The Biblical Sepharad and the Hebrew Name for the Iberian Peninsula: A New Etymological Explanation

It is commonly believed that the biblical place-name Sepharad, which appears only once in the book of Obadiah (1:20), has as its most plausible candidate for identification the ancient capital of Lydia, Sardis, in Asia Minor. This hypothesis is based on the evidence in some Assyrian documents, where Sardis appears as Saparda and most convincingly in a Lydian-Aramaic bilingual inscription from the Achaemenid period from Sardis, where the place-name of Sardis is rendered in Aramaic as ספרד. Moreover, since the period of Roman Antiquity, the persistent Jewish tradition identified Sepharad with the Iberian Peninsula.

But nevertheless, the connection between the name Sepharad referring to the Iberian Peninsula and the Sepharad that appears in the Bible remains obscure. Even in the case that we accept that Sepharad was Sardis, it is difficult to explain the relation that there could have been between the Iberian Peninsula and the ancient capital of Lydia. The aim of this speech is to shed some light on all these unresolved questions by making a new connection between Saparda and the Greek loanword Hesperides, which are consonantically very close.