Just as reports of the territorial boasts of the negus reached the Arabian peninsula, news of his conversion from paganism to monotheism must have arrived there as well. Of course South Arabia had encountered monotheism before through its various Jewish communities, particularly those that had settled in the Ḥaḍramawt. A fourth-century synagogue has now been identified in the port city of Qana’ on the southern coast of Yemen,4 and a traveling Indian evangelist called Theophilus reported on the Jewish communities he encountered in the region when he was sent to convert the Ḥimyarites in the fourth century.5 Furthermore, the ancient Jewish tribes in Yathrib (the future Medina) in northwest Arabia would have been known in the South through commercial contacts along the trade routes for spice and incense. The Jews of Yathrib were thought in some traditions to be descended from emigrants fleeing from Palestine after Vespasian’s devastation of Jerusalem in the first century AD.6 So the monotheism that sprang up in Axum would certainly not have been incomprehensible to the Ḥimyarites, even if they lacked any deep understanding of either Christian doctrine or Christian sectarianism. They knew monotheism when they saw it, because they had had a long experience of polytheism, just as the Ethiopians had. The pagan Arab pantheon was extensive, allegedly including some 360 divinities,7 but with some, like Hubal in the northwest and Raydān in the southwest, more prominent than others.
On the other side of the Red Sea monotheism in Ethiopia was breaking up its ancestral paganism. The worship of Maḥrem (Ares in Greek) yielded to the Christian God, even as the rulers in Axum proudly proclaimed their new faith, just as they had in pagan times, in Sabaic script alongside Ethiopic and Greek. More significantly, the Ethiopians also came to see themselves, by a process that is still not well understood, as descended from Solomon through a legendary union with the Queen of Sheba, despite the awkward fact that the kingdom of Sheba (Saba) lay in the south of the Arabian peninsula. Nonetheless, the Ethiopians found no difficulty in claiming descent from the House of David without ever considering themselves Jews. This paradox of Ethiopian Christianity has lasted to the present time and is memorably enshrined in Ethiopia’s national book, the Kebra Nagast (“The Glory of Kings”).8 The Ark of the Covenant was (and still is) believed to reside in Axum, destined to return to Jerusalem only with the Second Coming.
The legendary origin of the Ethiopian people had, therefore, through the Queen of Sheba, a mysterious and ill-defined connection with the Arabs of the peninsula and with the Jews who resided in it. The basic story is narrated in the Kebra Nagast and devolves from a report that an Ethiopian merchant of a certain Queen Makeda brought back from Jerusalem. He had allegedly accepted an invitation from King Solomon to the merchants of the world to bring him exotic treasures for which he promised to pay generously in silver and gold. This merchant brought back such extravagant tales of Solomon’s wisdom and magnificence that the queen decided to go herself to meet him. By a ruse he succeeded in sleeping with her and fathering a child called Menelik, whom Solomon eventually anointed king of Ethiopia and the founder of a dynasty there. It was Menelik who surreptitiously took the Ark of the Covenant from the temple in Jerusalem and conveyed it by raft to Ethiopia.9
This bizarre narrative involves the Queen of Sheba because Makeda was obviously identified with the biblical Queen who went to hear the wisdom of Solomon. This queen, whose visit to Jerusalem is described in the first Book of Kings of the Hebrew Bible, has often been identified with the “Queen of the South,” who appears in the New Testament in a similar mission to Solomon. Although the land of Sheba was undoubtedly Saba in southern Arabia, the Septuagint’s correct rendering of the name as Saba in Greek might readily have been misunderstood, through an easy confusion of vowels, with Seba, which was the name of one of the sons of Kush, himself the son of Ham and the Semitic eponym of the Ethiopians (Kushites). Hence Sheba could be imagined to lie in East Africa, and that is exactly where Josephus, in the first century AD, put it when he called it the royal capital of Ethiopia. The queen Kandake, whose eunuch meets Philip in the Acts of the Apostles, came, in the Christian tradition, to be seen as the very queen who slept with Solomon and generated the royal line of Ethiopia. It seems clear from this Christian text as well as the nearly contemporaneous report of Josephus that by the early Roman Empire the link between Jews and the Ethiopians had already spread widely enough in the Near East to make its appearance in both Jewish and Christian literature at almost the same time.10 Kandake’s name looks very much like a deformation of the Ethiopian name Makeda that appears in the Kebra Nagast, although a less plausible connection with Macedonia has sometimes been invoked because of Ethiopian legends concerning Alexander the Great. Whatever the etymology, there can be no doubt that Makeda is the Kebra Nagast’s Queen of Sheba.
