elaiōn

The sense of ἐλαιών is not in doubt: it is a formation in -ών denoting the place where something grows, exactly parallel to ἀμπελών (vineyard), and the lexica gloss it "olive orchard, olive grove" (BDAG, s.v. ἐλαιών; LSJ, s.v. ἐλαιών). Moulton and Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. ἐλαιών, collect the documentary evidence from the Egyptian papyri, where the word is common for a registered olive plot in leases, tax records, and land registers; this documentary currency is the backbone of J. H. Moulton's argument (A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 1: Prolegomena, 3rd ed. 1908) that Luke could and did use the noun as the hill's proper name. The disputed territory is the distribution. In Acts 1:12 the genitive singular Ἐλαιῶνος is unambiguous; in the recurring Synoptic and Johannine phrase τὸ ὄρος τῶν ἐλαιῶν the form ἐλαιῶν is formally the genitive plural of ἐλαία, and the phrase is normally construed as "the mount of the olive trees", matching LXX Zechariah 14:4 (τὸ ὄρος τῶν ἐλαιῶν for הַר הַזֵּיתִים) and 2 Samuel 15:30. Strong's numbering, which this corpus's tagging follows, gathers all twelve instances under the single head ἐλαιών. The crux is Luke 19:29 and 21:37, τὸ ὄρος τὸ καλούμενον Ἐλαιῶν: BDF §143 treats Luke's Ἐλαιῶν as the proper name in an indeclinable or nominative use, while the alternative construal is the genitive plural, and since the earliest witnesses are unaccented the decision is an editorial one; part of the manuscript tradition levels Luke 19:29 toward Ἐλαιῶνος (see Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. 1994, ad loc.). Commentators generally follow BDF here (Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV, AB 28A, 1985; Bruce, The Book of the Acts, NICNT rev. ed. 1988, on Acts 1:12). Josephus uses the same designation for the ridge in his narratives of the first century, and the topography, an olive-terraced rise separated from the city by the Kidron, is not contested.