An Improbable City

Jerusalem may be one of the most famous cities in the world, both ancient and modern, but it was also a most improbable city. It possessed none of the vital geographical features that would have made it an important city in the ancient world. It was not surrounded by a rich hinterland that ensured its citizens a reliable source of food or surplus for trade. Nor was it located on a major trade-route that would have compensated her for such a lack of food by opening her to the free exchange of goods from beyond or enriching it with the possibility of wealth from taxes. Its water supply was also limited to a sole spring (the Gihon); in ancient times, it stood outside the city-walls, making it vulnerably exposed.

If Jerusalem was an improbable city, it was also a dispensable city. For the first three hundred years after their conquest of Canaan, the Israelites were quite contend to leave it well alone under the occupation of the Jebusites. Its significance as the city that we now know began with David's conquest of it sometime in the early days of the 1st Mill BC.

So how did Jerusalem become so famous and central to world history? The answer - the only adequate answer - has to do with its place in the promise of God to King David to raise up through his line a Saviour for the world. It was the city in which the Saviour, to fulfil his mission, was crucified and from which he was raised from the dead, the City that saw the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the City from which the Good News of salvation went out into the whole world. In a very poignant sense, then, Jerusalem is a parable; in the hands of God nothing is too small to be made great and useful.♦