Translation
In those days, having risen up, MARY
went with haste to the hill country, to a town in JUDAH,
Go to footnote numberParaphrase
A few days after recovering from her encounter with the angel, THE [PREVIOUSLY] REBELLIOUS ONE made her way quickly to the hill country, i.e. to a certain town in THE LAND OF PRAISE AND CELEBRATION,
Footnotes
1: “a town in Judah”
Here the absence of a name should catch our attention. We are not told the name of the town because it would not contribute to the story. The identification of all the components of the story is not important; the spiritual truths found in the story are important. Notice also that this unnamed town is in Judah, not Judea. By the time of Jesus the names Judah and Judea were used for roughly the same area of land, but they had different emphases. Judah was the old Hebrew designation for one of the tribes of Israel, with its roots in God’s plan; Judea was what the same area of land was called by foreigners who did not like the Jews because they were hot-headed and rebellious.