[493] Plural; LXX. and Qeri.
[494] Sudden change to imperative. The English versions render, _Thou shouldest not have looked on_, etc.
[495] Cf. Ps. cxxxvii. 7, _the day of Jerusalem_.
[496] The day of his strangeness = _aliena fortuna_.
[497] With laughter. Wellhausen and Nowack suspect ver. 13 as an intrusion.
[498] פֶּרֶק does not elsewhere occur. It means cleaving, and the LXX. render it by διεκβολή, _i.e._ pass between mountains. The Arabic forms from the same root suggest the sense of a band of men standing apart from the main body on the watch for stragglers (cf. נגד, in ver. 11). Calvin, “the going forth”; Grätz פרץ, _breach_, but see Nowack.
[499] Wellhausen proposes to put the last two clauses immediately after ver. 14.
[500] The prophet seems here to turn to address his own countrymen: the drinking will therefore take the meaning of suffering God’s chastising wrath. Others, like Calvin, take it in the opposite sense, and apply it to Edom: “as ye have exulted,” etc.
[501] _Reel_—for לעוּ we ought (with Wellhausen) probably to read נעוּ: cf. Lam. iv. 2. Some codd. of LXX. omit _all the nations ... continuously, drink and reel_. But א^{Ca} A and Q have _all the nations shall drink wine_.
[502] So LXX. Heb. _their heritages_.
[503] That is the reverse of the conditions after the Jews went into exile, for then the Edomites came up on the Negeb and the Philistines on the Shephelah.
[504] _I.e._ of Judah, the rest of the country outside the Negeb and Shephelah. The reading is after the LXX.
[505] Whereas the pagan inhabitants of these places came upon the hill-country of Judæa during the Exile.
[506] An unusual form of the word. Ewald would read _coast_. The verse is obscure.
[507] So LXX.
[508] The Jews themselves thought this to be Spain: so Onkelos, who translates ספרד by אַסְפַּמְיָא = Hispania. Hence the origin of the name Sephardim Jews. The supposition that it is Sparta need hardly be noticed. Our decision must lie between two other regions—the one in Asia Minor, the other in S.W. Media. _First_, in the ancient Persian inscriptions there thrice occurs (great Behistun inscription, I. 15; inscription of Darius, II. 12, 13; and inscription of Darius from Naḳsh-i-Rustam) Çparda. It is connected with Janua or Ionia and Katapatuka or Cappadocia (Schrader, _Cun. Inscr. and O. T._, Germ. ed., p. 446; Eng., Vol. II., p. 145); and Sayce shows that, called Shaparda on a late cuneiform inscription of 275 B.C., it must have lain in Bithynia or Galatia (_Higher Criticism and Monuments_, p. 483). Darius made it a satrapy. It is clear, as Cheyne says (_Founders of O. T. Criticism_, p. 312), that those who on other grounds are convinced of the post-exilic origin of this part of Obadiah, of its origin in the Persian period, will identify Sepharad with this Çparda, which both he and Sayce do. But to those of us who hold that this part of Obadiah is from the time of the Babylonian exile, as we have sought to prove above on pp. 171 f., then Sepharad cannot be Çparda, for Nebuchadrezzar did not subdue Asia Minor and cannot have transported Jews there. Are we then forced to give up our theory of the date of Obadiah 10-21 in the Babylonian exile? By no means. For, _second_, the inscriptions of Sargon, king of Assyria (721—705 B.C.), mention a Shaparda, in S.W. Media towards Babylonia, a name phonetically correspondent to ספרד (Schrader, _l.c._), and the identification of the two is regarded as “exceedingly probable” by Fried. Delitzsch (_Wo lag das Paradies?_ p. 249). But even if this should be shown to be impossible, and if the identification Sepharad = Çparda be proved, that would not oblige us to alter our opinion as to the date of the whole of Obadiah 10-21, for it is possible that later additions, including Sepharad, have been made to the passage.