The Christianity of the Ethiopians was further complicated by their refusal to accept the dyaphysite orthodoxy decreed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. In the Kebra Nagast the emperor Marcianus, who presided over that council, is denounced as an apostate. The Ethiopians’ steadfast support of Christ’s one nature inevitably brought them close to the Monophysite communities of Syria and Palestine and alienated them from Byzantium. But, as time went on, it was to become clear that geopolitical imperatives could nevertheless bring these two Christ-loving nations together when necessary, despite their doctrinal differences.
It can hardly be an accident that precisely when these momentous changes were happening in Ethiopia the kings of Ḥimyar, who had taken over all the grandiose titles of the Ethiopian kings, suddenly and remarkably also became monotheists. But their monotheism was authentically Jewish and bore no visible connection with the mythology involving the Queen of Sheba that grew up in Axum. This extraordinary development in Arabia, so closely following in time the changes in Ethiopia, is amply documented in the Sabaic epigraphy. As Christian Julien Robin, the leading authority on Ḥimyarite inscriptions, has emphatically asserted, from 380 onwards polytheism utterly vanished from South Arabia.11 The disappearance of polytheism there and the appearance of imperialist royal titulature occurred in roughly the same period.
In the first four centuries of the Christian era 800 inscriptions, according to Robin’s count, document the many gods of South Arabia’s pagan temples. But after 380 there is not one pagan text out of approximately 120 documents between 380 and 560. The accretion of monotheist inscriptions led scholars at first to a cautious hypothesis that the peoples of the region had merely acquired a murky and ill-defined taste for monotheism without taking it seriously. Such muddled religiosity was thought to have reflected the confusion of Jewish and Christian perspectives in the world that encompassed them. But with the addition of more detailed documents it has become absolutely certain that the Arabs of Ḥimyar genuinely embraced Judaism as converts. This is not so much apparent from their use of Hebrew on inscriptions as from the introduction of such unambiguous language for themselves as “the people of Israel.” Although God appears sometimes simply as “the Merciful (Rahmanān),” he is also explicitly invoked as the “Lord of the Jews,” and persons with Jewish names are found imposing burial regulations designed to segregate Jews from non-Jews. Occasionally the divinity is called vaguely “Lord of Heaven and Earth,” much as he was in the earliest, less overtly Christian inscription of Aezanas at Axum.12
A confluence of monotheist ideas in the region seems inescapable, even if one stream flowed towards Christ and the other towards Yahweh. The Ḥimyarites took over such words as Amen and Shalom, and a Ḥimyarite seal, now in a private collection, bears a representation of a menorah with a name in Sabaic letters. The presence of Ḥimyarites (Greek Homêritai) in a tomb at Beth She‘arim in Palestine may reflect the rise of Judaism in later fourth-century Ḥimyar,13 or it may simply indicate Jews who traveled there from some of the early local communities such as Theophilus had observed. The same can be said of the Jewish girl Leah, whose bilingual epitaph, in both Hebrew and Sabaic, turned up in the vicinity of Jerusalem.14
Whatever uncertainty exists in interpret
ing the evidence for Jewish Ḥimyarites in Palestine, none exists when it comes to Judaism as the religion of the government in Ḥimyar in the fifth and early sixth centuries. The epigraphical evidence is amply reinforced by literary traditions that concern two notorious episodes of coercion and brutality on the part of the Arab Jewish kings in their dealings with Christian communities in the kingdom.
The first episode, from the third quarter of the fifth century concerns a Christian martyr called Azqīr, known to us from an Ethiopic synaxarion (church calendar), which makes explicit reference to rabbis who assembled in judgment on him.15 He was put to death in his own city, Najrān, and afterwards some thirty-eight other Christians were reportedly martyred, including priests, monks, and bishops. The second episode is known from a rich dossier on the massacre of Christians in 523 carried out at Najrān by a Ḥimyarite king whose full name was Yūsuf As’ar Yath’ar, sometimes simply called Joseph in modern literature.16 Because of the notoriety of his anti-Christian pogrom he appears repeatedly in ancient and medieval texts, and under various nicknames—dhū Nuwās (“long-haired”) in Arabic, Dounaas (apparently a form of the Arabic name) in Greek, Masrūq (“the comber” perhaps alluding to torture) in Syriac, and Finḥas (the Biblical Phineas) in Ethiopic.17 The episodes of both Azqīr and the Najrān martyrs constitute incontestable evidence for the persecution of Christians by their Jewish overlords, and both reveal concerted efforts to force conversion to Judaism.
