1Cave of the Patriarchs, Hebronמְעָרַת הַמַּכְפֵּלָה

Genesis 23, read each year in the Torah portion of Chayei Sarah.

The Cave of the Patriarchs, known in Hebrew as Me'arat HaMachpelah, is the oldest Jewish holy site in the world, and it is revered as the second holiest place in Judaism after the Temple Mount. Six figures rest here in three couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. The Torah devotes a full chapter to how Abraham acquired the cave, weighing out four hundred silver shekels to Ephron the Hittite before witnesses at the city gate, which made it the first parcel of land the Jewish people ever owned in the Land of Israel. The structure standing over the tomb today was raised by Herod the Great; it is the only Herodian building anywhere to survive fully intact. For seven centuries, from 1267 until Israel returned in 1967, Jews were forbidden to climb past the seventh step of an outer staircase, yet they never stopped coming to pray. You can read the full history of Abraham's Tomb and, for the biblical footprint of the city, a count of how many times Hebron appears in the Torah.

• Genesis 23:19
  וְאַחֲרֵי־כֵן קָבַר אַבְרָהָם אֶת־שָׂרָה אִשְׁתּוֹ אֶל־מְעָרַת שְׂדֵה הַמַּכְפֵּלָה עַל־פְּנֵי מַמְרֵא הִוא חֶבְרוֹן בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן׃
  And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre, the same is Hebron, in the land of Canaan.
  Genesis 23:19, JPS 1917. Hebrew: Masoretic text.

  Summary. The verse fixes the tomb to a named place, Machpelah at Hebron, and records a purchase rather than a gift, which is why later tradition treated the Jewish title to the site as beyond dispute.

2The Western Wall & Temple Mount, Jerusalemהַכֹּתֶל הַמַּעֲרָבִי

Har HaBayit, the Temple Mount, and its last standing wall.

Ask which place sits at the very top of Judaism's order of holiness and the answer is here: the Temple Mount, Har HaBayit, the summit that tradition identifies with Mount Moriah, where both the First and Second Temples stood before they were destroyed in 586 BCE and 70 CE. Because Jewish law restricts entry onto the Mount itself, the focus of prayer for the past two thousand years has been the Western Wall, the Kotel, the surviving stretch of the great retaining wall Herod built around the Temple platform. It is the closest accessible point to where the Holy of Holies once stood. Jerusalem's sanctity is shared, too: the same stones draw millions of Christian pilgrims, and the long Christian connection to Israel and to this city has a history of its own. In June 1967 the wall came back into Jewish hands after nineteen years of Jordanian rule that had barred Jews from it entirely.

• Psalm 122:1
  שָׂמַחְתִּי בְּאֹמְרִים לִי בֵּית יְהוָה נֵלֵךְ׃
  I rejoiced when they said unto me: 'Let us go unto the house of the LORD.'
  Psalm 122:1, JPS 1917. Hebrew: Masoretic text.

  Summary. The pilgrim's joy in this psalm has echoed at the wall for centuries; note that it comes from the Book of Psalms, part of the Writings of the Tanakh rather than the Five Books of the Torah.

3Rachel's Tomb, Bethlehemקֶבֶר רָחֵל

Genesis 35, the death of Rachel on the road to Ephrath.

Just north of Bethlehem, on the old road that runs from Jerusalem down to Hebron, stands a small domed structure that Jewish tradition has identified for more than seventeen centuries as the grave of the matriarch Rachel. Together with the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Western Wall, Kever Rachel completes the three holiest pilgrimage sites in the land. Rachel is the one matriarch not buried at Hebron: she died in childbirth on the journey, and Jacob buried her where she fell rather than carry her onward. The site has drawn Jewish worshippers for generations, and women in particular have come to pray here, moved by the prophet Jeremiah's image of Rachel weeping for her exiled children and refusing to be comforted.

• Genesis 35:19-20
  וַתָּמָת רָחֵל וַתִּקָּבֵר בְּדֶרֶךְ אֶפְרָתָה הִוא בֵּית לָחֶם׃ וַיַּצֵּב יַעֲקֹב מַצֵּבָה עַל־קְבֻרָתָהּ הִוא מַצֶּבֶת קְבֻרַת־רָחֵל עַד־הַיּוֹם׃
  And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, the same is Beth-lehem. And Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave; the same is the pillar of Rachel's grave unto this day.
  Genesis 35:19 to 20, JPS 1917. Hebrew: Masoretic text.

