the low hill country lying beneath a range of mountains, and in nearly every use the named district of Judah between its mountains and the coastal plain
The word is built on a root meaning "to be low," and it is purely a word about ground. What it names is low only by comparison with what rises above it. In practice the Bible uses it almost as a place name: it carries "the" in every verse but one, the way English says "the Midwest," and it points to one stretch of country, a band of soft, rolling chalk hills about ten to fifteen miles wide running along the western foot of the Judean mountains and separating them from the flat Philistine plain.
That is why it keeps the same company. When the Bible divides the land into districts, it counts off the hill country, the dry south, the rift valley and the Shephelah as separate named zones (Deuteronomy 1:7, Joshua 12:8, Jeremiah 17:26). It is a region with borders, a town list of its own beginning at Joshua 15:33, farmland worked by a king's laborers (2 Chronicles 26:10), and a reputation: sycamore figs grew there so thickly that "cedar" set against "sycamore of the Shephelah" became the standard picture of the rare beside the ordinary (1 Kings 10:27).
The regions listed alongside it keep its edges sharp:
- the dry south (נֶגֶב) is named for its lack of rain rather than for its height, and lies below the Shephelah toward the desert.
- the rift valley (עֲרָבָה) is the deep trough on the far side of the mountains, low ground of an entirely different kind.
- the level tableland (מִישׁוֹר) is flat open country, which is why 2 Chronicles 26:10 can name it and the Shephelah in one breath as two different places.
On one occasion the word steps outside Judah. Joshua 11:16 closes its list with "the hill country of Israel and its lowland," using the same word for a low belt under a different range of hills. There it is doing what the root always allowed, naming whatever lies low beneath a height rather than the one famous district.