Some of the world's most enduring ideas were put into words in Jerusalem, and here Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore the city's libraries and archives, encountering some of the oldest and most important manuscripts in the world. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its authors and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In this fascinating look at the power of language, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.