Queen of Sheba

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Queen of Sheba arrives in Jerusalem with camels bearing spices, gold, and precious stones. No name is given in the Hebrew Bible. No inscription has ever been found that proves she existed. And yet her story has traveled further, and changed more lives, than almost any other in the ancient world.

  She is called Bilqis in Arabic. She is called Makeda in Geez, the classical language of Ethiopia. She is a queen without a confirmed kingdom, a woman without a verified biography, and a figure who has nonetheless shaped religious traditions across West Asia, Northeast Africa, and far beyond.

  What drove so many cultures to claim her? What does her story reveal about the societies that retold it? And what can archaeologists and historians actually say about whether anyone like her ever existed?

• 2. A Story Without a Name

  ›

  First Kings chapter ten introduces her without ceremony. She comes to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones. She tests Solomon with riddles. She is overwhelmed by his wisdom and his palace. She gives him gifts on a scale the Bible says was never matched before or since.

  The word used for her riddles in that Hebrew text is a term borrowed from Aramaic, which tells textual scholars something important. Aramaic loanwords in Hebrew scripture typically signal a later date of composition. A significant number of biblical philologists believe an early version of the story predates the Deuteronomistic history, which was compiled roughly between 640 and 609 BCE. Many scholars place the account in its current form during the Babylonian Captivity, around 550 BCE.

  The purpose of the story, by that reading, was to glorify Solomon: to show a ruler so magnificent that foreign queens traveled from the ends of the known world to sit at his feet. That framing sits uneasily with how the Deuteronomistic history treats Solomon elsewhere. The same texts that exalt him here are largely critical of him in other passages.

  The rabbis who later denounced Solomon read one verse, First Kings 10:13, as evidence of criminal intercourse between Solomon and the queen, with Nebuchadnezzar, the destroyer of the Temple, as their offspring. The Talmud, in Bava Batra 15b, offers a different reading entirely: that the phrase "malkath Sheba" refers not to a woman at all, but to the kingdom of Sheba.

• 3. Where Was Sheba?

  ›

  Modern historians and archaeologists identify Sheba as one of the South Arabian kingdoms, located in what is now Yemen. The ancient city of Marib was its capital, and in the 19th century the explorers Halevi and Glaser found its ruins in the Arabian Desert. Among the inscriptions they recovered, scholars read the names of four South Arabian states: Minea, Hadramawt, Qataban, and Sawa.

  The Awwam Temple near Marib, known in folklore as Maḥram Bilqis, was excavated by archaeologists, but no evidence relating to the Queen of Sheba was found there. The nearby Barran Temple is also called the Arash Bilqis, or Throne of Bilqis, dedicated like the Awwam Temple to the god Almaqah, but that connection too has not been established archaeologically.

  In 2005, American archaeologists discovered ruins near Marib that they attributed to the vicinity of the biblical queen's palace. Researcher Madeleine Phillips reported finding columns, numerous drawings, and objects dating back roughly three millennia.

  The chronological question is thorny. Solomon lived from approximately 965 to 926 BC. Some scholars argue the first traces of the Sabaean monarchy appear some 150 years after his reign. Peter Stein, on the other hand, argues that archaeological and epigraphic evidence places the Sabaean kingdom as far back as the 10th century BC, which would make a diplomatic visit in Solomon's time at least plausible.

  Assyrian sources confirm that South Arabia was engaged in international trade as early as 890 BC. Some researchers read the queen's visit as a trade mission, aimed at counteracting Solomon's efforts to establish a foothold on the Red Sea coast and break the South Arabian monopoly on caravan routes to Syria and Mesopotamia.

  The famous Arabian explorer Harry St John Philby took a different view entirely. He believed the queen originated from northern Arabia, not the south, and that her legends had at some point blended with those of Zenobia, the warrior queen of Palmyra, who lived in the 3rd century CE. A sarcophagus reportedly found at Palmyra in the 8th century, during the reign of Caliph Walid I, bore the inscription: Here is buried the pious Bilqis, the consort of Solomon.

• 4. The Ethiopian Inheritance

  ›

  No tradition has woven the Queen of Sheba more tightly into its national identity than Ethiopia. The Kebra Nagast, translated from Arabic in 1322 and meaning Glory of the Kings, is the Ethiopian national saga. It names her Makeda and makes her the daughter of a man who destroys the legendary snake-king Arwe.

