Separation (Hastings' Dictionary)

For ' separation * In the sense of .■nj, see artt. RED Hkifer, p. 208", UNCLEANNESS, and in sense of IJJ art. Naziritb. SEPHAR {.Tj^q [with n locale] ; LXX A Za<t>^ipa\ SEPHARAD SEnUAGIXT 437 Gn lO". — Given as a limit of the territory occupied by tho Joktanides, and apparently identified with the Eastern mountain. This place is ordinarily identified (since tlie time of Fresnel, ap. Ges. The.f.) with Zafar, the name of two places of im- portance in S.

Arabia — one of them the capital of the Himyarites, near Sana in Yemen, the other a coast town in the district of Shihr, to the extreme east of Hiidramaut, and, indeed, a place, from its situation with regard to Hadramaut and the great Dabna, likely to serve as a landmark. So in the Taj al-'arua (iii. 370) this place is said to be ' at the extreme end of Yemen.' Wellsted ( Travels, n.

153) says of it : ' Dofar is situated beneath a lofty mountain ; the country around is well culti- vated,' but it only deserves to be called ' a miser- able village.' Apparently, then, with the depopu- lation of S. Arabia that has gone on for some centuries, the place has declined from the import- ance which the Arabic geographers sometmies assign to it. Against this identification Glaser (Skizze, ii.

437) urges that we cannot prove Zafar to have existed at so early a period ; liut we also have no record of its foundation. The repre- sentation of the Arabic Z by o is surprising, out scarcely constitutes a serious objection, when the situation of the place corresponds so well with what the Biblical writer intends. D. S. Margoliouth.