The Mount of Olives takes its name from the olive groves that once covered its slopes, though centuries of cultivation, war and building have left only scattered stands today. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Zechariah describes the feet of the Lord standing on the Mount of Olives on the day he comes to fight the nations besieging Jerusalem, splitting the mountain in two, a passage later readers took as describing the messianic age.
Partly on the strength of that reading, Jews have sought burial on the mount's western slope for well over two thousand years, in the belief that resurrection would begin there first, and the resulting cemetery, with an estimated one hundred fifty thousand graves, is the oldest continuously used Jewish burial ground anywhere.
The New Testament gospels set several episodes of Jesus's last days on the mount. He is described weeping over Jerusalem as he looked down on the city from its slope, an episode commemorated at the church called Dominus Flevit, "the Lord wept." He taught his disciples on the mount, in a passage called the Olivet Discourse concerning the destruction of the Temple and the end of the age.
The garden of Gethsemane, where he was arrested after the Last Supper, lies at the mount's foot. And in the account given in the Acts of the Apostles, it is from the Mount of Olives that Jesus ascended to heaven forty days after the resurrection, a tradition commemorated by the Chapel of the Ascension near the summit and marked liturgically by Christians as the Feast of the Ascension.