Izates II of Adiabene

Origins and early life

Izates II was born around the turn of the era, the son of Monobazus I, king of Adiabene — a vassal kingdom of the Parthians around Arbela, in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan — and of Queen Helena, who has her own fiche in this directory; his story is told by Josephus, and it is the most detailed account of a conversion to Judaism that antiquity has left us.

Work and career

Sent as a youth to the court of Charax Spasinu, at the head of the Persian Gulf, he was drawn to Judaism by a Jewish merchant named Ananias, who taught the women of the palace; when he returned to take the throne, around the year 36, he found that his mother had been converted too, and he resolved to be circumcised. Ananias and Helena begged him not to, arguing that a king could worship the God of the Jews without the rite and that his subjects would not endure a circumcised king; but a second Jew, Eleazar of Galilee, found him reading the Torah and asked how he could read the law and not obey it, and Izates sent for the surgeon the same day — the passage that ancient and modern writers have quoted in every argument over what makes a convert.

The prophecy of ruin proved false: he reigned some twenty years, restored the Parthian king Artabanus to his throne, defeated his own rebellious nobles, and sent five of his sons to be educated in Jerusalem; in the famine of the 40s, under Claudius, he and Helena bought grain in Egypt and figs in Cyprus and fed the city.

Later years

He died around 55, and his bones and his mother's were sent to Jerusalem, to the mausoleum she had built there, the Tombs of the Kings; his brother Monobazus II succeeded him, and the princes of Adiabene fought for Jerusalem against Rome in the war of 66.