The Conversion of Adiabene: The Politics of Jewishness on the Near Eastern Frontier

Abstract This article explores what motivated the Adiabenian dynasty to foster connections with Jews and Judaism in the first-century Near East beyond the exclusively pious explanation offered by our surviving literary sources and in previous scholarship. It does so by building on three scholarly trends, concerning the social and political role of Jewish conversion in the late Second Temple period, the nature of late ancient royal self-fashioning, and developments in approaches to the relationship between frontier kingdoms and the two imperial powers of Rome and Parthia. The case of Adiabene demonstrates how Jewishness could function as a versatile political tool on the first-century frontier, a reflection of both the place and perception of Jewishness in this context and of the adaptive strategies frontier kings undertook to navigate precarious political conditions and the competing audiences that made their socio-political environment so fraught.