JERUSALEM: City of the past, city of the future : JERUSALEM: One City, Three Faiths. <i> By Karen Armstrong (Alfred A. Knopf: $30, 471 pp.)</i> : TO RULE JERUSALEM. <i> By Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht (Cambridge University Press: $39.95, 554 pp.)</i>

Along a stretch of Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles, the lampposts are decorated with colorful banners that bear a single phrase in English, Hebrew and Arabic: “JERUSALEM 3000.” One might assume that the banners are celebrating the 3,000th anniversary of the founding of the Holy City--but one would be wrong.

Two new books about Jerusalem allow us to decipher the layers of myth and legend, history and politics, miracle and revelation that are encrypted in the enigmatic slogan on those street banners. And the very fact that we need help in decoding such a simple message reveals something crucial about Jerusalem and what it symbolizes to Jews, Christians and Muslims around the world.

As Karen Armstrong emphasizes in “Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths,” Jerusalem was founded by an obscure people called the Jebusites at some unknowable date in the distant past. The 3,000th anniversary now being celebrated is roughly based on the supposed date of the conquest of Jerusalem by King David, an event that is reported only in the Bible and, even according to the Bible, took place long after Jerusalem first came into existence.

Conquest, Armstrong points out, has been the fate of Jerusalem throughout its long and troubled history. After King David came the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans; later, the armies of Islam boiled up out of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Crusaders of Christian Europe briefly displaced Islam and were soon displaced by a series of new Islamic conquerors. And so the claims and counterclaims that can be found in the daily newspaper are echoes of battles that began thousands of years ago and never really ended.

Armstrong, a former nun and distinguished historian of religion, uses Jerusalem as a focal point for a work of impressive sweep and grandeur. Her magisterial book begins in prehistory, lingers in the pages of the Bible and the Koran, pauses to contemplate the role of Jerusalem in the growth of Christianity and Islam and then marches forward through a couple of millenniums of world history, religion and politics.

By contrast, Roger Friedman and Richard Hecht, both professors of religious studies at UC Santa Barbara, approach Jerusalem in the here-and-now in “To Rule Jerusalem,” bringing a kind of urgent first-person journalism to bear in their scholarly study of the politics of Jerusalem and the contemporary Middle East.

These two books can be regarded as companion volumes, one devoted to Jerusalem as a repository of a rich spiritual tradition, the other focusing on Jerusalem as a flash-point of contemporary world politics. Thus, for example, while Armstrong muses over the notion of “sacred space,” Friedman and Hecht are more interested in issues of urban development. When it comes to Jerusalem, we begin to realize, the two concerns are not so far apart.

The point is made in both books: The alchemy of politics and true belief is precisely what makes Jerusalem a shimmering symbol of humankind’s loftiest spiritual aspirations and, at the same time, the front line of a bitter struggle for sovereignty over a few square miles of stony earth. And both books offer a caution to contemporary politicians, Arab and Israeli, who declare as nonnegotiable their claims to the much-bloodied soil of the so-called City of Peace.

Hecht and Friedland, for example, point out that the significance of Jerusalem in the destiny of the modern state of Israel has been vigorously debated even within Jewish circles. They remind us that the founders of modern Zionism were not much interested in Jerusalem and its holy sites, including Mount Zion, and they introduce us to Orthodox Jews who still reject Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem because they believe that only the Messiah is empowered to redeem the Land of Israel.

“It is ironic that Jerusalem lent its name to the Jewish nationalist movement, for Zionism was built largely outside Zion, in the countryside and along the coast,” they point out. “Theodor Herzl wanted to build the capital on Mount Carmel, not within Jerusalem.”

Armstrong suggests another irony when she describes the role that Jerusalem played in the growth of Christianity. The early church, she explains, embraced an “otherworldly theology” that had little to do with holy places on Earth. But discovery of the supposed site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus on what is today the Temple Mount in Jerusalem ignited a powerful interest in shrines and relics, and a tradition of pilgrimage that reached a frenzied and fatal expression in the Crusades.

The excavation of Christian sites in the Jerusalem area was the result of “holy archeology” undertaken by the newly converted Roman emperor, Constantine, more than a thousand years ago--and buried artifacts still figure importantly in the debate over Jerusalem. Today, archeology is a tool of Realpolitik: Israelis search for shards and ruins that will prove the antiquity of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land, while contemporary Palestinian Arabs argue that “there is no archeological evidence for the Jewish kingdom founded by King David.”

As I read “Jerusalem” and “To Rule Jerusalem,” I was reminded of a recent book titled “From Time Immemorial,” which argued that Jews had a superior claim to the land of Israel because they had lived there earlier, longer and in greater numbers than Arabs. Both of these new books allow us to see the sterility and folly in such an argument; what seems to matter in the politics of the contemporary Middle East is not census data but religious zeal, not what we know but what we believe to be true.

“The Jerusalem question is explosive because the city has acquired mythical status,” Armstrong observes. “Stories about Jerusalem should not be dismissed because they are ‘only’ myths; they are important precisely because they are myths.”

Armstrong, arguing against the ample evidence of her own work, clings to the hope that “interior growth and liberation” will take the place of the “deadly struggle for sovereignty” and permit Arabs and Israelis to achieve “tolerance and coexistence in the Holy City.” Indeed, she insists that such ideals have always sanctified the dream, if not the reality, of Jerusalem.

“Crucial to the cult of Jerusalem from the very first was the importance of practical charity and social justice,” she insists. “Some of the worst atrocities have occurred when people have put the purity of Jerusalem and the desire to gain access to its great sanctity before the quest for justice and charity.”

Hecht and Friedman agree on the problem, but they are less optimistic about the prospect of a solution: “The city is built upon a set of symbols that threaten to tear it apart,” they write. “As Israelis and Palestinians move toward peace, Jerusalem is being prepared as a battlefield for war.”

The ultimate irony of these two worthy books is that the very men and women who ought to read and heed them--the decision-makers in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East--are unlikely to find the plea for peaceful coexistence to be very persuasive. We need only glance at the headlines or the evening news to be reminded that banners and slogans have always counted for more than high ideals in Jerusalem.