הרב מונבז

Munbaz II, called Munbaz the King and known in English sources as Monobaz, was the son of Queen Helene and of Munbaz I, king of Adiabene, and a ger who came under the wings of the Shechinah after his mother and his younger brother, Izates II. When Munbaz I was niftar, Helene gathered the governors of Adiabene and the commanders of its armies and asked them to confirm her husband’s wish that Izates inherit the throne; they agreed, but asked that in the meantime she install a regent she trusted. She chose her eldest son, Munbaz II, and crowned him to hold the kingdom until Izates returned — and when Izates came back to Adiabene, Munbaz handed him the crown.

Yosef ben Matityahu writes that seeing the reverence in which Izates was held for his piety, his brother Munbaz and the king’s other relatives resolved to leave the ways of their fathers and to keep the ways of the Jews. Bereshit Rabbah tells of the bris of the two brothers: they were sitting and reading in Sefer Bereshit, and when they reached the pasuk “and you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin,” each in turn faced the wall and wept; afterward each of them went, on his own and without the other’s knowledge, and had himself circumcised. When the subjects of Adiabene learned that the king and his relatives had become Jews, the nobles of the realm were enraged, and persuaded first an Arab king and then Vologases, king of the Parthians, to make war against Izates; both failed.

Not long after, Izates was niftar at the age of fifty-five, twenty-four of them as king, having directed that his elder brother Munbaz inherit the throne. Helene hurried back to her eldest son, now king, and did not long outlive Izates; Munbaz sent the bones of his mother and his brother to Yerushalayim and had them buried in the three pyramids Helene had built outside the city. The Mishnah relates that Munbaz made handles of gold for all the vessels used in the Beit HaMikdash on Yom Kippur, and the Tosefta and both Talmuds tell of his greatness in tzedakah: he spent on it the vast fortune he had inherited from his fathers, saying, “My fathers stored below and I stored above; my fathers stored for others and I stored for myself; my fathers guarded in a place where a hand can reach and I guarded in a place where no hand can reach.” The date of his passing is not known, but he was still reigning during the Great Revolt against Rome, and sent aid to the Jewish fighters. The tanna Munbaz, one of the talmidim of Rabbi Akiva, may have been among his descendants.