The Judaism of the government in Ḥimyar in the fifth and early sixth centuries has become by now, after more than a century of doubt and uncertainty, an acknowledged fact of Arabian history. The rich epigraphical evidence is amply reinforced by the literary traditions for the two brutal episodes of coercion and brutality. But the massacre at Najrān is by far the more important of the two persecutions that the Jewish regime in Ḥimyar launched against the Christians within their kingdom. It not only convulsed but transformed central and southwestern Arabia. It provoked an invasion from Ethiopia that installed Christianity as the official religion of the kingdom for nearly fifty years, and it allowed not only the negus in Axum but the emperor in Constantinople as well as the king of Sassanian Persia to confront one another indirectly in this remote region by intervening in the politics and the religion of the Arabian peninsula. This, in turn, positioned all three rulers to become power-brokers in the rapidly changing world into which Muḥammad was born, in about 570 according to the Muslim tradition enshrined in the Prophet’s biography (sira). The Arab pagans never lost sight of the traditional polytheist culture that the conversion of the Ḥimyarites to Judaism had seriously curtailed, and the Ka‘ba at Mecca preserved memories of Hubal, to whom that ancient sacred monument was thought to have been once dedicated. Furthermore, the presence of newly energized Christian communities that owed their salvation to the monotheist Ethiopians guaranteed that the Persians would have to work hard to reassert their traditional alliances with both Jews in Arabia and the Naṣrid rulers (the so-called Lakhmids) just north of Arabia at al Ḥīra. The sheikhs of al Ḥīra had long been Persian clients who were opposed to Byzantium’s Arab clients at Jabala to the northwest—the Jafnids (often called Ghassānids).18 The tumultuous events in sixth-century Arabia may reasonably be called the crucible of Islam.
It was the pogrom at Najrān in 523 that portentously inaugurated the challenge to the old order. Fortunately we need no longer speak with uncertainty about the date of the massacre, since recent research by Robin and his student, Iwona Gajda, have finally established 110 BC as the chronological era that was used in the Ḥimyarite dating that appears in the epigraphy.19 We can now date with confidence those texts that display numbers of the Ḥimyarite era, and, on the basis of the inscriptions that Gajda and Robin have analyzed, we can say that after a brief restoration of Ethiopian-sponsored Christianity in Ḥimyar somewhere between 518 and 522, the militantly Jewish Yūsuf revived the Judaism that had dominated the kingdom ever since the end of the fourth century.
The irredentist claims of Axum that had begun with Aezanas at almost the same time as Judaism came to Ḥimyar had grown ever more strident as the monarchy in East Africa became more Christian. Ella Asbeha, the strong negus who assumed the biblical name of Kālēb, can be observed through his inscriptions to have been an advocate not only of Ethiopia’s claims to territory in the Arabian peninsula but no less of its extraordinary claim to represent the house of David and to boast direct descent from Solomon. His Ge‘ez inscriptions leave no doubt about the Solomonic origins that the Ethiopian monarchy espoused. They quote the Bible, particularly the Psalms, and they proclaim the glory of David.20 So when the Jewish king of Ḥimyar, Yūsuf, reasserted Jewish rule in Ḥimyar in about 522, Kālēb was already poised to invade the country, in fact for the second time. We know from the surviving list of chapter headings for the lost parts of the Syriac Book of the Ḥimyarites that he had launched a campaign in Arabia a few years earlier,21 and this campaign seems clearly to have led to the short-lived Christian occupation of Arabia in the years just before 522.
