Mount of Olives

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.

By the fourth century, once Christianity had imperial patronage under Constantine, the mount had begun to fill with churches marking its gospel associations: the Eleona over the traditional site of Jesus's teaching, the first Church of the Ascension, and later Dominus Flevit and Gethsemane's Church of All Nations, most rebuilt more than once across the centuries of Byzantine, Crusader and modern construction. The Palm Sunday procession still traces a traditional route down the mount's western face into the Old City, reenacting the triumphal entry described in the gospels.

The Jewish cemetery on the mount's slope has its own modern history of contest. Under Jordanian control of East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, much of the cemetery was damaged, with gravestones reportedly used as paving and building material, and access for Jewish burial and visitation was cut off; since Israel took control of East Jerusalem in 1967 the cemetery has been restored and burials there have continued, though the area remains within contested and, under international law, disputed territory, and access and land questions around the mount surface periodically in wider Jerusalem disputes. Today the mount offers one of the classic views of the Old City and the Temple Mount's Dome of the Rock, and it remains simultaneously an active cemetery, a pilgrimage destination, and a residential Palestinian neighborhood, a layering of uses that is itself characteristic of Jerusalem's sacred geography.