Queen of Sheba
10th century BCE
Saba (Sheba); Arabia; Ethiopia
Excerpts from Woman Ruler: Woman Rule
©2001 Elin Sand
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Let my voice be heard by all of you, my people. I am going in quest of Wisdom and Learning. My spirit impels me to go and find them out where they are to be had, for I am smitten with the love of Wisdom and I feel myself drawn as though by a leash toward Learning. For there is nothing on earth more precious than Wisdom… Now I have heard of the wisdom of Solomon and I love him merely on hearing this about him, and to discourse with him is the desire of my heart, like water to the thirsty. I shall go North into the Kingdom of Israel to meet Solomon and to test him with hard questions.
So I said to the king, "The report was true that I heard in my own land of your accomplishments and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came and my own eyes had seen it. Not even half had been told me; your wisdom and prosperity far surpass the report that I had heard. Happy are your people, the people of Israel! Then I gave the king nine thousand pounds of gold, a great quantity of spices, and precious stones; never again did spices come in such quantity as that which I gave to Solomon.
Who were these two mighty potentates of the Bible--Solomon, King of Israel and Judah, and the Queen of Sheba--shining golden in the rich reflected light of all their massive wealth?
Soon after [his father King] David's death Solomon had his older brother and likely rival killed. His joint-rule with David had lasted from 968-965 BCE; from 965 until 928 he ruled alone…Solomon, unlike David, was an administrator, not a conqueror. During his reign there were no further foreign wars, and no territorial expansion; Solomon poured his energy into building Jerusalem and into ambitious trading schemes. He was starting from scratch: archaeological finds show Israel-Judah then to have been a small and struggling kingdom, and Jerusalem more of a village than a city, primitive and lackluster when compared to the capitals of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians.
And who was the great Queen of the South who visited Solomon's not-so-magnificent court with her great retinue of camels and gold, incense and gems, and where did she come from and why?
Semitic Saba, biblical Sheba, lay south in Arabia. So much is known. The Sabaeans of southern Arabia, now Yemen, appear only from the 8th century BCE on--two hundred years too late. They appear suddenly as a highly organized polity, with a splendid capital, Marib, of grand buildings and a magnificent dam built to trap the monsoon rains and irrigation channels to spread it throughout the fields necessary to support a great state. They were unusually literate--at least that is the surmise--based on the extensive graffiti that have been found where shepherds and herders might have been expected to live. The script of the monuments, if not the graffitic one, was unusually elegant, considerably more so than most of the other Semitic scripts in use. This high civilization could not have sprung from nowhere. One possibility is that it was just beginning in the south around the time our Queen made her fabled journey. Pottery shards engraved with the Sabaean script have been found dating back to approximately c.950 BCE and little else--but then, very little digging has been done in the Arabian sands. Another possibility is that in the middle of the 10th century the Sabaeans and their queen lived in northern rather than southern Arabia. The Assyrians in their records testify to at least five northern Arabian queens during the 8th and 7th centuries out of a total mention of eight Arab rulers. A further three queens are mentioned during the 6th and 5th centuries. With a clear tradition of ruling queens, stronger in the early centuries than in the later, the Queen of Sheba may well have come from northern Arabia earlier still.
A strong Queen, making a long journey, astride her camel, followed by her retinue, arrives in Jerusalem. The King comes forth to greet her, making a show of all his finery in hopes of impressing her. They sit down gleefully to test each other with riddles, to discuss trading agreements, to talk about religion. Two rulers of small and somewhat rustic nations who meet as equals, two shrewd Semitic leaders with much in common, two people whose forebears lived in tents and wandered through the deserts worshipping the sun and the moon and the morning star, a king of the North and a queen of the South eyeing each other thoughtfully nearly three thousand years ago. Possible? Why not?
*For information about: the legends of Sheba and Solomon; African traditions about Sheba; King Solomon and King David; biblical redactors; biblical archaeology; the incense trade; Saba; Arabia; Ethiopia; Israel; bibliography and more see *the book
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