Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the city in which God places His name, the place He chose to make His presence and His claim known. The Lord preserved David’s line “that David my servant may have a light alway before me in Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen me to put my name there” (1 Kings 11:36). The name appears as Urusalim in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century before Christ, and the Hebrew Yerushalayim is commonly traced to “foundation of Shalem,” though Hebrew hearers readily caught in it shalom, “peace,” and shalem, “whole.” A sacred city is easily mistaken for a holy object, sanctified by its stones. Scripture makes Jerusalem’s holiness depend on the Name it bears and on the fidelity of those who dwell within its walls.

The Place of the Name

Deuteronomy speaks repeatedly of the place the Lord would choose to cause His name to dwell, without naming the city, and only after David captured the Jebusite stronghold and Solomon built the house of the Lord upon its hill do the histories identify that place with Jerusalem. In the ancient Near East, a king who set his name upon a city claimed it, and the Deuteronomic formula accordingly carries divine ownership as well as divine presence. Jerusalem belonged to God by His own declaration, and the sons of David who reigned there governed as His stewards. The Psalms of Ascent celebrate a city whose compact unity mirrored the unity of the tribes who went up to it.

The Name never functioned as a guarantee. Jeremiah stood in the gate of the temple and warned the people against trusting in the sanctuary while they oppressed the stranger and the widow, and within a generation the Babylonians burned the city. The Book of Mormon opens on the eve of that catastrophe, as Lehi prophesies the city’s fall and departs into the wilderness. The exiles by the rivers of Babylon swore that their right hands would forget their skill before they forgot Jerusalem, and their descendants rebuilt it. The pattern of the city’s history thus joins election to accountability: the place chosen for the Name could be laid waste when its people forgot the One whose Name it bore.

The Waters of Gihon

Jerusalem stands on a ridge watered by a single perennial spring, the Gihon, at the foot of its eastern slope, and the survival of the city has always depended on bringing that water within its walls. Facing the Assyrian advance late in the eighth century before Christ, King Hezekiah cut a tunnel through the bedrock, and the chronicler remembered “how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city” (2 Kings 20:20). The tunnel, more than five hundred meters long, survives, and an inscription discovered in 1880 records the moment when two crews of hewers, digging from opposite ends, heard one another’s voices and broke through.

Isaiah regarded the same preparations with misgiving. He noted that its people had torn down houses to fortify the wall and had channeled the water of the old pool, “but ye have not looked unto the maker thereof, neither had respect unto him that fashioned it long ago” (Isaiah 22:11). The prophet’s rebuke falls upon a city that trusted its engineering while forgetting its Maker. The spring’s name deepens the irony, since Gihon is also one of the four rivers of Eden, and the archaeologist Lawrence Stager argued that Jerusalem’s temple traditions deliberately recapitulated the primordial garden. Zechariah carried that typology to its conclusion, foreseeing a day when “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” toward the eastern and western seas (Zechariah 14:8).

Jerusalem Below and Above

The Savior approached the city for the last time from the Mount of Olives, and “when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes” (Luke 19:41-42). The lament turns upon the peace the city’s own name promised, which it failed to recognize when its King stood before it. Within forty years Roman legions destroyed the city and its temple, as Babylon had done six centuries earlier. The Name placed upon Jerusalem conferred no immunity, and the city’s peace depended on whether its people would receive the One who bore that Name.

Christian tradition answered the city’s fall by turning its gaze upward. Paul had already set the earthly Jerusalem, “in bondage with her children,” against the “Jerusalem which is above,” which “is free, which is the mother of us all” (Galatians 4:25-26), and Augustine made the heavenly city the pilgrim’s true home. The Restoration returns that hope to the earth. Ether prophesied that the Jerusalem from which Lehi came “should be built up again, a holy city unto the Lord,” adding that “it could not be a new Jerusalem for it had been in a time of old” (Ether 13:5). Latter-day Saints therefore anticipate two cities, the ancient Jerusalem restored and a New Jerusalem in the Americas, both literal and both on earth.

Water for the Holy City

Modern engineering has extended Hezekiah’s labor far beyond its ancient scale. Reverse-osmosis desalination now supplies drinking water to coastal cities across the arid world, and Israel draws a large share of its municipal water from plants on the Mediterranean coast, among them the Sorek facility opened in 2013. A 2019 survey counted nearly sixteen thousand desalination plants worldwide. Transhumanists cite such achievements as evidence that scarcity can yield to ingenuity, and Mormon transhumanists see in them a foretaste of the renewal of the earth that prophecy foretells. The risks are concrete. The plants consume great quantities of energy and discharge concentrated brine that can harm marine life, and the allocation of water among the peoples of the Holy Land remains among the most contested questions in the region.

On October 24, 1841, the apostle Orson Hyde climbed the Mount of Olives and dedicated the land for the gathering of Judah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Among his petitions he asked the Lord to “let springs of living water break forth to water its thirsty soil.” Hyde’s hope joins Zechariah’s living waters to the labor of those who rebuild, and the engineers who draw fresh water from the sea may count themselves participants in its answer. Isaiah’s caution stands beside that hope. Jerusalem is the city where God places His name, and its waters, whether drawn through Hezekiah’s rock or through polymer membranes, serve that Name when those who channel them look “unto the maker thereof” and share them with every people who dwell in the land.