Ḥimyar חִמְיָר

South Arabia, today's Yemen. In 379 CE the last dated pagan inscription was cut in the great temple at Marib—and the break is total: the old gods ʿAthtar, Almaqah and Dhāt-Ḥimyam vanish from the stone at once and for good. In January 384, under King Malkīkarib Yuhaʾmin, the first monotheistic royal inscriptions appear: instead of the gods, "the Lord of the Sky," Rabb-samīn. Around 420 the name Raḥmānān (רחמנא, "the Merciful") comes into use—an Aramaic word in a Sabaic inscription.

Then come dated synagogue buildings: August 433—a mikrāb named Barīk under King Abīkarib Asʿad; January 465—the synagogue Yaʿūq, where a prince asks Raḥmānān for a just life and a worthy death. Three times, and only in inscriptions of the last reign, the explicit formula "Lord of the Jews" (rabb-yahūd) occurs; 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 whole people occurs nowhere else in South Arabian epigraphy.

The most unexpected document is DJE 23 from Bayt Ḥāḍir, fifteen kilometres from Sana'a: 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."

Three corrections, without which the picture is skewed. Ḥimyarite monotheism begins in 384, not in the second century: the "second-century inscriptions recording synagogues authorised by Ḥimyarite kings" printed on the English Wikipedia are chronologically impossible—the earliest synagogue inscriptions are dated 433 and 465. The royal inscriptions are, moreover, 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 the opposite fact from the same stone: the list of priestly courses in Hebrew points precisely to a link with the Land of Israel. Both facts belong side by side.

It ended around 525–530 with the Aksumite invasion: the Ethiopian king Kaleb (Ella Aṣbeḥa) took Ḥimyar, and the Raḥmānān formula in the inscriptions was replaced by Christian Trinitarian formulae. Around 570 came the Sasanians, in 628–629 the Muslims, and the Jews of Yemen became dhimmīs.