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Bible Dictionaries
Arabia
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or Arabia (Ἀραβία, from עֲרָב), which now denotes the great peninsula lying between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, was in ancient times a singularly elusive term. Originally it meant simply ‘desert’ or ‘desolation,’ and when it became an ethnographic proper name it was long in acquiring a fixed and generally understood meaning. ‘Arabia’ shifted like the nomads, drifted like the desert sand. It did not denote a country whose boundaries could be defined by treaty, shown by landmarks, and act down in a map. Too vast and vague for delimitation, it impressed the imagination like the steppe, the prairie, or the veldt, while it had a character and history of its own. To the settled races of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, it meant any part of that hinterland, skirting the confines of civilization, which was the camping-ground of wandering tribes for ever hovering around peaceful towns and spreading terror among their inhabitants. It was the dim border region, not so wholly unproductive as to be incapable of supporting life, interposed between cultivation and the sheer wilderness. So uncertain was the application of the term, that there was no part of the semi-desert fringe extending from the lower Tigris to the lower Nile which was not at one time or another called Arabia. To the prophets of Israel the word had one meaning, on Persian inscriptions another, and to Greek writers (Herod. ii. and iii.; Xenophon, I. v. 1, VII. viii. 25) still another. Every one used it to denote that particular hinterland whose tribes and peoples were more or less known to him; that was his Arabia.
But by the 3rd cent. b.c. the Arab tribe of the Nabataeans had become a powerful nation, with Petra as their capital, and from that time onward Arabia began to be identified, especially in the Western mind, with the Natataean kingdom. While 1 Mac. still distinguishes the Nabataeans from other Arabs (1 Maccabees 5:25; 1 Maccabees 9:35), 2 Mac. speaks of Aretas, the hereditary king of the Nabataeans, as ‘king of the Arabs’ (2 Maccabees 5:8). In the time of Josephus this people ‘inhabited all the country from the Euphrates to the Red Sea’ (Ant. I. xii. 4). Soon after taking possession of Judaea , the Romans sent an expedition, under Marcus Scaurus, against the Nabataeans (59 b.c.); and, though their subjugation was not accomplished at that time, it must have taken place not much later. From the days of Augustus the kings of the Arabians were as much subject to the Empire as Herod, king of the Jews, and they had the whole region between Herod’s dominions and the desert assigned to them. To the north ‘their territory reached as far as Damascus, which was under their protection, and even beyond Damascus, and enclosed as with a girdle the whole of Palestinian Syria’ (Mommsen, Provinces2, Lond. 1909, ii. 148f.). The Arabians who were present at the first Christian Pentecost (Acts 2:11) were most likely Nabataeans, possibly from Petra.
The Nabataean kings made use of Greek official designations, and St. Paul relates how ‘the governor’ (ὁ ἐθνάρχης) of Damascus ‘under Aretas the king’ was foiled in the attempt, probably made at the instigation of the Jews, to put him under arrest soon after his conversion (2 Corinthians 11:32 f.). This episode, which has an important bearing on the chronology of St. Paul’s life, raises a difficult historical problem. Damascene coins of Tiberius indicate that the city was under direct Roman government till a.d. 34; and, as the legate of Syria was engaged in hostilities with Aretas till the close of the reign of Tiberius, it is very unlikely that this emperor yielded up Damascus to the Nabataean king. But the accession of Caligula brought a great change, and the suggestion is naturally made that he bought over Aretas by ceding Damascus to him. The fact that no Damascene coins bearing the Emperor’s image occur in the reigns of Caligula and Claudius is in harmony with this theory (Schürer, History of the Jewish People (Eng. tr. of GJV).] i. ii. 357f.). The view of Mommsen (Provinces2, ii. 149), following Marquardt (Röm. Staatsverwaltung, Leipzig, 1885, i. 405), is different. Talking of the voluntary submission of the city of Damascus to the king of the Nabataeans, he says that
‘probably this dependence of the city on the Nabataean kings subsisted so long as there were such kings [i.e. from the beginning of the Roman period till a.d. 106]. From the fact that the city struck coins with the heads of the Roman emperors, there follows doubtless its dependence on Rome and therewith its self-administration, but not its non-dependence on the Roman vassal-prince; such protectorates assumed shapes so various that these arrangements might well be compatible with each other.’
See, further, Aretas,
In the Galatian Epistle (Galatians 1:17) St. Paul states that after his escape from. Damascus he ‘went away into Arabia,’ evidently for solitary communion with God; but he does not further define the place of his retreat, and Acts makes no allusion to this episode. When he quitted the city under cover of darkness, he had not a long way to flee to a place of safety, for the desert lies in close proximity to the Damascene oasis. Possibly he went no further than the fastnesses of Ḥauran. Lightfoot (Gal. 87f.), Stanley (Sinai and Palestine, Lond. 1877, p. 50), and others conjecture that he sought the solitude of Mt. Sinai, with which he seems to show some acquaintance in the same Epistle (Galatians 4:25). But he could scarcely have avoided specific reference to so memorable a journey, which would have brought him into a kind of spiritual contact with Moses and Elijah. Besides, the peninsula of Sinai was about 400 miles from Damascus; and, as military operations were being actively carried on by the legate of Syria against Aretas in a.d. 37-the probable year of St. Paul’s conversion-it would scarcely have been possible for a stranger to pass through the centre of the perturbed country without an escort of soldiers.
In a.d. 106 the governor of Syria, Aulus Cornelius Palma, broke up the dominion of the Nabataean kings, and constituted the Roman province of Arabia, while Damascus was added to Syria. For the whole region the change was epoch-making,
‘The tendency to acquire these domains for civilisation and specially for Hellenism was only heightened by the fact that the Roman government took upon itself the work. The Hellenism of the East … was a church militant, a thoroughly conquering power pushing its way in a political, religious, economic, and literary point of view’ (Mommsen, op. cit. ii. 152).
Under the strong new régime the desert tribes were for the first and only time brought under control, with the result that no small part of ‘the desert’ was changed into ‘the sown.’ ‘Rome won the nomads to her service and fastened them down in defence of the border they had otherwise fretted and broken.… Behind this Roman bulwark there grew up a curious, a unique civilisation talking Greek, imitating Rome, but at heart Semitic (G. A. Smith, EGHL, London, 1894, p. 627).
Literature.-E. Schürer, History of the Jewish People (Eng. tr. of GJV).] i. ii. 345ff.; J. Euting, Nabatäische Inschriften aus Arabien, Berlin, 1885; H. Vincent, Les Arabes en Syrie, Paris, 1907; G. A. Cooke, North-Semitic Inscriptions, London, 1903; and the article ‘Arabs (Ancient),’ by Th. Nöldeke, in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics . i. 659.
James Strahan.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Arabia'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/a/arabia.html. 1906-1918.
