If the earth started shaking under you on the very spot where Jesus prayed and then went up into heaven, what would you make of it?
This is the Mount of Olives, a hill of prophets, of prayer, and of things still to come.
Prophets wept on it, and Christ taught on it.
It held the agony of Gethsemane and the wonder of the ascension.
And there’s hardly a stone on it without a piece of eternity attached.
Now, once again, this mountain has the world’s attention.
Cracks are opening on its slopes as though the ground is getting ready for something promised thousands of years ago.
Is that only geology?
Or is it an early echo of Zechariah 14:4 where the Lord stands on this hill in that day and it tears apart into two halves?
What are these cracks really saying?
Are we standing at the doorway of the greatest event the world will ever see when the King of Kings returns?
This mountain is stirring and the world has noticed.
So, let’s explore this mountain.
And the cracks showing up on it today and what they mean in light of the signs in the Bible.
I’m Ambrose Wild and by the end of this we’ll read exactly what Zechariah says happens to this mountain and in what order because the order is the part almost everyone skips.
Start with a scene that happened on this same hill.
Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives when his disciples came to him privately with a question.
In the words of the King James Bible, tell us when shall these things be and what shall be the sign of thy coming and of the end of the world?
That’s Matthew chapter 24:3.
So the question people are asking about these cracks today was first asked out loud right here by the men who knew him best.
And part of the answer he gave them was about earthquakes.
We’ll come back to exactly what he said.
The Mount of Olives is a long ridge of soft chalk and hard flint about 3 and a half kilometers from end to end rising east of Jerusalem’s old city to around 826 m at its highest point.
That soft chalk matters to this story.
It’s easy to cut, which is why the slopes are full of burial caves carved by hand, but it isn’t strong enough to build with.
The Kidedron Valley runs between it and the city walls, and the Bible keeps returning to it.
In 2 Samuel 15, King David goes up the ascent of Ovette weeping with his head covered, running from his own son, Abselum.
Centuries later, Ezekiel watches the glory of the Lord leave Jerusalem and stand upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.
That’s Ezekiel 11:23.
Zechariah puts the Lord’s feet on it in that day.
In the Gospels, Jesus teaches his long sermon about the end from its slopes.
He prays in agony among the olive trees of Gethsemane down at the bottom of the slope.
And in Acts chapter 1, he’s taken up from it while the disciples watch until a cloud receives him out of their sight.
So, one hill holds a king’s grief, a prophet’s vision, and the last moments of Jesus on earth.
And Christians aren’t the only ones who look at it this way.
For Jewish families, this is the most precious burial ground in the world.
The cemetery on its western slope holds somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000 graves, depending on whose count you trust.
People have been buried in caves on this mountain since the first temple period.
And the main cemetery you see now goes back about five centuries to land first leased from the Islamic wack in the 1500s.
Why here?
Because of an old Jewish teaching recorded in the Midrash that the dead will first rise on this very mountain when the Messiah comes.
The prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is part of that hope.
Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones.
Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.
That’s Ezekiel 37:5.
Among the people waiting here are the man who revived Hebrew as a spoken language, Eleazar Ben Yehuda, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Schmool Ysef Agnon, the chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kuk, and the Israeli prime minister Minah Begin.
For Muslims, the mountain carries weight, too.
In Islamic tradition, this is where all of humanity is gathered on judgment day with every soul facing its reckoning.
And there’s a small domed building on the summit that tells you how tangled this hill’s story really is.
It’s the chapel of the ascension built over a rock that pilgrims say still carries the right footprint of Christ.
Today, it’s in the hands of the Islamic Wakov, and it was turned into a mosque.
More than eight centuries ago.
Its mikra, the niche that points Muslim worshippers toward Mecca, sits inside a shrine built to remember Jesus going up into heaven.
So, three faiths look at one ridge and each of them sees the end of the story written on it.
That’s also why so many eyes drift from the mountain to the stone wall facing it.
Directly across the Kidedron Valley in the eastern wall of the old city is the Golden Gate.
Its two great arches blocked with stone sealed in their present form in 1541 under the Ottoman Sultan Sullean.
Ezekiel was shown a shut eastern gate in his vision of a future temple and he was told this gate shall be shut.
It shall not be opened and no man shall enter in by it because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it.
That’s Ezekiel 44:2.
And now there are reports that the gates own stones are moving.
At the same time, the mountain across from it is cracking.
So the hill and the gate seem to be moving together toward the same appointed day.
But what is actually happening in the ground under them?
Start with the claim you’ll hear most often.
You’ll hear that geologists have found a major fault line running straight beneath the Mount of Olives.
The record is more interesting than that.
The great rift that splits this region does run from Lebanon down toward the Red Sea through the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem.
That rift runs for about 3,000 mi and it began pulling apart roughly 35 million years ago.
But in a 2009 study, the seismologist Nicholas Ambrazes looked at old aerial photographs of the area around Jerusalem and reported that they show landslides on steep slopes, but no throughgoing faults near the old city.
