Mount of Olives

The Mount of Olives is the limestone ridge running north to south along the eastern side of Jerusalem, separated from the city and from the temple platform by the Kidron valley. It carries three named summits. From north to south they are Mount Scopus, the central summit that holds the village of et-Tur and the ascension traditions, and the southern summit, which 2 Kings 23:13 calls the Mount of Corruption and which older English works call the Mount of Offence. The ridge runs roughly three and a half kilometres. Published elevations differ by several metres between sources, so every figure here carries the word about: about 826 m for Mount Scopus, about 808 m for the central summit, about 747 m for the southern summit, with the temple platform at about 740 m and the Kidron floor beside the city at roughly 610 to 640 m. On those figures the central summit stands about 70 m above the temple platform. The valley between is dry for most of the year and runs only in the rains. The old road from Jericho and the Jordan came up the eastern side of the ridge, through Bethany, over the shoulder by Bethphage, and down the western slope to the city.

The first time Scripture names the mountain, a king is walking up it in flight. 2 Samuel 15 has David crossing the Kidron with the people weeping around him, going up the Mount of Olives with his head covered and his feet bare, praying that the counsel of Ahithophel would be turned into foolishness, and meeting Hushai the Archite at the top. Verse 32 says the summit was a place where he used to worship God, which means a holy place already stood on this ridge in the tenth century BC.

Solomon built on the same hill and Josiah tore it down. 1 Kings 11:7 says Solomon built a high place for Chemosh and for Molech on a hill east of Jerusalem. The text does not use the mountain's name there. The identification with this ridge is the traditional one, held from the Targum and Rashi onward, and it rests on 2 Kings 23:13, which places Josiah's demolition east of Jerusalem and south of the Mount of Corruption. Adam Clarke, following the Targum and Rashi, records the old observation behind that second name: the Hebrew for corruption, hammashchith, differs by one consonant from hammishchah, anointing, which is the word in the Mishnah's own name for the ridge. After the exile the mountain returns to ordinary use. Nehemiah 8:15 sends the returned community out into the hill country for branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle and palm to build booths for the feast of the seventh month.

Ezekiel gives the ridge its heaviest place in the prophets. He watches the glory of the LORD leave the temple by stages, first from the threshold, then at the entrance of the east gate, and finally rising up from within the city to stand over the mountain east of the city (Ezekiel 10:18 to 19; 11:22 to 23). Twenty-two chapters later the same glory comes back from the east, enters through the east gate, and fills the house, and the gate is then shut and stays shut (Ezekiel 43:1 to 5; 44:1 to 2). Zechariah, later still, names the mountain outright. On the day of the LORD, he writes, the feet of the LORD will stand on the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem, and the mountain will split east to west into a great valley, half of it moving north and half south (Zechariah 14:4). That verse is the only use of the name in the Old Testament prophets.

Between the Testaments the mountain became a working part of Jerusalem's religious life, and the Jewish sources that record it are named, dated and placed here rather than assumed. The Mishnah, compiled about AD 200 and recording Second Temple practice, puts the burning of the red heifer of Numbers 19 on this mountain. Mishnah Parah 3:6 to 3:7 describes a causeway of arch upon arch built from the Temple Mount across to the mountain so that the priest and the heifer could cross without contracting impurity from a grave below, and Parah 3:9 has the priest sprinkling the blood seven times toward the entrance of the sanctuary. Mishnah Middot 2:4 gives the architectural consequence: every wall of the temple enclosure was high except the eastern wall, which was kept low so that the priest burning the heifer on the Mount of Olives could see the sanctuary entrance through it at the moment of sprinkling. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 2:2 to 2:4 names this mountain as the first station in the chain of beacon fires by which the new moon was announced across the country, from here to Sartaba, Grofina, Hauran and Beth Biltin, and from there to the exiles in Babylonia. Two later aggadic sources, Lamentations Rabbah proem 25 and Avot de Rabbi Nathan 34, list ten stages by which the divine presence withdrew from the temple, and Lamentations Rabbah says the presence rested three and a half years on the Mount of Olives, calling Israel to repent, before it left. Those two are reading Ezekiel 10 and 11 rather than reporting independently, and this page presents them that way. The western slope also holds a Jewish burial ground generally described as the oldest in continuous use anywhere, with First Temple period graves in the Silwan necropolis at its southern foot. The reason the tradition gives for burying here is Zechariah 14:4 and the belief that the resurrection will begin from this slope. That is a tradition, and it is stated as one. One negative belongs here as plainly as the positives: 1 Enoch does not mention the Mount of Olives. There is no passage that names it. What the Enochic literature holds is a related interest in the mountains around Jerusalem, in its account of seven mountains and a throne-mountain and a blessed place with a deep valley beside it.

Josephus puts two episodes on the ridge in the first century. He reports twice a man from Egypt who gathered a crowd in the wilderness and brought it to the Mount of Olives, promising that at his command the walls of Jerusalem would fall so that they could go in. The procurator Felix attacked with cavalry and infantry, the crowd broke, and the Egyptian escaped. Josephus gives the figure of thirty thousand followers. Acts 21:38 has a Roman tribune ask Paul whether he is that same Egyptian and give the number as four thousand men of the sicarii. The numbers do not agree and this page does not resolve them. What both reports agree on is that a messianic crowd movement formed on this mountain within a generation of the ascension, which is what Zechariah 14:4 would lead a first-century Jerusalemite to expect of the place. Josephus also records that during the siege of AD 70 Titus brought legions up to Mount Scopus and placed the Tenth legion, which had come up from Jericho, on the Mount of Olives, opposite the city and separated from it by the Kidron. The book and section numbers for both passages were taken from the standard divisions and have not been checked against a printed edition, so this page names the works and leaves the numbers to the sources list.

The last week of Jesus's life runs across the ridge from one end to the other. Matthew 21:1 and Mark 11:1 place the sending for the colt at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives. Luke puts the praise at the descent from the mountain and the weeping in the same stretch of road, before He entered the city at all (Luke 19:37 to 44). Mark 13:3 and Matthew 24:3 place the teaching about the temple and the end of the age on this mountain, opposite the temple, with the disciples asking privately, and the full study of that teaching lives on its own page. Luke 21:37 says He taught in the temple by day and went out to spend every night on the Mount of Olives, and John 8:1 records the same habit. That verse sits inside the account of the woman taken in adultery, John 7:53 to 8:11, which is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts, and this page says so where it uses it. On the last night the pattern held: they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives, and Luke 22:39 says He went out as usual. John 18:2 says Judas knew the place because Jesus had often met there with His disciples.

Luke tells the ascension twice. At the end of his Gospel he says Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, lifted His hands, blessed them, and was carried up into heaven. At the start of Acts he says they watched Him taken up, a cloud hid Him, two men in white asked why they stood looking into the sky, and told them that this same Jesus would come back in the same way. Acts 1:12 then says they returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Luke 24:50 gives a village and Acts 1:12 gives the mountain, and both are districts rather than points. Bethany's district reached the eastern slope of the ridge, and John 11:18 puts the village fifteen stadia from the city. Adam Clarke worked the arithmetic in the eighteenth-century way, five stadia from the city to the mountain and fifteen to the village, with a tract on the eastern slope carrying the name Bethany.