During its long history, Jerusalem has been attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice. The oldest part of the city was settled in the 4th millennium BCE, making Jerusalem one of the oldest cities in the world.
According to the Bible, the Israelite history of the city began in c. 1000 BCE, with King David‘s sack of Jerusalem, following which Jerusalem became the City of David and capital of the United Kingdom of Israel.[11] According to the Books of Samuel, the Jebusites managed to resist attempts by the Israelites to capture the city, and by the time of King David were mocking such attempts, claiming that even the blind and lame could defeat the Israelite army. Nevertheless, the masoretic text for the Books of Samuel states that David managed to capture the city by stealth, sending his forces through a “water shaft” and attacking the city from the inside. Archaeologists now view this as implausible as the Gihon spring – the only known location from which water shafts lead into the city – is now known to have been heavily defended (and hence an attack via this route would have been obvious rather than secretive). The older Septuagint text, however, suggests that rather than by a water shaft, David’s forces defeated the Jebusites by using daggers rather than through the water tunnels coming through the Gihon spring. There was another king in Jerusalem, Araunah, during, and possibly before, David’s control of the city, according to the biblical narrative, who was probably the Jebusite king of Jerusalem. The city, which at that point stood upon the Ophel, was, according to the biblical account, expanded to the south, and declared by David to be the capital city of the Kingdom of Israel. David also, according to the Books of Samuel, constructed an altar at the location of a threshing floor he had purchased from Araunah; a portion of biblical scholars view this as an attempt by the narrative’s author to give an Israelite foundation to a pre-existing sanctuary.
Later, according to the biblical narrative, King Solomon built a more substantive temple, the Temple of Solomon, at a location which the Book of Chronicles equates with David’s altar. The Temple became a major cultural centre in the region; eventually, particularly after religious reforms such as those of Hezekiah and of Josiah, the Jerusalem temple became the main place of worship, at the expense of other, formerly powerful, ritual centres, such as Shiloh and Bethel. However, according to K. L. Noll, in Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, the Biblical account of the centralization of worship in Jerusalem is a fiction, although by the time of Josiah, the territory he ruled was so small that the Jerusalem temple became de facto the only shrine left.[19] Solomon is also described as having created several other important building works at Jerusalem, including the construction of his palace, and the construction of the Millo (the identity of which is somewhat controversial). Archaeologists are divided over whether the biblical narrative is supported by the evidence from excavations.