What this hill does have is a scar.
On its west face, above the Church of All Nations, two Israeli geologists named Wax and Levit map the remains of a large ancient landslide with its scarp about halfway up the mountain.
The Geological Survey of Israel considers that slide probably much older than biblical times.
In other words, part of the mountain’s western face already came loose long before anyone alive today was here to see it.
And the warnings about what could happen next are real.
Wax and Levit’s work was a study of earthquake risk and slope stability in Jerusalem and later reports from the Geological Survey looked at the danger of earthquakes setting off landslides around the city.
The survey’s director at the time of one major study, a three-year project, Amos Ben, warned that the old city itself sits on layers of debris left behind by armies over the centuries instead of solid bedrock.
As he put it, the layer below is not made of solid rock, but rather a kind of rubble, and that kind of ground can amplify the shaking.
The study pointed to the old city and the raised platform of the Temple Mount as some of the most exposed places in the whole city.
About half a dozen major earthquakes have hit Jerusalem in the last thousand years.
Some Israeli scientists warned that another major quake could strike the region within 50 years.
So, the ground under this hill is unsettled.
And scripture says that shaking is coming.
Revelation chapter 16 describes it plainly.
And there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth.
So mighty an earthquake and so great.
In the next verse, the great city is divided into three parts.
And the letter to the Hebrews takes the idea further.
Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.
A geologist can measure the stress building in the rock, but the shaking Hebrews describes reaches all the way up to heaven.
And the two stories meet on this one ridge of soft chalk east of Jerusalem.
This isn’t the first time the ground here has moved either, and the Bible itself keeps the record.
Amos was a herdsman from Takcoa, and his book opens by dating his words to the days of Uzziah, king of Judah, 2 years before the earthquake.
That quake was so famous that Zechariah used it as a reference point centuries later.
Ye shall flee like as you fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah.
That’s Zechariah 14:5, the very next verse after the mountain splits.
For a long time, that earthquake was known mostly from those verses.
Then in 2021 on the eastern slope of the city of David in Jerusalem, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Joe Uzio and Ort Kaf found collapsed walls and smashed pots and lamps dating to the middle of the 8th century before Christ.
There was no burn layer and there were no weapons, the kind of evidence you’d expect from an attack.
They called it possibly the first solid evidence in Jerusalem of that earthquake.
Here’s the detail that stops people.
The historian Josephus writing in the first century describes what that same quake did outside Jerusalem at a place he calls Ero.
He says half the mountain broke off from the rest on the west and rolled itself four furlongs and stopped against the eastern mountain blocking the roads in the king’s gardens.
Ambrazes puts that distance at about 800 m.
And he points out that Josephus wrote about six centuries after the event and that nobody is sure where Eros was.
But the image is hard to forget.
A real earthquake in Isaiah’s reign.
A slope tearing loose near Jerusalem.
And the prophet who described this mountain splitting pointing straight back to that same quake.
The scholar Charles Clare Monongo even suggested that the valley right beside this mountain is the aal that Zechariah names in that same verse.
The place the new valley is said to reach.
After that, the list keeps growing.
Josephus records a great earthquake in Judea in 31 BC that killed around 10,000 people.
On the 18th and 19th of May, in the year 363, a pair of violent earthquakes struck the region, badly damaging cities as far apart as Sepharus in Galilee and Petra.
And they hit just as the Roman Emperor Julian was trying to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
The church historian Serman blamed the earthquake for that attempt failing.
Another great quake struck in 749, damaging Bian, Tiberius, and other towns around the Jordan Valley.
And in 1033, a severe earthquake shook Jerusalem and Samaria and even sent a tsunami into the coastal towns.
The last big one came less than a century ago.
On the afternoon of July 11th, 1927, a magnitude 6.3 earthquakes struck near the northern Dead Sea.
Across the region, somewhere between 285 and 500 people died, depending on whose count you use.
In Jerusalem alone, more than 130 people died and around 450 were hurt.
The domes of the church of the holy sephila and the al axa mosque were badly damaged.
And on the ridge itself at the Russian monastery of the ascension, three people were killed.
So when someone says this mountain could shake again, they’re not guessing.
It already has within the last 100 years.
And if it did, the obvious question is whether every crack is a countdown.
That’s what Jesus was asked on this hill.
And we’re getting closer to his answer.
Before we get there, there’s another side to this mountain that’s easy to miss when all the talk is about cracks and quakes.
This is also where the church began.
After Jesus was taken up, Acts chapter 1 says, “The disciples returned unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a Sabbath day’s journey.
They went back to the upper room, and they gave themselves to prayer and waited for the spirit they’d been promised.
The church didn’t start in a palace or a cathedral.
It started with a small group of people walking down this hillside, still looking up.
Christians never forgot where that happened.
Around the years 384 to 390, a wealthy Roman woman named Poomenia from the imperial family paid for the first church built around what pilgrims believed were Christ’s last footprints on Earth.
