Places of the Bible
Sepharad
Where the name appears
Events told in passages that name Sepharad, and how many of their verses do. That is not the same as saying they happened here: a place can be named as a landmark, as somewhere being travelled to, or as the subject of a prophecy.
- Prophecies of Obadiah · 584 BC · 1 verse
Easton’s Bible Dictionary
(Obad. 1:20), some locality unknown. The modern Jews think that Spain is meant, and hence they designate the Spanish Jews “Sephardim,” as they do the German Jews by the name “Ashkenazim,” because the rabbis call Germany Ashkenaz. Others identify it with Sardis, the capital of Lydia. The Latin father Jerome regarded it as an Assyrian word, meaning “boundary,” and interpreted the sentence, “which is in Sepharad,” by “who are scattered abroad in all the boundaries and regions of the earth.” Perowne says: “Whatever uncertainty attaches to the word Sepharad, the drift of the prophecy is clear, viz., that not only the exiles from Babylon, but Jewish captives from other and distant regions, shall be brought back to live prosperously within the enlarged borders of their own land.”
From M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (1893), in the public domain.
Named in 1 verse
- Obadiah
- 1:20
The place, its people and its events come from Theographic, a knowledge graph of the Bible by Robert Rouse, used and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.