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Queen Helena and Monobaz Fed Starving Jerusalem

The king of Adiabene fell asleep with his hand on his wife's pregnant belly, and a voice told him to move it. The son she was carrying was named Izates.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. A Hand on a Pregnant Belly
  2. The Speech Helena Made the Day Her Husband Died
  3. The Surgeon in the Other Room
  4. The Grain Ships
  5. My Fathers Stored Below
Queen Helena and Monobaz Fed Starving Jerusalem Click for full size

A Hand on a Pregnant Belly

Monobazus ruled Adiabene, east of the Tigris, inside the reach of Parthia. He had married his own sister, Helena, and she was carrying a child, and one night he fell asleep in bed with his hand resting on her belly.

A voice told him to take his hand off. Do not hurt the child in there. It will be born safely and it will end well.

He woke up badly and told his wife what he had heard. When the boy was born he named him Izates, and after that he made no attempt to hide that this was the son he cared about. His other sons noticed. Their hatred got bad enough that their father sent Izates out of the country for his own safety, to a king down at the head of the Persian Gulf who married the boy to his daughter and gave him a district to live on.

When the old king felt himself dying he sent for the son he had exiled and handed him a province called Carra, good ground that grew spice in quantity, and famous for something else besides. What was left of Noah's ark was in that country, and they would still take a visitor out and show it to him.

The Speech Helena Made the Day Her Husband Died

Izates was still in Carra when his father died, and the queen did not wait an hour. She called in the grandees, the provincial governors, and every officer who held an army, and she made them a short speech.

You all know my husband wanted Izates to succeed him and thought him worthy of it. Even so, I will wait for your decision. A man is fortunate who receives a kingdom not from one person only, but from the willing votes of many.

It was a test, and she watched them take it. They did homage, confirmed her husband's choice, said they were glad of it, and then said the rest of what they were thinking: before Izates arrives, let us kill his brothers and his cousins, so that nothing is left alive to envy him.

She thanked them for their loyalty and said the killing could wait until her son was standing here to approve it. They pressed. She held. In the end they settled for putting the brothers in chains and asked her to name a regent, and she put the diadem on her eldest son, Monobaz, and gave him his father's signet ring to hold until Izates came.

The Surgeon in the Other Room

A Jewish merchant named Ananias had reached Izates during those years abroad, having first reached the women of the household and taught them, and through them the young king. Helena had come to the same place separately, taught by a different Jew, without either of them knowing about the other.

Izates came home, found his brothers in irons, refused to kill them and refused to release them, and shipped them out as hostages instead, some to Claudius in Rome and some to the king of Parthia. Then he turned to the thing he actually wanted, which was to be a Jew completely, and that meant circumcision.

His mother told him not to. He was a king. His subjects would learn that he had taken up foreign rites and they would never accept being ruled by a Jew, and it would cost him the kingdom and possibly his life. Ananias, when Izates repeated all this to him, agreed with her, and added that he would leave the country rather than be blamed for it. A man could serve God without the operation, he said, and God would forgive an omission made out of fear of one's own subjects.

Izates let it go. He kept reading.

Some time later another Jew came to Adiabene from Galilee, a man named Eleazar with a reputation for knowing the law, and he walked in to pay his respects and found the king sitting with the book of Moses open in front of him.

"You do not understand what you are doing. You are breaking the chief of these laws and wronging God himself. You are not supposed to read them, you are supposed to do them. How long are you going to stay uncircumcised? If you have not yet read the law about it, read it now."

Izates did not argue and did not delay. He got up, went into another room, and sent for a surgeon.

Then he called in his mother and his old teacher and told them it was done. They were struck with astonishment and then with fear, for him and for themselves, and they waited for the kingdom to come apart.

It did not. The plots came and failed. The king of Parthia himself was thrown out by his own governors and arrived at the border of Adiabene as a beggar with a thousand relatives and servants behind him, and Izates got down off his horse in the road, set the fallen king on it, and walked in front of him on foot.

The Grain Ships

Helena watched all of it, and when she was satisfied that her son was safe and that men who were not Jews admired him for what she had been afraid of, she asked his permission to go to Jerusalem and worship at the Temple. He gave it, sent her out with a great deal of money, and rode part of the way with her.

She arrived into a famine. People in the city were starving, dying for want of anything to buy.

She put her servants on ships. Some went to Alexandria with money to buy as much grain as the money would buy. Others went to Cyprus for cargoes of dried figs. They were back faster than anyone had expected, and she fed whoever came for it. When word reached Izates, he sent enormous sums to the leading men of Jerusalem to keep the distribution going.

My Fathers Stored Below

Her eldest son did something harder to defend. During years of drought and hunger, Monobaz went into the vaults and gave away the treasure his father had put there, and his grandfather, and his grandfather's fathers, until the vaults were empty.

His relatives came at him in a body. Your fathers stored treasure up and added to what their fathers had stored, and you have thrown all of it away.

He did not raise his voice at them.

