Lives of Scripture

Aretas IV was king of Nabatea, an Arab kingdom southeast of Judea, from roughly 9 BC to AD 40. Paul names him once, in a passage recalling the sufferings he endured for the gospel: "in Damascus the ethnarch under Aretas the king was guarding the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me, and I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and so escaped his hands" (2 Corinthians 11:32-33). Acts 9:23-25 recounts the same escape but attributes the plot to "the Jews" watching the gates; the two accounts are best read as complementary rather than contradictory -- local opponents of Paul's preaching may have worked through or alongside the ethnarch's authority in the city. Exactly how a Nabatean king's officer came to hold authority in Damascus, a city usually under Roman control, is a genuine historical puzzle scholars still debate, since no clear record survives of Rome ceding the city to Aretas outright. Whatever the precise arrangement, Paul's point in recounting it is not political but personal: even a king's guards could not stop God's purpose for him, and his undignified escape in a basket -- lowered down a wall like cargo rather than fleeing with dignity -- became, in Paul's own telling, a badge of weakness he chose to boast in rather than a humiliation to hide.