Isaiah 36:19
Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim? and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand?
Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad?.... 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 {n}, in Mesopotamia, or that, near Babylon, Abydenus {o} 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, 2 Kings 17:3,6, which yet is here boasted of as a conquest of the present king.
{n} Geograph. l. 5. c. 18.
{o} Apud Euseb. Praepar. Evangel. l. 9. c. 41. p. 457.