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Queen Helena and Monobaz Fed Starving Jerusalem

A royal family east of the Tigris chose Judaism and proved it when famine reached Jerusalem and they opened their treasuries without hesitation.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. A Kingdom East of the Tigris
  2. She Came to Jerusalem
  3. Monobaz Sent the Inheritance Upward
  4. The Tombs of the Queens

A Kingdom East of the Tigris

Adiabene sat in northern Mesopotamia, east of the Tigris, inside the orbit of Parthian power. Its royal house commanded territory, soldiers, and wealth that most Jewish communities could only imagine. When Judaism reached the palace of Helena and her son Izates, it arrived quietly, through teachers, through women in the court, through the pull of a teaching that neither Helena nor Izates had gone looking for.

Josephus, writing in Greek around 93 CE, preserves the political difficulty of their conversion with the precision of a man who understood how royal decisions worked. Izates wanted to fully commit. He worried about what circumcision would mean for a king whose subjects were not Jewish. Advisors on both sides pressed different answers. His mother Helena, who had already committed separately and quietly, urged patience. Another teacher, more zealous, told him full commitment was the only honest path.

Izates converted fully. So did Helena. The inner choice became public identity. Adiabene joined something it had not been born into.

She Came to Jerusalem

Helena did not remain at a distance. She came to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple, arriving with the resources and visibility of a queen, taking her place among the people she had joined. This was not a private conversion that stayed safely theoretical behind palace walls. She brought herself to the city. She made an appearance at the altar.

Then the famine came.

Josephus records that a severe famine hit Judea during Helena's time in Jerusalem. People were starving. The city was suffering the way ancient cities suffer famines, not abstractly but with the specific hunger that empties granaries and watches children weaken. Helena sent her agents to Alexandria for grain and to Cyprus for dried figs. She bought the food at royal expense and distributed it to the starving population.

The conversion that had been interior became visible again, and visibly expensive. She did not give from surplus. She deployed royal resources into a Jewish crisis. That is different from admiring Judaism from a comfortable distance. That is putting Adiabene's treasury into Jerusalem's famine.

Monobaz Sent the Inheritance Upward

Izates's brother Monobaz made a different kind of statement with wealth. During years of drought and hardship, he distributed his entire inheritance, and the inheritances of his ancestors, to the poor. His family confronted him. He was depleting the family treasury. He was giving away what generations had accumulated.

Monobaz answered in one of the great formulations of the Talmud. My ancestors stored up below. I am storing up above. They stored in a place where a hand can reach it. I am storing in a place where no hand can reach it. They stored something that bears no fruit. I am storing something that bears fruit. They stored treasure. I am storing lives.

The argument turns the logic of wealth on its head. Property is only real wealth if it cannot be taken from you. But physical property can always be taken, by armies, by drought, by the ordinary attrition of time. What you give to the hungry cannot be taken back. It becomes a permanent asset in a ledger that operates on different terms than any earthly treasury.

The Tombs of the Queens

Josephus also records that Helena commissioned tombs north of Jerusalem that were still visible and impressive in his own time. The family that had joined Israel from outside the land built monuments that remained in the land as permanent markers of their belonging.

This is how Josephus understood conversion at its best: not as a private spiritual transformation but as a reorientation of resources, presence, and final resting place. Helena and Monobaz did not merely adopt Jewish belief. They invested in Jewish survival and built Jewish monuments. They gave what they had in the direction of what they loved.

TzedakahKingsHelenaMonobazJosephus
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

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

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.

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

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)

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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