Judean Hill Country

The limestone ridges south and west of Jerusalem rising five to nine hundred meters above the coastal plain — terraced olive groves, vineyards on the slopes, and small villages strung along the wadis. In Luke 1:39 Mary "set out and went with haste into the hill country, to a town of Judah" to visit her cousin Elizabeth; Christian tradition has located that town at Ein Karem, a village in the western Judean hills just outside Jerusalem.