Aretas IV

The man who became Aretas IV did not begin life with a royal name. Inscriptions and coin evidence indicate that he was called Aeneas (Haretat in Nabataean sources rendered his throne name) before he took the crown at Petra in 9 BC, following the death of King Obodas III ^[1]. The circumstances of his accession were irregular. He seems not to have been the designated heir, and the historian Josephus records that his assumption of power initially angered the Roman emperor Augustus, who considered the Nabataeans a client people whose kings required imperial approval ^[2].

Almost nothing is recorded about his birth, parents, or upbringing, a silence typical for Nabataean rulers, whose kingdom left inscriptions and coins rather than narrative histories. The dates sometimes attached to his life in modern reference lists are uncertain; what the sources establish firmly is the span of his reign, forty-eight or forty-nine years from 9 BC to AD 40 ^[1]. He grew up in a kingdom of Arab traders whose wealth came from the caravan routes carrying frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to Mediterranean ports, and whose engineers had mastered water storage in one of the driest regions on earth ^[3].

Augustus was eventually persuaded to confirm the new king, in part because the alternative candidates and the intrigues at the Herodian court made Aretas the least disruptive option. The episode taught the young ruler a lesson he applied for the rest of his reign: Nabataean independence survived only so long as Rome saw no reason to end it ^[2].

Once secure on the throne, Aretas adopted the title Philopatris, usually translated from its Nabataean form as "he who loves his people" ^[1]. The choice was a political statement. Earlier Nabataean kings had styled themselves in Greek fashion as lovers of their fathers or their dynasties; Aretas tied his legitimacy to the population itself, a useful posture for a ruler whose claim to the crown had been contested ^[4].

His kingdom occupied a strategic corridor. To the north lay the Roman province of Syria, to the west the territories of Herod the Great and, after Herod died in 4 BC, those of his quarrelsome sons. During the unrest that followed Herod's death, Aretas supplied troops to the Roman governor Varus for the campaign that suppressed revolts in Judea, an early demonstration of loyalty that helped stabilize his standing with Rome ^[2].

The backbone of his power remained commerce. Nabataean caravans moved incense, spices, bitumen from the Dead Sea, and Chinese silk along routes the kingdom policed and taxed. Under Aretas the volume of Nabataean coinage rose dramatically, with more coins surviving from his reign than from all other Nabataean kings combined, a rough but telling index of economic activity ^[3]. Any account of Aretas IV achievements begins with this prosperity, because it paid for everything else.

Petra reached its architectural peak under Aretas IV. Archaeologists attribute to his reign the enlargement of the city's main theatre, cut directly into the sandstone with seating usually estimated in the thousands, and major work on the colonnaded street and temple precincts at the heart of the city ^[3]. Many scholars also date the Khazneh, the famous rock-cut facade that greets visitors emerging from the Siq gorge, to the decades around his rule, though its exact patron and purpose are still debated ^[5].

His building activity extended far beyond the capital. At Hegra (modern Mada'in Salih in Saudi Arabia), the kingdom's great southern city, the majority of the dated monumental tombs were carved during his reign, several bearing inscriptions that name him and members of his family ^[6]. The site, now a UNESCO World Heritage property, preserves the clearest dated record of Nabataean stone carving anywhere, and most of it belongs to the era of Aretas ^[6].

He also projected power northward. At various points his authority reached Damascus, and the New Testament preserves a trace of this influence: Paul writes in 2 Corinthians that "the governor under King Aretas" guarded the city to arrest him, forcing his escape over the wall in a basket ^[7]. Scholars continue to argue over whether Aretas formally controlled Damascus in the mid-30s AD or merely maintained an ethnarch there to oversee the Nabataean trading community, but the reference makes him one of the few Arabian kings named in Christian scripture ^[4].

Nabataean coins and inscriptions, unusually for the ancient Near East, regularly name the king's queen alongside him. Aretas ruled first with Queen Huldu, who appears on his coinage until about AD 16, and later with Queen Shaqilat, who features on issues from roughly AD 18 onward ^[1]. Whether Huldu died or was set aside is not recorded. The prominence of these women on official coinage suggests that royal wives held a recognized public position in Nabataean ideology ^[4].

His children shaped both his diplomacy and his wars. A daughter, Phasaelis, was married to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, sealing an alliance between the two neighboring client rulers ^[2]. His son Malichus II would eventually succeed him, and inscriptions at Hegra record other offspring, giving historians an unusually full picture of a Nabataean royal family ^[6].

The marriage alliance collapsed in spectacular fashion. Around AD 27, Antipas resolved to divorce Phasaelis in order to marry Herodias, the wife of his own half-brother. Warned of the plan, Phasaelis asked to travel to the fortress of Machaerus near the Nabataean frontier, then slipped across the border to her father ^[2]. Josephus presents the insult to his daughter as the beginning of the hostility between Aretas and Antipas, compounded by an ongoing boundary dispute in the region of Gabalis ^[2].

The quarrel with Antipas came to battle in AD 36. The armies of the two rulers met near the contested frontier, and the forces of Aretas destroyed those of the tetrarch, a defeat so complete that Josephus reports some Jews viewed it as divine punishment on Antipas for his execution of John the Baptist ^[2]. For an aging king, it was a resounding vindication of his daughter's honor and his kingdom's strength.

Rome, however, could not let a client king wage private war on another. The emperor Tiberius ordered Lucius Vitellius, governor of Syria, to march against Petra and bring back Aretas alive or dead ^[2]. Vitellius moved south with two legions, but while he paused in Jerusalem the news arrived that Tiberius had died in March of AD 37. The governor halted the campaign to await instructions from the new emperor, Caligula, and the expedition against Nabataea was quietly abandoned ^[2]. Aretas, by luck and timing, escaped the consequences of his victory.

He died in AD 40, after nearly half a century on the throne, and was succeeded peacefully by his son Malichus II ^[1]. The transition itself testifies to the stability he had built: the kingdom passed to the next generation without recorded dispute, at a moment when neighboring dynasties were tearing themselves apart.

Historians of the Nabataeans generally treat the reign of Aretas IV as the kingdom's high-water mark. The population of Petra, the reach of its trade, the quality of its architecture, and the sheer quantity of its coinage all peaked in his era, before shifting trade routes and, in AD 106, Roman annexation under Trajan ended Nabataean independence ^[3]. Visitors to Petra today walk through a city that is, to a large degree, his creation, and the dated tombs of Hegra remain the best-preserved gallery of his kingdom's craftsmanship ^[6].

His afterlife in written history rests on two accidents of contact with better-documented worlds. Josephus preserved the story of Phasaelis, Antipas, and the battle of AD 36 because it intersected with the Herodian dynasty and with John the Baptist ^[2]. Paul's letter preserved his name because a Nabataean official in Damascus once tried to arrest a traveling preacher ^[7]. Together these fragments made Aretas IV facts a point of interest for biblical scholars as well as historians of Arabia, and they anchor the chronology of Paul's early career.

For students seeking an Aretas IV biography, the fascination lies in the contrast between the thinness of the written record and the abundance of the physical one. Few ancient kings left so little narrative and so much stone. The theatre at Petra, the tomb facades of Hegra, and thousands of small bronze coins bearing his profile beside his queens carry the memory of a ruler who kept a desert kingdom rich, independent, and at peace with Rome for almost fifty years ^[3].