Ḥimyar turns to monotheism: the kings of South Arabia and the Jews

In 379 the last dated pagan inscription was cut in the great temple at Marib, and with that the old South Arabian gods vanish from the stone—at once and completely. In January 384, under King Malkīkarib Yuhaʾmin, the first monotheistic royal inscriptions appear: instead of ʿAthtar and Almaqah, "the Lord of the Sky." Around 420 the name Raḥmānān, "the Merciful," comes into use, in Aramaic.

Then come dated synagogue buildings: August 433, a mikrāb named Barīk under King Abīkarib Asʿad; January 465, the synagogue Yaʿūq. Three times, and only in inscriptions of the last reign, stands the formula "Lord of the Jews"; CIH 543 reads "the name of Raḥmānān who is in the Sky, Israel and their god, the Lord of the Jews." The word "Israel" as the name of a people occurs nowhere else in South Arabian epigraphy.

The most unexpected document was found at Bayt Ḥāḍir near Sana'a: inscription DJE 23, the list of the twenty-four priestly courses of 1 Chronicles with their Galilean seats—in Hebrew; eleven of the twenty-four survive. Beside it, in Sabaic: "Amen, Amen—this house is a place of prayer."

What exactly this was is an open question, and it is better said honestly. The royal inscriptions are deliberately reticent: they name Raḥmānān and never name the Torah, Moses or the Sabbath, and not one speaks of the resurrection of the dead—which sets Ḥimyarite monotheism apart from the rabbinic Judaism of the same years. And at the same time the list of priestly courses in Hebrew points to a direct link with the Land of Israel. The cautious formulation: a Judaizing royal monotheism with an identifiable Jewish community and Jewish elite, whose relation to halakhah is unresolved.

It ended around 525–530 with the Aksumite invasion: the Ethiopian king Kaleb took Ḥimyar, and the Raḥmānān formula was replaced by Christian Trinitarian formulae. Around 570 came the Sasanians, in 628–629 the Muslims.