"To What Shall I Compare You?": Jerusalem as Ground Zero of the Hebrew Imagination

In September 1995, corresponding in the hebrew calendar to the month of ELuL 5755, Jerusalem celebrated its three-thousandth anniversary, dating from King David's conquest of the Jebusite city. Of those three millennia of recorded history, the Israelites dominated the region for only six centuries; although many physical and textual reminders of ancient Jerusalem attest to its status as the center of the Hebrew political and religious imagination, the city remains the most contested site on the global map.