The dry, chalk-and-limestone country that falls away east of the Judean hills toward the Dead Sea — close enough to Jerusalem to walk to in a day, empty enough to disappear into. It is where David hid from Saul, and in the first century it held the settlement at QUMRAN, whose Community Rule quotes the very verse Matthew applies to John: 'they shall separate from the habitation of unjust men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him' (Community Rule VIII, on Isaiah 40:3). ⚠ That parallel places John inside a recognizable movement without making him a member of one — the wilderness was where people went precisely to be outside the system, and both he and they read the same prophet to justify going. Deliberately given no map pin: it is a zone rather than a site, and the library does not draw a boundary it cannot defend.