Saphir

Saphir (meaning beautiful or delightful) was a town of Judah mentioned once in Micah's lament over the coming Assyrian invasion (Mic. 1:11). The verse contains a wordplay on the town's name: "Pass on your way, inhabitants of Saphir, in nakedness and shame" — the town of beauty will be exposed in disgrace. This type of rhetorical wordplay on place-names runs throughout Micah 1:10–15, with each community's fate matching or ironically inverting its name. The site is tentatively identified with es-Suafir (or Sawafir), about five miles southeast of Ashdod on the coastal plain, in the Shephelah region. Saphir's inclusion in Micah's catalog of doomed Philistine and Judean cities places it in the path of the Assyrian advance under Sargon II and Sennacherib.