Arethas and the Martyrs of Najran

Christianity in Himyar and the city of Najran

By the opening of the sixth century the kingdom of Himyar — the southern highlands of Arabia, roughly the Yemen of today, with its capital at Zafar — stood at the meeting-point of the great powers and religions of late antiquity. Rome and Sassanid Persia contended for its trade; Judaism had struck deep root among its ruling class, and Christianity, carried by Syrian and Ethiopian missionaries and by the merchants of the Red Sea routes, had taken hold above all at Najran, an oasis city on the caravan road of the north (near the modern Saudi–Yemeni border). Najran had its church, its clergy, and its bishop, and its Christians were bound by faith and kinship to the Miaphysite churches of Syria and to the Christian kingdom of Aksum (Ethiopia) across the water. It was a confident and organised community, and it is this that made it the chosen target when the throne of Himyar passed to a zealous adversary of the Cross.

Dhu Nuwas and the war on the Christians

The Himyarite king of the sources — Yusuf As'ar Yath'ar in his own inscriptions, Masruq to the Syrians, Dhu Nuwas ("the man of the hanging sidelocks") in Arabic memory, and Dunaan in the Greek Passion and the Byzantine calendars — was a convert to Judaism who seized power amid the rivalry of Aksum and Persia for the region. Resenting the Christians as agents of the Ethiopians and of Rome, he opened his reign, according to the sources, by falling upon the Aksumite garrison and the Christians of Zafar, burning their church, and then turning against the strongest Christian centre of his kingdom, Najran. He laid siege to the city.

The fall of the city and the breaking of the oath

Unable to take Najran by storm, Dhu Nuwas offered terms, swearing — by the tradition, on the Torah and by oaths binding on a Jew — that if the city opened its gates no harm would come to its people. Trusting the royal word, the citizens admitted him; and the king at once broke his oath. He seized the notables, exhumed and burned the bones of the bishop Paul who had died before the siege, and set before the Christians the choice of apostasy or death. The community held firm. The men were assembled; a great trench or pit was dug and filled with fire, and those who would not deny Christ were cast into it or put to the sword — an atrocity that stamped itself so deep on Arabian memory that the Qur'an itself is widely read as alluding to it in the Sura of the Constellations (al-Buruj 85:4–8), "Slain were the Men of the Trench (Ashab al-Ukhdud)."

The martyrdom of Arethas

At the head of the martyrs stood Arethas — al-Harith ibn Ka'b, sayyid and chief of Najran, an old man of the tradition's reckoning some ninety-five years. Brought before the king with the leading citizens, he answered the demand to apostatise with an open confession of Christ and an exhortation to his people to stand fast, counting it the crown of a long life to die for the faith he had served. He was beheaded with the elders of the city; the number of those who perished with him in the whole persecution is given in the Greek and Slavonic tradition as 4,299, a figure the sources of the event render variously as some two thousand men with women and children besides.

Syncletica and the women of Najran

The Passion dwells especially on the courage of the women. A noblewoman of high family — Syncletica (Σιγκλητική) in the Greek Passion, Ruhm (Ruma) in the Syriac letters — widowed young and living in chastity and almsgiving, was dragged before the king, who hoped that so prominent a lady's fall would break the resolve of the rest. She reviled his apostasy to his face before the women of the city, refused every inducement, and, when her daughters were killed before her eyes — the sources relate the horror that their blood was poured into her mouth — went to her own death unbroken, giving thanks. Her defiance became, in the retelling, the emblem of the whole company: the martyrs of Najran are remembered not as a passive multitude but as a city that chose, household by household, to die confessing.

Vindication

News of the massacre travelled fast along the same trade routes that had carried the faith. A survivor's report and the letters of Syrian churchmen reached Constantinople; the emperor Justin I and the patriarch, and the Alexandrian church, pressed the Christian king of Aksum, Elesbaan (Kaleb Ella Asbeha), to act. Within a year or two — about 525 — Elesbaan crossed the Red Sea with an army, defeated and killed Dhu Nuwas, and re-established Christianity in Himyar, rebuilding the church of Najran over the relics of the martyrs. The Church keeps king and martyrs together on the same day.