‘In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king guarded the city of the Damascenes in order to take me, and through a window was I let down in a basket by the wall, and escaped his hands.'
He finishes this aspect of his glorying with a personal example, which went back to his earliest days as a Christian. One which he never forgot. The letting down in a basket contrasts with being caught up to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2) and with his spiritual destruction of fortresses (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). He knew what it was to have both the downs and the ups. Because of one governor (ethnarch), acting on a king's behalf, he was lowered over a wall in a basket (the basket in question would have been a bag of braided rope, suitable for carrying hay, straw or bales of wool) through an aperture in the wall, a humiliating experience and in itself a reminder of his weakness. This underlined all he had said about afflictions and danger, and was in total contrast to 2 Corinthians 10:4 where the thought included that of scaling the walls, thus showing that he is outwardly weak, even if inwardly powerful. And it also contrasts with his being lifted up to the third heaven by another King. In the flesh he suffers humiliation and tribulation, in the Spirit he soars above all.
The governor or ethnarch ruled the city on behalf of Aretas, who was a Nabataean king. Or alternately he may have been ethnarch of the Nabataeans living in the city. Either way he was determined to prevent Paul leaving the city by watching the gates, resulting in his ignominious exit. No climbing of fortresses here. Only humiliation. But once again God's power was revealed through weakness.
Note on Aretas.
The political status of Damascus at the time of Paul's stay there is not certain. It is unclear whether it was under Roman rule, Nabataean rule under the Romans, or some kind of joint Roman-Nabataean rule. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the Greek term "ethnarch" (ethnarches) could refer to the governor of the city or to the ruler of a major ethnic group within the city. Josephus, for example, employed the term for rulers of peoples under foreign control (Jewish Antiquities 17:11:4; Jewish Wars 2:6.3), and Strabo tells of how an ethnarch was granted to the Jews in Alexandria because of their large numbers (17:798). A reasonable conjecture is that "ethnarch" refers to the leader of a semi-autonomous colony of Nabataeans in the city during the rule of Gaius (AD 37-41). But this was a time when the policy of client kingdoms on the eastern frontier was in force.
The king in question was Aretas IV Philopatris who was the last and most famous of the Nabataean kings under that name. He reigned in Petra from 9 BC to AD 40. Herod Antipas, who ruled the regions of Galilee and Perea, divorced Aretas' daughter to marry Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Philip. Aretas naturally took this personally and bided his time until several years later, when he invaded Perea and was able to defeat Herod's forces in AD 36. Rome was unhappy about this but their retaliation was forestalled by the death of the emperor Tiberius. Caligula favoured Aretas, It is thought that Aretas' rule may well for a time have included Damascus, (although he need not have been there at the time mentioned). It would explain the ability of his ethnarch to guard the city (gates) continually (imperfect tense). The absence of Roman coinage there between AD 34 and 62 may hint at this but is not decisive.
Luke's account of the same episode attributes Paul's flight to "the Jews," who were conspiring to kill him, and were keeping a close watch on the city gates (Acts 9:23-25). Whether this was in cooperation with the authorities, or for the purpose of private vengeance we do not have sufficient information to know. Having obtained the cooperation of the authorities in order to arrest Paul they may well have wanted to ensure that he did not escape by themselves also watching the gates with a view to killing him.
End of Note.