Our knowledge of Yūsuf’s aggressive assault against the Christians inside his own kingdom depends upon a complex dossier of interrelated texts, in which the massacre at Najrān is the principal and recurring theme. These include, first and foremost, the Greek hagiographical account (martyrion) of the martyrdom of Ḥārith, or St. Arethas as he is known in Greek, at Najrān as well as the horrific letter written in Syriac by a Monophysite priest (or perhaps bishop) called Symeon from Beth Arsham near Seleuceia on the Tigris, inside Persia. There is little doubt that the Greek text of the martyrion derives substantially from the letter of Symeon, and that both were written down soon after the events they relate. Symeon’s letter was subsequently abbreviated in other Syriac ecclesiastical works. In 1971 Irfān Shahîd was able to publish a second letter about the Najrān massacre and argued that this was yet another text by the same Symeon of Beth Arsham.22 A very recent stylistic analysis of these two letters by David Taylor in Oxford has, however, shown conclusively that the second letter is not only not by the author of the first but of far less historical value.23 Neither letter, as he insists, should be treated as a straightforward historical document because both are obviously tendentious, even though the first is full of details that look genuine. They can, to some extent, be controlled by another Syriac work, the fragmentary Book of the Ḥimyarites, but that is no warrant for assuming, as Shahîd did, that Symeon was also the author of that too.
What emerges from these texts is that Yūsuf tried to wipe out the Christian churches in his kingdom either by destroying them or turning them into synagogues, and by trying to force their communicants to convert to Judaism. One of the documents gives a horrifying account of his pledge of safety to those who surrendered to him at Ẓaphār, only to have his forces kill three hundred of them in custody and set fire to a church where another two hundred had congregated. He concentrated his efforts on the significant Christian population of Najrān. He himself reported on his persecution in a letter that he sent to a meeting held at Ramla, southeast of the Naṣrid camp at al Ḥīra, under the auspices of sheikh al Mundhir (Alamoundaros in Greek) together with the support and representation of his ally, the Persian king. The Byzantine emperor Justin also sent a delegate called Abramios to this meeting, as we know from an account of a later embassy written by his son, Nonnosus.24 And present of course for the discussions and clearly taking careful notes was Symeon of Beth Arsham, who wrote an account of all that was said. This he dispatched to the homonymous abbot, Symeon, at Gabboula in the Jafnid territory of Syria.
The conference at Ramla thus brought together representatives of both Persian and Byzantine interests, under the auspices of a Persian client, to hear the Ḥimyarite king proudly describe his murderous assault on the Christians of Najrān. This so incensed Symeon of Beth Arsham that he sounded an alarm for Christians, or at least Monophysite Christians, all over the Near East. He wanted his account of what he heard to be spread to Ethiop
ia, Antioch, Tarsus, Edessa, and Cappadocian Caesarea. Such activism was fully consistent with what we know of Symeon of Beth Arsham, of whom John of Ephesus wrote, “As if God made him ready and as if the earth had vomited him up, Symeon would suddenly spring up and be present there, since from the greatness of his zeal and fervor of his will he did not rest and sit still in one district.”25 It is hard to imagine how he managed to be in attendance at Ramla, but his presence was obviously in character.
In his letter to the Ramla gathering Yūsuf had described in excruciating detail the torments he inflicted upon the Christians of Najrān. The messenger that read out his letter felt free to supplement it with additional sanguinary details, and amazingly the letter itself incorporated impassioned speeches by some of the martyrs. Why Yūsuf chose to boast of his murderous actions in this way, before the representatives of Byzantium and Persia and in the presence of a dynamic and vociferous Christian, may only be surmised. The Persians had thrown their support behind the Jews in Arabia as well as behind the sheikh, al Mundhir, who hosted the conference. Yūsuf may have wanted not only to win Persian approval for his extermination of Ḥimyarite Christians but, at the same, to have secured a buffer against reprisals from Christian powers such as Byzantium or Ethiopia.
In the case of Byzantium he need hardly have worried at this stage, since the Chalcedonian court at Constantinople showed little interest in coming to the aid of overseas Monophysites. But the irredentist ambitions of Kālēb to recover Ethiopian rule in Arabia were something else. The Ethiopians had a past history of invasion and occupation of the peninsula, and Yūsuf’s appeal at Ramla could do nothing to protect him against Kālēb. The massacre occurred in 523, the meeting at Ramla in 524, and Kālēb’s army was in Ḥimyar by 525.
7
THE ETHIOPIAN INVASION OF 525
Throne of Adulis Page 8
