With Jerusalem at the center of global attention, the book The Names of Jerusalem: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Traditions offers a perspective on how language itself shapes the identity, and holiness of Jerusalem. By tracing the linguistic and historical development of the city’s names in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, the work highlights the shared heritage and enduring differences in these traditions.
This book is a composite of essays written by Aaron Demsky, Christophe Rico, and Iraj Sheidaee. Demsky is a retired professor of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University and founding director of the Project for the Study of Jewish Names. Rico is professor of Greek philology at the École Biblique of Jerusalem and dean of Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities, and Sheidaee is a distinguished linguist and historian whose specialty is the early contact between Christianity and Islam.
The authors approach the subject of Jerusalem’s sanctity through the many distinctive names attributed to the city in the three monotheistic faiths. They do so by analyzing etymology and linguistic and historical developments, as well as the symbolic meaning of the city’s names in these respective traditions.
The book presents many sources in their original languages, notably Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic, each with its English translation. The volume is designed to be accessible to both specialists and a broad readership interested in the cultural and religious significance of Jerusalem. The following names studied in this book reflect over 4,000 years of the city’s history: Salem, Jerusalem, Hierosoluma, Moriah, Zion, Ilia, Medinat Bayt al-Maqdis, and Al-Quds.
The basic assumption is that names, and especially place names of a religious nature, are not neutral labels. Instead, they encode theological claims and collective memory.
When geography becomes theology
One of the main types of place names, especially in the biblical world, is those of a religious character associated with a divinity. For example, the book proposes that Beit El and Beit Shemesh are abodes of gods with those names. A name can also simply be reduced to an alternate form of a divine name, such as Jericho (meaning “moon god”) or Anatot (“goddess Anat”).
Some place names, the book tells us, like personal names, make a statement with a divine subject and generally a verb in the third-person imperfect. For example, Yavniel means “‘El’ creates or builds.”
Demsky explains that the Canaanite name “Yerushalem” is such a sentence name where the subject is the divinity Shalem (a Canaanite god) and the verb yeru is from the Hebrew yarah, which means “to set the foundation stone of the world (Job 38, 4-6).” This verb implies that Jerusalem is the place where the world was created. This ancient belief reappears in Jewish tradition in the form of the even ha-shetiyah on the Temple Mount.
Islam adapted this belief and concretized it with the Dome of the Rock. What makes Jerusalem holy? An attribute, the authors say, that is already found in the later books of the Bible. In rabbinic literature, different degrees of spatial holiness are defined regarding the Holy Land, the holy city, and at the pinnacle, the Temple Mount. It is here where we find the “numinous indwelling,” namely the Shechinah: “The Lord dwells in Zion” (Joel 4:21).
Historic events have influenced the name of the city. After putting down the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. Aelia was his family name, and Capitolina was the pagan temple to Jupiter placed on the Mount.
Under the Byzantine Empire, Christianity became the official religion in the early fourth century, and Jerusalem regained its sacred status as illustrated in the sixth-century Madaba map where the centerpiece is called “The Holy City of Jerusalem.”
Other seminal attributes were fundamental in defining Jerusalem’s holiness, the book tells us.
During the Second Temple period, the biblical idea of a connected heavenly and earthly Jerusalem was enhanced. This duality might have been supported by the supposed dual ending (-ayim) of the Hebrew name. Later, this belief is echoed in Christianity and in Islam in the resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem and in Mohammed’s miraculous night flight over the Temple Mount.
As Rico shows, the idea of the “Heavenly Jerusalem” is basic to Christian thinking. The Book of Revelation (ch. 21) – the last book in the Christian Bible – describes “New Jerusalem” as a bride in all her glory who will descend to Earth. Finally, the medieval St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes that the “true” Jerusalem is found in spiritual devotion and inner peace rather than just physical travel.
Rico expands on how Christians found symbolic and theological richness through Jerusalem’s various biblical names. In Christian tradition, those names transcend its historical reality to become an allegorical mystery interpreted through the four senses: the literal (history), the allegorical (faith), the moral (the soul), and the anagogical (heavenly hope).
Iliya – the shortened form of Aelia Capitolina – was the first Arabic name used by Muslims for the city, according to Sheidaee, who presents a strong case that the Latin name Aelia passed into Arabic through local linguistic contact that occurred much earlier than had once been assumed.
Not knowing its pagan source and influenced by Jewish tradition, Muslims assumed “Iliya” referred to the prophet Elijah, who went up to heaven alive, as, according to their belief, did Mohammed. Ironically, the name that was supposed to obliterate the Jewish connection to Jerusalem became a religious tie in Islam to biblical tradition.
Sheidaee’s chapter presents a detailed and thorough philological-historical study of the names used in Arabic for Jerusalem from the time of the Islamic conquest of the city in 638 CE until the present day.
Historically, three Arabic names have enjoyed official status within the Islamic polities that have ruled the city and wider colloquial acceptance by Arabic speakers and Muslims. In addition to Iliya, they appear as Medinat Bayt al-Maqdis (derived from the Hebrew Beit HaMiqdash (“House of the Holy/Sanctuary”) and Al-Quds (“the Holy/Sanctuary”).
In calling the city Al-Quds, Muslims endorsed and assimilated, albeit selectively, in conformity with their own emerging doctrine, the city’s sacred biblical and Judeo-Christian history and tradition, adding their own Islamic stamp. ■
THE NAMES OF JERUSALEM: JEWISH, CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC TRADITIONS
By Aaron Demsky, Christophe Rico and Iraj Sheidaee
Polis Institute Press
130 pages; $33