  Summary. Genesis marks the grave with a pillar "unto this day," a phrase later readers took as a quiet promise that the site would stay known; it has.

4Joseph's Tomb, Shechemקֶבֶר יוֹסֵף

Joshua 24, the bones brought up from Egypt.

In the heart of Samaria, beside the ancient city of Shechem, lies the traditional tomb of Joseph. The Book of Joshua records that when the Israelites came up out of Egypt they carried Joseph's bones with them and buried him in the field his father Jacob had bought at Shechem. That purchase matters: ancient tradition counts Joseph's tomb, alongside the Cave of Machpelah and the Temple Mount, among the very few holdings whose Jewish ownership the Bible sets out in a recorded sale. A note on the name: Shechem is both a place and a person, the city itself and the son of Hamor from whose family Jacob bought the ground. The ruins of the ancient city sit at Tell Balata, where the excavations at Shechem have traced roughly four thousand years of settlement.

• Joshua 24:32
  וְאֶת־עַצְמוֹת יוֹסֵף אֲשֶׁר־הֶעֱלוּ בְנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרַיִם קָבְרוּ בִשְׁכֶם בְּחֶלְקַת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר קָנָה יַעֲקֹב מֵאֵת בְּנֵי־חֲמוֹר אֲבִי־שְׁכֶם בְּמֵאָה קְשִׂיטָה וַיִּהְיוּ לִבְנֵי־יוֹסֵף לְנַחֲלָה׃
  And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in the parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of money; and they became the inheritance of the children of Joseph.
  Joshua 24:32, JPS 1917. Hebrew: Masoretic text.

  Summary. The verse names the buyer, the sellers, and the price, the same legal care found in Abraham's purchase at Hebron; Joshua belongs to the Prophets, part of the Tanakh but not the Torah.

5The Mount of Olives, Jerusalemהַר הַזֵּיתִים

Zechariah 14, facing the Temple across the Kidron.

Across the Kidron Valley from the Temple Mount rises the Mount of Olives, Har HaZeitim, home to the oldest continuously used Jewish cemetery in the world. Jews have been buried on its western slope, facing the site of the Temple, for roughly three thousand years, drawn by an old tradition that the resurrection of the dead will begin here and that those laid to rest facing the Temple will rise first. The prophet Zechariah pictured the mount as the place where redemption itself would arrive. Its graves range from figures of the biblical period to rabbis, writers, and leaders of the modern age; you can trace the layers of Jerusalem's ancient burial grounds from the Second Temple period to see how far back the practice reaches.

• Zechariah 14:4
  וְעָמְדוּ רַגְלָיו בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא עַל־הַר הַזֵּיתִים אֲשֶׁר עַל־פְּנֵי יְרוּשָׁלִַם מִקֶּדֶם׃
  And His feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east.
  Zechariah 14:4, JPS 1917. Hebrew: Masoretic text.

  Summary. Zechariah's prophecy fixed the mount in the Jewish imagination as the threshold of redemption; like Joshua, it comes from the Prophets rather than the Torah.

6Safed, the City of Kabbalahצְפַת

Not a biblical site; one of the four holy cities of Judaism.

The last two sites on this list are cities rather than tombs, and neither appears in the Bible; they earned their holiness later. Safed, Tzfat, sits highest of all the towns in the Galilee, and after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 it became the world center of Jewish mysticism. Within a single remarkable generation in the sixteenth century it was home to Isaac Luria, known as the Ari, whose teachings reshaped Kabbalah; to Joseph Karo, who codified Jewish law in the Shulchan Aruch; and to Shlomo Alkabetz, who wrote Lecha Dodi, the hymn Jews the world over still sing to welcome the Sabbath. Together they made Safed one of the four holy cities. Scholars still study the Kabbalah of Tzefat as a turning point in Jewish thought.

7Tiberias, on the Sea of Galileeטְבֶרְיָה

Seat of the Sanhedrin; the fourth holy city.

On the western shore of the Sea of Galilee lies Tiberias, Tveria, the fourth of Judaism's holy cities. After the Temple was destroyed, Tiberias became a capital of Jewish learning: the Sanhedrin held its final sessions here, the Jerusalem Talmud took shape in the Galilee, and the Masoretes of Tiberias fixed the system of vowels and cantillation marks that preserves the biblical text to this day. The city is also a resting place of sages. Its most visited grave is the tomb of Maimonides in Tiberias, the great medieval philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, whose body was carried from Egypt to be buried here; Rabbi Akiva and Yochanan ben Zakkai are remembered nearby.