The Queen of Sheba

In First Kings the episode is short and mostly about Solomon. The queen hears of his fame concerning the name of the Lord, comes to test him with riddles, finds that nothing is hidden from him, sees his house, his table, his servants and his ascent to the house of the Lord, and there is no more spirit in her. She blesses the God of Israel, exchanges enormous gifts, and goes home. The text names her country but not her.

The Quran, in the chapter called the Ant, tells a longer and more theological story. A hoopoe reports to Solomon that it has found a woman ruling a people who prostrate themselves to the sun instead of to God. Solomon sends a letter; the queen consults her council and answers with diplomacy rather than war; her throne is brought to Solomon by a servant with knowledge of the Book; and she is shown into a courtyard of polished glass that she takes for water and gathers her skirts to cross. Realizing her mistake, she says that she had wronged herself and submits with Solomon to the Lord of the worlds. Her conversion, not her wealth, is the point.

The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, compiled in Ge'ez in the fourteenth century, makes the visit the origin of a nation. Makeda, queen of Ethiopia, goes to Solomon, is fathered of a son by him, and returns home; the son, Menelik, later visits his father and brings the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, where the Ethiopian church holds it to be still. The Solomonic descent this establishes was claimed by Ethiopian emperors down to Haile Selassie and written into the constitutions of 1931 and 1955.

In Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls her the queen of the South, who came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and says that she will rise at the judgment against a generation that will not hear something greater.

Sheba is not imaginary. Saba was a real and wealthy south Arabian kingdom centred on Marib in what is now Yemen, known from its own inscriptions, from Assyrian records, and from classical writers who described the incense trade it controlled. Frankincense and myrrh, the goods the queen brings in the biblical account, grew there and almost nowhere else, and the caravan route north through the Hejaz to the Levant is well documented. A ruler of Saba sending a trade embassy to a rising kingdom that controlled the northern end of that route is entirely plausible in principle.

The difficulties are of date and of person. Saba's attested rulers are men, styled mukarrib, and the inscriptions that name them belong to a period later than the tenth century BCE where Solomon is conventionally placed. The archaeology of Marib and of the great dam does not yet reach far enough back to confirm a tenth century monarchy of the wealth the story requires, and no south Arabian text mentions a journey to Jerusalem. The Ethiopian identification, which places Sheba on the African side of the Red Sea, is a later development and is generally read as a national claim rather than a geographical one, though the Sabaean cultural presence in the Ethiopian highlands is real.

So the queen sits where a good deal of the world's religious literature sits, between a plausible setting and an unverifiable event. What is certain is her afterlife. She is invoked in three scriptures, made a saint of wisdom by Christian typology, given a name and a conversion by Islam, and made the ancestress of an imperial dynasty by Ethiopia, all from a passage of thirteen verses that does not tell us who she was.