A pilgrim named Agiraa watched the feast of the Ascension being celebrated on this mountain in 384.
In 614, the armies of the Persian king Kosro II destroyed the churches on the mountain.
They were rebuilt and around the year 680, a pilgrim named Arulf described the footprints there as impressed in the dust.
In the 12th century, the crusaders rebuilt the Ascension Church again.
Then Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187, and by the next year, the chapel had been turned into a mosque.
The right footprint is still shown there today.
The piece of stone with the left one was carried off to the Al Axa mosque in the Middle Ages.
So the place where the church watched its lord leave has been destroyed, rebuilt, captured, and repurposed.
And pilgrims still climb up to see it.
And the angel’s words from that day are the reason all this matters.
While the disciples were still staring up, two men in white apparel stood by them and said, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?
This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go into heaven.”
That’s Acts 1 11.
The church was born on this mountain looking up.
Many believers expect the church’s long wait to end on this same hill.
Which brings us back to the graves.
From the top of the ridge, the tombs run down the western slope toward the old city and the sealed golden gate.
Generations of Jewish families chose this ground out of a conviction that once the Messiah arrives and enters the city, those buried here will rise to greet him.
Picture it the way they do.
A whole hillside of the dead lying in the direction they expect their king to walk.
For the families who bury their parents here, choosing this slope is an act of faith.
What makes it so striking is that the same slope that holds all that waiting is the slope where people now say cracks are opening.
The book of Revelation describes the dead, small and great, standing before God as the books are opened.
For believers standing on this hill, it’s hard not to connect those words with tens of thousands of graves on ground that is starting to break.
And yet, if you read the prophets carefully, the waiting here was always meant to end with a voice and with breath, the way Ezekiel saw it, and not just with the ground moving.
That hope doesn’t belong to one faith alone.
For Jews, this is where the dead will rise.
For Muslims, it’s tied to the great gathering on judgment day.
For Christians, it’s the place where the angels promised Jesus would come back the same way he left.
Three faiths, each with its own reading, and all of them turned toward one ridge.
Every conqueror who held Jerusalem wanted this hill, too.
In 1189, 2 years after he took the city, Saladin gave the whole mountain to two of his commanders.
The book of Revelation gives the Christian side of that moment in one sentence.
Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him.
If every eye will see it, then the question reaches past the people standing on this hill to everyone watching the news about it wherever they are.
And that’s exactly the kind of moment Jesus was asked about sitting right here.
So when the ground moves, what can anyone actually stand on?
The writer of Hebrews answers that directly.
He says, “The shaking is meant to remove the things that can be shaken that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”
And then he says, “Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.
Kingdoms rise and fall, and this hill has seen plenty of them.
Romans, Persians, crusaders, sultans, and empires have all come and gone.
Daniel saw one more kingdom coming after all of them.
And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed.”
That’s Daniel 2:44.
And Revelation 21 tells you how that kingdom feels from the inside.
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.
And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying.
Now, here’s the answer I promised.
When the disciples asked Jesus for the sign of his coming sitting on this mountain, his answer covered far more than one crack in one hillside.
He told them that nation would rise against nation and that there would be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in diverse places.
And then he added the line that changes how you hear every earthquake report.
All these are the beginning of sorrows.
In other words, the shaking marks the start of the road.
He gave the earthquakes as signs to watch and he called them a beginning.
That’s an answer given on this exact hill to this exact question.
And now read Zechariah 14:4 in its order.
And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east.
And the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west.
And there shall be a very great valley.
Notice what comes first.
His feet stand on the mountain, and then the mountain splits.
Ambrazes reading the passage as an earthquake scientist thought the prophet was describing the kind of huge landslide this ridge has already had.
But in the verse itself, the great split doesn’t arrive as a warning that someone might come.
It’s what happens when he has already arrived.
The cracks people are talking about now may belong to the beginning of sorrows.
Jesus described Zechariah’s split comes after that when the ground answers the moment the Lord stands on it.
That’s why the angel’s promise matters so much on this particular hill.
The same Jesus, they said, in like manner, as you saw him go, he left from this ridge in front of his friends.
Ezekiel watched the glory of the Lord leave the city and stop on this same mountain.
And Zechariah saw the Lord’s feet stand on it again.
And the mountain that has already slipped and shaken through centuries of quakes is still waiting for that.
Tonight, the Mount of Olives is quiet.
The 50 m bell tower of the Lutheran Church of the Ascension stands against the sky.
The old landslide scar still sits above the Church of All Nations.
The grave still face the old city across the Kidron Valley, and the footprint still sits in its stone inside the little chapel on the summit.
The ground there may move again tomorrow, or not for a hundred years.
Either way, what believers are watching for is the one who said he’d come back to it.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And if this helped you see this mountain more clearly, stay with the channel because there are more videos like this one on the way.
Following the Bible’s promises to the places you can still stand on
