The Cities,
Name by Name

Shalem / Urusalim (Bronze Age) → Yerushalayim יְרוּשָׁלַיִם (Hebrew, 3,000 years) → Hierosolyma (Greek/Latin) → Aelia Capitolina (Rome, 135 CE) → al-Quds القدس (Arabic)

The city appears as Urusalim in Egyptian letters centuries before King David made it Israel's capital around 1000 BCE. After crushing the Jewish revolt in 135 CE, Rome renamed it Aelia Capitolina specifically to erase its Jewish identity, the oldest name-erasure on this page. Even the Arabic name concedes the point: al-Quds, "the Holy," is short for Bayt al-Maqdis, from the Hebrew Beit HaMikdash, the Temple. Jerusalem has been the capital only of Jewish states, has held a Jewish majority since the mid-1800s, and is the direction of Jewish prayer three times a day, from anywhere on earth, for two millennia. The full page →

Kiryat Arba (Bible, older name) → Hevron חֶבְרוֹן (Hebrew) → al-Khalil الخليل (Arabic, "the Friend")

Hebron is the second-holiest city in Judaism and its oldest deed: Genesis records Abraham buying the Cave of Machpelah there as a burial plot, and King David reigned in Hebron for seven years before Jerusalem. Its Arabic name, al-Khalil, means "the Friend of God", Abraham: the city is named, in Arabic, after the reason Jews are buried in it. A Jewish community lived in Hebron almost continuously for millennia until 1929, when Arab rioters murdered 67 Jews in a weekend and the British evacuated the survivors. Today the city is Palestinian-majority with a small, contentious Jewish quarter around the Cave, which for 700 years under Muslim rule Jews were forbidden to enter past the seventh step.

Shechem שְׁכֶם (Hebrew Bible) → Flavia Neapolis (Rome, 72 CE) → Nablus نابلس (Arabic, from "Neapolis")

"Nablus" is not an Arabic word. It is the Greek Neapolis, "new city," worn smooth by Arabic pronunciation, a Roman city founded in 72 CE beside biblical Shechem, where Abraham first camped in the land, where Joseph's bones were buried, and where Joshua renewed the covenant. Above the city, Mount Gerizim remains the holy mountain of the Samaritans, the tiny Israelite sect that never left. The city is thoroughly Palestinian today; its name is a Roman receipt sitting on an Israelite foundation.

Yafo יָפוֹ (Hebrew, "beautiful") → Joppa (Greek) → Yafa يافا (Arabic)

One of the world's oldest ports, and the Bible's harbor: the cedars of Lebanon for Solomon's Temple landed at Jaffa, and Jonah sailed from it. The name is Hebrew/Canaanite, from the root for beauty. By the late Ottoman era Jaffa was a major Arab port town, and the first Hebrew city of the modern era, Tel Aviv, was founded on its sand dunes in 1909 by sixty Jewish families; the child outgrew the parent, and today they are one municipality, Tel Aviv-Yafo, mixed Jewish and Arab. Both stories are true, and the page loses nothing by telling them together.

Akko עַכּוֹ (Bible, Judges 1:31) → Ptolemais (Hellenistic/Roman) → St-Jean d'Acre (Crusader) → Akka عكا (Arabic)

Akko appears in the Book of Judges as a Canaanite city the tribe of Asher failed to take, was Greek Ptolemais for centuries, the Crusaders' last capital, then Ottoman Akka. Its current Arabic name is the original Semitic one, a case where the oldest name simply survived every empire. Today it is one of Israel's mixed cities, Jewish and Arab, its old city a UNESCO site layered Crusader-over-Hellenistic-over-Canaanite, which is the whole land in one cross-section.

Tverya טְבֶרְיָה (Hebrew) = Tiberias (founded 20 CE, named for the emperor) → Tabariyya طبريا (Arabic)

Founded by a Jewish client king and named for a Roman emperor, Tiberias became, after Jerusalem's destruction, the beating heart of Jewish life in the land: seat of the Sanhedrin, where the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and where the Masoretes fixed the vowel system every Hebrew Bible uses to this day, the "Tiberian" vocalization. When people claim Jewish life in the land ended in 70 CE and resumed in 1948, Tiberias is the city-sized counterexample: one of Judaism's Four Holy Cities, with Safed, Hebron and Jerusalem.

Tzfat צְפַת (Hebrew) → Safad صفد (Arabic) → Safed (English)

The mountain city where Jewish mysticism found its capital: in the 1500s, exiles from Spain made Safed the center of Kabbalah, home of Isaac Luria and of Joseph Karo, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law, there. Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday-evening service sung in every synagogue on earth, was composed in Safed's lanes. It held one of the land's continuous Jewish communities through Ottoman centuries, survived the 1929 riots that killed 18 of its Jews, and is a Jewish city today.

