Why is Jerusalem called the City of David?

A town the tribes could not hold

Jerusalem was old long before David. Clay letters found at Amarna, in Egypt, include several from its king, Abdi-Heba, writing to Pharaoh in the 14th century BC. In the Bible it is the town of the Jebusites, sometimes simply called Jebus (Judges 19:10). It sat on the border between Judah and Benjamin, and neither tribe managed to drive the Jebusites out (Joshua 15:63; Judges 1:21). Then David, seven years a king in Hebron, marches on it with his own men.

The king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who spoke to David, saying, “The blind and the lame will keep you out of here,” thinking, “David can’t come in here.” Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion. This is David’s city.

The taunt means that even the blind and the lame could hold these walls. David tells his men to go up by the tsinnor (5:8), a rare word usually taken to mean a water shaft. In Chronicles, Joab goes up first and wins command of the army (1 Chronicles 11:6).

Why the king’s name

“David lived in the stronghold, and called it David’s city” (2 Samuel 5:9). The name said who owned it. In Samuel’s telling the fortress fell to “the king and his men,” his own soldiers, not a tribal levy (Chronicles, retelling it, says “all Israel”). So, many historians conclude, it became the king’s own property, standing between Judah in the south and the tribes to the north. A capital that belonged to no tribe could serve all of them. David then brought the Ark of the Covenant “into David’s city with joy” (6:12), and his fortress became the religious center too.

A narrow ridge

The City of David was small: a narrow spur running south from today’s Temple Mount, above the Kidron Valley, with the Gihon spring at its foot. The Bible keeps the name for that ridge even after the city grows. Solomon is anointed at the spring below it (1 Kings 1:38–39). He moves the Ark up “out of David’s city, which is Zion” to his new Temple on the hill to the north (8:1). David is buried in it (2:10), and so are Solomon and most of the kings of Judah after him. Hezekiah’s tunnel brings the Gihon water “straight down on the west side of David’s city” (2 Chronicles 32:30), and Nehemiah’s builders repair “the stairs that go down from David’s city” (Nehemiah 3:15).

Over the centuries the name Zion spread to the Temple hill and then to all Jerusalem. Mount Zion itself moved to the western hill, where a medieval tradition still shows visitors David’s Tomb. The Bible puts his grave on the old ridge.

Bethlehem, the other City of David

In the New Testament the phrase points somewhere else.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to David’s city, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David

For Luke, David’s city is his hometown, where Samuel anointed him. The usage is old: in 1 Samuel, David himself calls Bethlehem “his city” (1 Samuel 20:6). So the angels announce a Savior born “in David’s city” (Luke 2:11), and the carol Once in Royal David’s City (1848) is about Bethlehem, not Jerusalem. For the town itself, see Where is Bethlehem?

Digging David’s city

In 1867 Charles Warren found a vertical shaft above the Gihon spring, long hailed as David’s tsinnor; later excavations suggested it was not reachable in his day. Hezekiah’s tunnel still carries water 533 meters to the Siloam pool, where an inscription found in 1880 describes the moment the two digging teams met. Whether the ridge also holds David’s palace is argued in Was King David a real person? Today the site lies in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and its excavations are politically contested.