Holy Martyr Arethas and the Four Thousand Two Hundred and Ninety-nine Martyrs with Him (+523)

Saint Arethas and four thousand two hundred and ninety-nine other Christians with him (according to another account, four thousand two hundred and fifty-two) suffered in the sixth century for their faithfulness to Orthodoxy. Arethas was the ruler of the Arabian city of Najran, whose inhabitants were Christians.

The king of the Homerites (a people living in southern Arabia, by the Arabian Gulf), the Jew Dunaan, resolved to root out Christianity in the land and issued an order to wipe out all the followers of Christ; the city of Najran did not fall away from the faith of the Saviour. Then the godless ruler set out with a great army to lay it waste. At the walls of Najran the king’s heralds announced that only those who denied Christ would be left alive. Dunaan could not take the Christian city by force, and resorted to cunning: he swore an oath that he would not touch the Christians and would only lay a tribute on Najran. The people of the city ignored Arethas’s advice, believed Dunaan and let the enemy into the city.

The lawless king ordered a great pyre to be lit and all the clergy to be thrown into it, to frighten the other Christians. So four hundred and twenty-seven clergy were burned. The ruler Arethas and the other elders were locked up in prison. “We will not deny Christ, for He is our life, and to die for Him is gain,” the Christians cried with one voice. For confessing Christ the godless tortured to death more than four thousand inhabitants of the city of Najran and the villages near it. Saint Arethas, according to one account, was run through with the sword.