Efrat / Beit Lechem בֵּית לֶחֶם (Hebrew, "house of bread") → Bethlehem (Greek/Latin) → Beit Lahm بيت لحم (Arabic, "house of meat")

Rachel was buried on its road, Ruth gleaned its fields, and David was anointed there a thousand years before the Nativity made it the cradle of Christianity. The Arabic name is a re-hearing of the Hebrew one. The modern story is the one fewer people tell: Bethlehem was about 85% Christian in 1947; under Jordanian and then Palestinian Authority rule its Christians shrank to a small minority, part of a Christian exodus across the Muslim Middle East that spared only Israel, the one country in the region whose Christian population grew. The Christian story →

Azza עַזָּה (Hebrew, "strong") → Gaza (Greek/Latin, via Philistine) → Ghazza غزة (Arabic)

Gaza enters history as a Philistine city, Samson's stage, and the Philistines, Aegean sea-people, are long extinct; despite the similar sound, they are not the ancestors of the Palestinians, who are named after them via Rome's rebranding of Judea. Less known: Gaza held a significant Jewish community for centuries; a pillar of its Great Mosque bore a carved menorah and a Hebrew-and-Greek inscription from an ancient synagogue, and a grand 6th-century synagogue mosaic was excavated on its shore. Jews lived in Gaza into the twentieth century, until Arab riots and war ended the community. Gaza now →

Lod לוֹד (Hebrew Bible) → Lydda / Diospolis (Greek/Roman) → al-Ludd اللد (Arabic) → Lod (restored)

Listed in the Bible among Benjamin's towns, Lod became a major rabbinic center after Jerusalem fell, home to the academy of Rabbi Eliezer and canonized in the Talmud's debates. Greek made it Lydda, Rome grandly renamed it Diospolis, Arabic wore it back down to al-Ludd, and Israel restored the original. Its 1948 story is one this site handles honestly on the hardest-case page: Lydda's Arab population was largely expelled in the July 1948 fighting. Today Lod is a mixed Jewish-Arab city, with all the friction and the ordinary life that implies.

Be'er Sheva בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע (Hebrew, "well of the oath") → Bir as-Sab' بئر السبع (Arabic)

Named in Genesis for the well and the oath Abraham swore there, "from Dan to Beersheba" is the Bible's own phrase for the length of the land. The biblical tell sits just outside the modern city, a UNESCO site with its ancient well. The Ottomans refounded the town around 1900; today it is the Negev's capital, a Jewish-majority city of a quarter million with the world's largest population of Bedouin neighbors around it.

Natzrat נָצְרַת (Hebrew) → Nazareth (Greek/Latin) → an-Nasira الناصرة (Arabic)

In Jesus's day Nazareth was a small Jewish village in a Jewish Galilee, which is the whole premise of the Gospels. A stone inscription found at Caesarea lists Nazareth as a home of one of the priestly courses that resettled the Galilee after the Temple's destruction. Today it is the largest Arab city inside Israel, with a Muslim majority and a large Christian community, whose residents are Israeli citizens who vote, and its Christians live with a freedom their brethren in PA-run Bethlehem visibly lack. Both facts belong on the same page.

The exception that proves the pattern.

Ramla الرملة (Arabic, "sandy"), founded c. 715 CE, and Hebrew adopted it: רַמְלָה

Here is the honest entry, and it is one city: Ramla, founded around 715 CE by the Umayyad caliph Suleiman as his district capital, is the only major city in the land founded by Arabs, for the district Jerusalem was never made capital of. Its very existence sharpens the pattern: thirteen centuries of intermittent Muslim rule produced one founded city, because the rulers governed a land whose cities, Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa, Acre, Shechem, already stood, with older names. Ramla today is a mixed Israeli city, and its name needed no excavating: there was nothing underneath.

Tel Aviv תֵּל אָבִיב (Hebrew, "hill of spring," 1909), named from Ezekiel 3:15 via Herzl's "Altneuland"

The control group in reverse: a city with no older name underneath, because Jews founded it on empty dunes north of Jaffa in 1909, sixty families drawing lots with seashells. The name translates Herzl's novel Altneuland, "old-new land," using a Babylonian-exile place name from Ezekiel: even the brand-new city is named in the old language, from the old book, about the old return. A century later it is a global tech and culture capital, which is its own answer to what the project was capable of. What Israel builds →