My fathers stored below, he said. I have stored above. My fathers stored where a hand can reach it. I have stored where no hand can reach. My fathers stored what bears no fruit. I have stored what bears fruit. My fathers stored money. I have stored lives.

Helena died not long after Izates did, and the bones of both of them were carried back to Jerusalem and put in the tombs she had built north of the city, three pyramids over a rock-cut chamber, which travelers were still stopping to look at fifty years later.

TzedakahKingsHelenaMonobazJosephus
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From the tradition

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The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Antiquities XX.1-5Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

A queen from Mesopotamia converted to Judaism, moved to Jerusalem, and saved the city from famine. Her name was Helena of Adiabene, and she was one of the most remarkable converts in Jewish history.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XX, the story begins with her son Izates, crown prince of Adiabene, a kingdom in what is now northern Iraq. A Jewish merchant named Ananias had been teaching Judaism to the women of the royal court, and through them reached Izates. Separately, Helena herself had been drawn to Jewish teachings by another teacher. Mother and son discovered each other's interest independently.

When Izates became king, he wanted to undergo circumcision to complete his conversion. Ananias warned him against it, arguing that the political risk was too great and that worshipping God mattered more than the physical act. But another teacher, Eleazar of Galilee, took a stricter view. He arrived at court, found Izates reading the Torah, and told him bluntly: you know the law, now do it. Izates was circumcised immediately.

Helena traveled to Jerusalem on pilgrimage around 46 CE and arrived during a devastating famine. She spent her own fortune buying grain from Egypt and dried figs from Cyprus, distributing food throughout the city. Izates sent enormous sums of money from Adiabene to support the relief effort. The Talmud later remembered Helena's generosity for centuries.

Izates faced rebellion at home for his conversion. His own kinsmen conspired against him, even inviting the Parthian king Artabanus to invade. But each plot collapsed. Artabanus was overthrown and ironically came to Izates as a refugee. Izates restored him to his throne, demonstrating the power of a king who trusted in God's protection. When Izates finally died after twenty-four years on the throne, Helena followed him in death shortly after. Their bones were brought to Jerusalem and buried in the pyramidal tombs Helena had built, monuments that were still visible in Josephus's day.

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Gaster, Exempla No. 101 (Bava Batra 11a)The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster (1924) · PD-US-pre-1929

Monobaz was a prince of the royal house of Adiabene, a small kingdom east of the Tigris whose royal family famously converted to Judaism in the first century CE. His mother Queen Helena is remembered in the Mishnah for her gifts to the Temple. Monobaz is remembered for something quieter.

A terrible famine struck the region during his reign. The royal treasury, heavy with gold accumulated by his father and grandfather over generations, sat locked in the vaults. Monobaz opened the vaults. And he emptied them into the hands of the starving poor.

The Family Council Outrages

His relatives came to him, furious. "Your fathers stored up treasures! They added to the treasures of their own fathers! You are scattering what took generations to gather. What will be left for your children?"

Monobaz did not argue. He answered them calmly with a sentence that became one of the most-cited lines of rabbinic generosity theology, preserved in Bava Batra 11a and collected by Gaster in 1924:

"My fathers laid up treasure on the earth. I have laid up treasure in heaven. My fathers laid up treasure where human hands could reach it. I have laid up treasure where no hand can touch it. My fathers laid up treasure that bears no fruit. I have laid up treasure that bears fruit forever. My fathers stored up for others. I have stored up for myself. My fathers stored up money. I have stored up souls."

The Inversion

The Sages preserved Monobaz's reply because it inverts the usual language of inheritance. A king typically hoards so his children can inherit. Monobaz gave away so his children could inherit something better: the merit of a father who had fed the hungry in a year of famine.

The only treasure that reaches the next world is the treasure you spent feeding the people of this one.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 101Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster (1924) · Public Domain

King Monobaz of Adiabene, a convert to Judaism, opened his family's treasuries during a year of famine and distributed everything to the poor. His brothers and his father's family confronted him angrily: "Your ancestors stored up treasures, adding to what their ancestors had gathered. And you have squandered it all!"

Monobaz replied with words that the Talmud (Bava Batra 11a) preserves as one of the most eloquent defenses of charity ever spoken: "My ancestors stored up treasures below. I have stored up treasures above. My ancestors stored treasures in a place where human hands can reach them. I have stored them where no hand can reach. My ancestors stored things that produce no fruit. I have stored things that bear fruit forever."

He continued: "My ancestors gathered money. I have gathered souls. My ancestors stored for others, for thieves, for conquerors, for whoever came after them. I have stored for myself, for the World to Come. My ancestors stored in this world. I have stored in the next."

His family had no answer. Monobaz had not wasted the family fortune, he had converted it into a currency that no thief could steal, no army could plunder, no economic collapse could devalue. The poor he fed during the famine were his treasury, and they were stored in heaven.

The sages cited Monobaz for generations as proof that true wealth is not what you accumulate but what you give away. The only possessions you truly own are the ones you no longer have.

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