- verses
- 1
- first named
- 2 Corinthians 11:32
- last named
- 2 Corinthians 11:32
- period
- the New Testament
- tribe
- Syria
Description
Who was Aretas?
Aretas is mentioned in the New Testament, in 2Co.11.32, where Paul recounts his escape from Damascus. According to Paul, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to arrest him. This event likely occurred shortly after Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, as he had begun preaching the gospel and faced opposition from both Jewish and Gentile authorities.
Aretas IV Philopatris was the king of the Nabataeans, an Arab kingdom centered in Petra (in modern-day Jordan), from roughly 9 BC to AD 40. The Nabataeans controlled the trade routes in the region, and their influence extended to Damascus during this period. The exact date of Paul's escape from Damascus is uncertain, but it is generally believed to have taken place in the mid-30s AD, during the reign of Aretas IV.
The mention of Aretas in 2 Corinthians provides historical context for Paul's early ministry and the challenges he faced as he spread the gospel message. It also demonstrates the political complexity of the region, with various authorities, both Jewish and Gentile, opposing the growing Christian movement.
Relations
Direct connections
The kinship import reads the registry's own columns — parent, child, sibling, spouse — for every entity in it, and records none here. An extracted relation would be listed beside them, and none names this person either.
Not stated
No family is recorded for this person.
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Aretas is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
1 verse across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in 2 Corinthians (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — one, across 1 book.
2 Corinthians1 verse
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources