ARABIA. — Arabia (Apa^La, from a"y!,), 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 ac- quiring 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 set down in a map. Too vast and
vague for delimitation, it impressed the imagina- tion like the steppe, the prairie, or the veldt, while it had a character and history of its o^vn. 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 support- ing life, interposed between cultivation and the sheer wilderness. So uncertain was the applica- tion 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. andiii. ; 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 Nabatseans 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 Nabat?ean kingdom. While 1 Mac. still distinguishes the Nabatseans from other Arabs (5^ 9^^), 2 Mac. speaks of Aretas, the hereditary king of the Nabatseans, as ' king of the Arabs' (5®). In the time of Josephus tliis people 'inhabited all the country from the Eu- phrates to the Red Sea' (Ant. I. xii. 4). Soon after taking possession of Judaea, the Romans sent an expedition, under Marcus Scaurus, against the Nabatseans (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, Provinces'^, Lond. 1909, ii. 148 f . ). The Arabians who were present at the first Christian Pentecost (Ac 2'^) were most likely Nabatseans, possibly from Petra.
The Nabatsean kings made use of Greek official designations, and St. Paul relates how 'the gov- ernor' (6 idvdpxr}s) 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 Co IP-'-). This episode, which has an important bearing on the chronology of St. Paul's life, raises a difficult his- torical 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 tiie close of the reign of Tiberius, it is very unlikely tiiat this emperor yielded up Damascus to the Nabatsean 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 Cal- igula and Claudius is in harmony with this theory (Schurer, HJP I. ii. 357 f. ). The view of Momm.sen (Provinces'^, ii. 149), following Marquardt (Rom. Staatsverwaltung , Leipzig, 1885, i. 405), is differ- ent. Talking of the voluntary submission of the city of Damascus to the king of the Nabatseans, he says that
' probably this dependence of the city on the Nabataan kingi subsisted so long as there were such kings [i.e. from the begin- ning of the Roman period till a.d. 106]. From the fact that tbe
ARAMAin
AREOPAGITE, AEEOPAGUS
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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 (1") 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 dehne 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 5aui-an. Lightfoot {Gal. 87 f.), 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 (Gal 4^). But he could scarcely have avoided specific refer- ence 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.