there. Eldad therefore inadvertently revealed his secret, but it went unnoticed.
However, his slip of the tongue suggests that he must have come from across
the Red Sea in Arabia.
From a cultural standpoint, the Himyarite connection opens up an array of
possibilities for understanding many aspects of his story. The long history of
violence and confrontation with powerful Asian and African neighbors pro-
duced in Himyar a treasure trove of tales of warfare and glory that survived in
Syriac, Byzantine, and later Islamic sources. Of particular interest are stories of
Dhu ̄Nuwas’s war against the Christians of southern Arabia and against the
Ethiopians. Even though he is defeated at the end, the Jewish king Dhu ̄Nuwas
is depicted as a ruthless killer and great military leader capable of mobilizing
tens of thousands of men. Even in defeat, he dies with style—marching into
the sea and drowning.^27
The background of these wars as recorded by Christian authors was the
Jewish king’s policy of persecution of southern Arabian Christians, which
prompted the Christian kings of Ethiopia to interfere on their behalf.^28 Early
Islamic culture was a major consumer of such Himyarite tales, and Jews and
some Himyarite characters made a nice career for themselves among early
Islamic circles as transmitters of them. Most well known is Ka‘b Ibn Maˆti al-
Himyarıˆ, better known as Ka‘b al-Ahbar (d. 652 ?), a Jew and early convert to
Islam who became an authority on Islamic traditions concerning the Jews,
which are known in Islam as theIsra’iliyyat.^29 Ka‘b’s title—al-Ahbar—is the
Arabic translation of the Hebrew scholarly titlehaver(lit. “associate of the
school”), and the wealth of knowledge about Jewish traditions that he displays
indicates that the Jews of southern Arabia had a scholarly system connected to
other centers of learning in the Jewish world.^30 This might account for Eldad’s
own wealth of knowledge of Jewish traditions a century and a half later.
A second important Himyarite figure is Wahb ibn Munabbih (c. 654 – 732 ),
a man of mixed Persian and Himyarite descent who was also a source on
Jewish traditions but, more important, on Himyari history. Wahb’s main
contribution to early Islamic literature isThe Book of Crowns, on the Kings of
Himyar[Kita ̄b al-Tija ̄n], which reached its final form when compiled by Ibn
Hisham (d. 833 ), himself of Himyarite origin and editor of an authoritative
biography of the Prophet.^31 Full of lore, myth, and tales about great Himyari
and Arab kings and heroes, it contains the genealogy of the “Children of Ham”
and their offspring the Habbasha (Ethiopians) and recounts the wars between
them and the Arabs.^32 For his part, Eldad dedicates several passages to the wars
that the ten tribes conducted with the “Cushites” (Ethiopians). But in his
account, it is not the Jewish Himyarite kings who fight the Ethiopians, but
the ten tribes: “After the death of Sennacherib, three tribes of Israel, being
lu
(lu)
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