Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad?
&c.] What is become of them? where are they to be found?
where's their power to protect and defend the people they
presided over? thus they might be justly derided, but not so the
God at Israel; these places are mentioned in ( Isaiah 10:9 ) . Hamath
was a city in Syria, thought by some to be the same afterwards
called Antiochia and Epiphania, from Antiochus Epiphanes: Arphad
is joined with it in ( Jeremiah
49:23 ) as a city of Syria; perhaps originally founded and
inhabited by the Arvadite, mentioned with the Hamathite, in (
Genesis
10:18 ) : where are the gods of Sepharvaim?
another place in Syria, the city Sipphore; not the Sipphara of
Ptolemy F14, in Mesopotamia, or that, near
Babylon, Abydenus F15 makes mention of, but a city in
Syro-Phoenicia, ( 2 Kings
17:24 ) : and have they delivered Samaria out of my
hand?
the gods of the above places, which were worshipped in Samaria,
or the gods peculiar to that place; though Samaria was not taken
by the present king of Assyria, Sennacherib, but by a predecessor
of his, Shalmaneser, 2Ki 17:3,6,
which yet is here boasted of as a conquest of the present king.