Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek commissioned Naomi Shemer to write a song about Jerusalem for the Israeli Song Festival on Independence Day 1967. Shemer almost refused, "what can I add about Jerusalem that hasn't been said?" She wrote it in 24 hours. The 19-year-old Shuli Natan, an unknown soldier-singer with an acoustic guitar, performed it. Within hours the radio was flooded with requests. Three weeks later, the Six-Day War began. On day three (7 June 1967), paratroopers reached the Western Wall. Shemer was performing for soldiers in Sinai when she heard. That night she wrote the fourth stanza, Chazarnu el borot ha-mayim ("we have returned to the water cisterns"), and a soldier had it on the radio by morning.
For decades Shemer claimed the melody was original. On her deathbed in 2004, she wrote to Gil Aldema admitting she had subconsciously borrowed from Pello Joxepe, a Basque lullaby by Juan Francisco Petriarena (her exposure: a Paco Ibáñez concert in 1962). She called it "an unfortunate accident I regret deeply." The melody itself is in A natural minor with a Phrygian flavor on the chorus, that minor-key longing is what makes it feel old, even before you hear the words.
זָהָב · נְחֹשֶׁת · אוֹר (zahav · nechoshet · or), "gold · bronze · light". The three materials of Jerusalem in the chorus. Gold = the sandstone at sunset. Bronze = the Temple vessels (1 Kings 7). Light = the city as the "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). Three substances, three eras: present, past, prophetic.
אֲנִי כִּנּוֹר (ani kinor), "I am a lyre". An echo of Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon… we hung our lyres on the willows". The exiles refused to sing. Here Shemer reverses it: I am the lyre, the instrument tuned for the city's songs.
אֵיכָה (eicha), "how…?" The opening word of Lamentations (Megilat Eicha, the scroll read on Tisha B'Av mourning the Temple's destruction). Shemer drops this single word into V2 and the whole liturgical weight of 2000 years of mourning lands on it.
בָּדָד יוֹשֶׁבֶת (badad yoshevet), "sits alone". Direct quote from Lamentations 1:1: Eicha yashva vadad ha-ir rabati am ("How the city that was full of people sits alone"). The whole song is built on Lamentations and its undoing.
The "no one visits the Temple Mount / no one goes down to the Dead Sea" of V2 erased the Arab population that lived in East Jerusalem and used those roads daily between 1948 and 1967. The line was technically about Jewish absence, Jews were forbidden from the Old City and Western Wall under Jordanian rule, but the lyric reads as if the city had been literally empty. Palestinian Israelis often cite this as the song's structural blind spot. The 1967 stanza's chazarnu ("we returned") also carries weight: for Israelis it's a homecoming; for Palestinians it's the start of military occupation. The song is beautiful and partial. Many singers today perform only V1 + chorus to avoid the politics of V2 and V3.
If Hatikvah is the official anthem (head), Yerushalayim Shel Zahav is the emotional anthem (heart). It was nearly adopted as the national anthem after 1967; Shemer's authorship anxiety and the song's narrow focus on Jerusalem kept it from being chosen. But every Israeli child learns it. It's sung at Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, military ceremonies, school assemblies. Knowing it is part of cultural literacy. The chorus alone, sung softly, can make a room of strangers go quiet.