The Torah says Jacob came upon a place and lay down because the sun had set (Genesis 28:11). The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot read that verse without shouting. It was not just any place. It was the place of the house of the sanctuary — the exact spot where the Temple would one day stand on Mount Moriah.
Jacob did not stumble onto it. He prayed there. The Targum inserts prayer where the plain text merely reports arrival. The patriarch lit the evening service on the Temple Mount centuries before the Temple existed. Tradition reads this as the origin of Maariv, the nighttime prayer, the prayer of the exile, the prayer of the man walking into darkness.
Then he took four stones of the holy place for his pillow. Not ordinary stones. Stones of the atar kadisha, the place consecrated from above. They were already holy. The Temple Mount had already been marked as God's address on earth when Abraham bound Isaac there (Genesis 22:2). Jacob lay down with four pieces of that mountain under his head.
The geography of Jewish prayer was being laid out under a sleeping man. Shaharit was Abraham's morning. Mincha was Isaac's afternoon. Maariv is Jacob's night. Three patriarchs, three services, one mountain.
The takeaway: the places where our ancestors prayed did not become holy because they prayed there. They prayed there because those places were already holy, and their souls knew it.