Gethsemane

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The garden on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem where Jesus went to pray on the night before his crucifixion
2. An olive grove situated at the base of the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, the site where Jesus spent his final hours in prayer before his arrest
3. The biblical garden east of Jerusalem where Jesus withdrew to pray and was subsequently taken into custody by Roman soldiers

Etymology: Gethsemane is a place name first, and the common noun came later. The garden of Gethsemane, on the slope of the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, appears in the New Testament as the site where Jesus prayed before his arrest. The name passed into Ancient Greek as "Gethsēmaní," and that Greek form came from an Aramaic phrase, "gaṯ šəmānê," which means "oil press." So a place that many people picture as a quiet, sacred garden was, in its original name, a workplace for crushing olives into oil. In English the word is now used as a common noun for any scene of intense anguish or suffering, a sense that grew out of the story of Jesus's agony in the garden rather than out of anything about olive presses. The extension to a general figure of speech is what most readers encounter today, even though the term's roots lie in a specific, practical Aramaic description of a piece of farm equipment.