ByBEN SOLOMON

JULY 12, 2026 14:09

With Jerusalem drawing worldwide focus, the volume The Names of Jerusalem: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Traditions examines the way language molds the city's identity and sacred character. By following the linguistic and historical growth of its names through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, the work underscores shared roots alongside lasting distinctions among them.

This volume gathers essays from Aaron Demsky, Christophe Rico, and Iraj Sheidaee. Demsky, a retired professor of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University, founded the Project for the Study of Jewish Names. Rico serves as professor of Greek philology at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem and leads Polis, the Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities. Sheidaee is a noted linguist and historian focused on early exchanges between Christianity and Islam.

The authors explore Jerusalem's sanctity by studying the distinct names given to the city in the three monotheistic faiths. They examine etymology, linguistic shifts, historical changes, and the symbolic weight each name carries within its tradition.

The book includes many sources in their original tongues, such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic, each paired with an English rendering. It aims to reach both experts and general readers drawn to the cultural and religious meaning of Jerusalem. The names covered span more than four thousand years of history and include Salem, Jerusalem, Hierosoluma, Moriah, Zion, Ilia, Medinat Bayt al-Maqdis, and Al-Quds.

The core premise holds that names, particularly those tied to religion, are never neutral. They carry theological assertions and shared memory.

When geography becomes theology

One common category of place names in the biblical world links locations to a divinity. The book suggests that Beit El and Beit Shemesh represent dwellings of gods bearing those names. A name may also serve as a variant of a divine name, as with Jericho, meaning moon god, or Anatot, referring to the goddess Anat.

Some place names, like certain personal names, form a statement with a divine subject and a verb in the third-person imperfect. Yavniel, for instance, means El creates or builds.

Demsky notes that the Canaanite name Yerushalem functions as a sentence name. The subject is the divinity Shalem, a Canaanite god, and the verb yeru derives from the Hebrew yarah, meaning to set the foundation stone of the world, as in Job 38:4-6. This implies Jerusalem marks the site of creation. The ancient idea reappears in Jewish tradition as the even ha-shetiyah on the Temple Mount.

Islam later adopted this notion and gave it form through the Dome of the Rock. What renders Jerusalem holy, the authors observe, appears already in later biblical books. Rabbinic literature outlines varying levels of spatial holiness for the Holy Land, the holy city, and, at the summit, the Temple Mount, where the Shechinah, the numinous indwelling, resides, as in the phrase The Lord dwells in Zion from Joel 4:21.

Historic events have also shaped the city's name. After suppressing the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. Aelia was his family name, while Capitolina referred to the pagan temple to Jupiter erected on the Mount.

Under the Byzantine Empire, Christianity became the state religion in the early fourth century, and Jerusalem recovered its sacred standing, as shown on the sixth-century Madaba map where the center is labeled The Holy City of Jerusalem. Other key attributes helped define the city's holiness.

During the Second Temple period, the biblical notion of a linked heavenly and earthly Jerusalem grew stronger. This duality may have drawn support from the supposed dual ending ayim in the Hebrew name. Later, the idea echoes in Christianity through the resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem and in Islam through Mohammed's miraculous night flight over the Temple Mount.

As Rico demonstrates, the concept of the Heavenly Jerusalem lies at the heart of Christian thought. The Book of Revelation, chapter 21, the final book of the Christian Bible, portrays New Jerusalem as a bride in full glory who will descend to Earth. In the medieval period, St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that the true Jerusalem exists in spiritual devotion and inner peace rather than mere physical travel.

Rico further shows how Christians discovered symbolic and theological depth in Jerusalem's various biblical names. In Christian tradition, these names move beyond historical fact to become an allegorical mystery read through four senses: the literal for history, the allegorical for faith, the moral for the soul, and the anagogical for heavenly hope.

Iliya, the shortened form of Aelia Capitolina, served as the first Arabic name Muslims applied to the city, according to Sheidaee. He makes a strong case that the Latin name Aelia entered Arabic through local linguistic contact that occurred earlier than previously thought.

Unaware of its pagan origin and guided by Jewish tradition, Muslims took Iliya to refer to the prophet Elijah, who ascended to heaven alive, just as Mohammed did according to their belief. Ironically, the name meant to erase the Jewish link to Jerusalem instead forged a religious connection in Islam to biblical tradition.

Sheidaee's chapter offers a detailed philological and historical study of the Arabic names for Jerusalem from the Islamic conquest in 638 CE to the present.

Three Arabic names have held official status in Islamic polities that governed the city and have found wide colloquial use among Arabic speakers and Muslims. Besides Iliya, they include Medinat Bayt al-Maqdis, drawn from the Hebrew Beit HaMiqdash meaning House of the Holy or Sanctuary, and Al-Quds meaning the Holy or Sanctuary.

By calling the city Al-Quds, Muslims endorsed and selectively absorbed the city's sacred biblical and Judeo-Christian history and tradition, while adding their own Islamic mark.

THE NAMES OF JERUSALEM: JEWISH, CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC TRADITIONS
By Aaron Demsky, Christophe Rico and Iraj Sheidaee
Polis Institute Press
130 pages; $33