Genesis 10:30 names it as a town in Arabia. What we think of today as Saudi Arabia roughly corresponds to the ancient Yoktanite kingdom, which this passage tells us stretched from Mesha (משא) to Sephar.
As has been observed elsewhere, the journey from here to Ethiopia is slight, and it may well be that anthropologists and geneticists should start to look for links between the Ethiopian and Yoktanite Arabians: Yehudit tends to describe both as Kushites (כוש), in an almost indiscriminate manner, as though it knew that the ancient dissemination of African people eastwards did not happen by their going northwards into Europe, nor northwards to the Mediterranean coast and then eastwards across Egypt and the Sinai into Mesopotamia - both of these very difficult and thoroughly illogical routes - but by easy boat journey across the Red Sea into Arabia, and through what are now Mecca and Medina north and eastwards into Mesopotamia, and on, north to the Caucasus, east to the Ganges... The same journey, but in the opposite direction, was made by the followers of Muhammad in the early days of Islam; the "Exiles" went by boat to Abyssinia to escape the persecution of the anti-Muslim majority in Mecca.
Is this the same place that Oved-Yah (Obadiah 1:20) is intending, when he makes the Bible's only reference to Sepharad? Because of its reference to exile, the name will later be used to describe the Jews exiled in the Moslem Diaspora, particularly in Spain and North Africa, but after 1492 in Amsterdam, Constantinople, and elsewhere.
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press
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