Jabalah was the son of al-Harith (Arethas in Greek sources) and grandson of the
sheikh Tha'laba. He first appears in the historical sources in 498 during the reign of
Byzantine emperor Anastasius I (), when, according to
Theophanes the Confessor, the
Diocese of Oriens suffered from large-scale
Arab raids. The head of one of the Arab groups invading Byzantine territory was Jabalah, who raided
Palaestina III before being defeated and driven back by the local Byzantine
dux,
Romanus. Romanus then proceeded to evict the Ghassanids from the island of Iotabe (modern
Tiran), which controlled trade with the
Red Sea and which had been occupied by the Arabs since 473. After a series of hard-fought engagements, the island returned to Byzantine control. In 502, Emperor Anastasius concluded a treaty of alliance with the
Kindaites and Ghassanids, turning them into imperial allies (
foederati). With the outbreak of the
Anastasian War against
Sassanid Persia, the Ghassanids fought on the Byzantine side, although only one operation, an attack against the
Lakhmid capital of
al-Hirah in July 513, is explicitly attributed to them. The Ghassanids settled deep inside the Byzantine
limes, and in a
Syriac source for July 519 they are attested as having their "opulent" headquarters at
al-Jabiya (Gabitha) in the Gaulanitis (
Golan Heights), where Jabalah had succeeded his father as king over his tribe. With the rise of the pro-
Chalcedonian Justin I () to the imperial throne in 518 and the subsequent re-imposition of Chalcedonian orthodoxy throughout the Empire, however, the staunchly
Monophysite Ghassanids withdrew from the alliance in and retreated into the northern
Hejaz. Not until the last year of Justin's reign was the alliance between Byzantium and the Ghassanids restored. Although the Ghassanids are not explicitly mentioned by the sources, the scholar
Irfan Shahîd identifies Jabalah with the Arab
phylarch known with the nickname
al-Aṣfar (), rendered in Greek as
Tapharas (). This was the Arabic version of the honorary Roman
gentilicium "
Flavius", which may have been awarded to Jabalah by the Emperor upon his return to Byzantine allegiance; this identification, however, is not certain. In 528, the Ghassanids took part in the conflict with Persia and her Lakhmid Arab allies, first in a punitive expedition against the Lakhmid ruler
al-Mundhir, and then in the
Battle of Thannuris under
Belisarius's command, where Jabalah/Tapharas was killed when he fell from his
horse. ==Family==