yerushalaim

The toponym is pre-Israelite and externally attested well before the biblical period: Rušalimum in the Middle Kingdom Egyptian Execration Texts, and Urusalim in the Amarna correspondence of Abdi-Heba, its fourteenth-century ruler. The standard analysis of the elements takes the first from a West Semitic root yrw / yry "to found, lay a foundation" and the second as Šalim, the divine name also behind the personal names of the city's early rulers, yielding "foundation of Shalem"; HALOT and BDB both register this with the appropriate caution, and neither treats the popular association with šalôm as etymological, though the biblical writers themselves exploit the assonance (Ps 122:6-8; cf. Heb 7:2 on Salem).

The Masoretic orthography is anomalous and much discussed. The consonantal text writes yrwšlm with no yod before the final mem, while the vocalization supplies a dual-looking ending, so the received reading yerûšālayim stands against the written form; the plene spelling with yod occurs only a handful of times, and only in demonstrably late contexts (1 Chr 3:5; 2 Chr 25:1; Jer 26:18; Esth 2:6). The Aramaic sections of Ezra and Daniel use yerûšlem, counted separately in the extended Strong's system (H3390); the LXX transliterates as Ierousalem, while Hellenized Ierosolyma appears in the Apocrypha, Josephus, and the majority of the New Testament's narrative material, with the distribution of the two Greek forms a long-standing question in Lukan and Pauline studies.

Distribution within the Hebrew Bible is itself diagnostic. The name is entirely absent from the Pentateuch, from Job, and from Proverbs; it is concentrated in Chronicles (roughly 145 occurrences), Jeremiah (over 100), Isaiah, Zechariah, Nehemiah and Ezra, and it is markedly rare in the Psalms compared with Zion. Genesis 14:18's Salem and Ps 76:2's parallel of Salem with Zion are the basis for the conventional identification of Salem with Jerusalem; the alternative Shechem identification, drawn from later Samaritan and pseudepigraphal traditions, is not widely followed.

On the personification, Dobbs-Allsopp's demonstration that bat plus a geographical name is appositional rather than possessive (so "Daughter Jerusalem," not "daughter of Jerusalem") is now the standard reading and governs 2 Kgs 19:21, Isa 37:22, Lam 2:13, 2:15, Mic 4:8, Zeph 3:14 and Zech 9:9; Maier's study maps the wider range of the city's female figurations, and Ezekiel 16 and 23 supply its harshest development. The Zion / Jerusalem pairing has been treated as parallelism rather than synonymy since Gunkel's isolation of the Songs of Zion; Ollenburger and Levenson give the standard theological accounts of the election of the city, and Roberts the classic defense of a Davidic-Solomonic date for the tradition.