  In the Kebra Nagast's telling, a merchant named Tamrin serves Makeda and travels to Jerusalem. He returns so full of accounts of Solomon's wisdom and generosity that Makeda resolves to visit him herself. She is given a palace, receives gifts daily, and converts to Judaism after long conversations with the king.

  On the night before she leaves, Solomon and Makeda make a pact. He swears not to harm her; she swears not to steal from him. The meals had been spicy. She woke thirsty and reached for water. Solomon appeared and reminded her of her oath. She answered: Ignore your oath, just let me drink water. That same night, Solomon dreamed that the sun, mistreated by the Jews, moved to shine over Ethiopia and Rome.

  She left carrying Solomon's ring. On the journey home she gave birth to a son named Baina-leḥkem, meaning Son of the Wise, later called Menelik. When Menelik was grown, he returned to Jerusalem with the ring and was received with great honors. Solomon anointed him king through the high priest Zadok, and Menelik took the name David.

  Before Menelik and his companions left for Ethiopia, the sons of the priests stole the Ark of the Covenant. Their leader Azaryas revealed this only after they had crossed the Red Sea. The procession traveled, according to the text, on a wind cart led by the archangel Michael. Solomon learned of the theft, sent a horseman and then gave chase himself, but could not catch them. He ordered the priests to keep silent and place a copy of the Ark in the Temple.

  The Ethiopian royal dynasty claimed direct descent from Menelik down to the present day. The 1922 regnal list of Ethiopia places Makeda's reign from 1013 to 982 BC. In 1872, Prince Kasa, later King John IV, wrote to Queen Victoria to request the return of a copy of the Kebra Nagast that had been taken to Britain. He wrote: There is a book called Kebra Nagast which contains the law of the whole of Ethiopia, and the names of the shums, churches and provinces are in this book. My people will not obey my orders without it.

• 5. Bilqis in the Quran

  ›

  The Quran tells a version of the story in chapter twenty-seven, using no name for her at all. She is simply a woman ruling them, the nation of Sheba. The figure who alerts Solomon to her existence is a bird known as the hud-hud, or hoopoe, which returns from scouting nearby lands to report that Sheba is led by a queen who bows to the sun.

  Solomon sends the queen a letter inviting her to submit to God. Her response is careful and deliberate. She consults her chief advisers, who tell her that her kingdom is powerful and inclined toward war, but that the decision rests solely with her. Rather than sending an army, she sends ambassadors bearing gifts. Solomon refuses the gifts, declaring that God gives far superior gifts. He sends the ambassadors back with a warning that if he travels to her, he will bring a force she cannot defeat.

  The queen then travels to Solomon. Before she arrives, he asks his chiefs who will bring him her throne. An Ifrit offers to move it before Solomon rises from his seat. A man with knowledge of the Scripture moves it in the blink of an eye. Solomon disguises the throne to test whether she recognizes it. She had already heard, during her journey, of Solomon's prophethood, and she and her subjects had resolved to submit to God.

  The episode that Muslim commentators return to most often comes at the end. The queen is invited to enter a palatial hall. She mistakes its floor for a lake and raises her skirt to avoid wetting her clothes. Solomon tells her it is made of smooth glass. She declares that she has wronged herself and submits with Solomon to God.

  Muslim commentators including Al-Tabari, Al-Zamakhshari, and Al-Baydawi supply her name as Bilqis, a word probably derived from the Greek pallakis or the Hebrew pilegesh, meaning concubine. The scholar Al-Hamdani described her as the daughter of Ilsharah Yahdib, the Sabaean king of South Arabia. Another tradition calls her the daughter of a jinni and a human.

• 6. Riddles and Rabbis

  ›

  Jewish elaborations of the queen's story range from the reverential to the suspicious. Josephus, in his Antiquities, identified the queen as the ruler of Egypt and Ethiopia and credited her with bringing to Israel the first specimens of the balsam plant, which he says was still growing in the Holy Land in his own time.

  A Yemenite manuscript titled Midrash ha-Hefez, published by S. Schechter in 1890, collects nineteen riddles attributed to the queen. Two are genuine riddles in the classic sense. The first: Without movement while living, it moves when its head is cut off. The answer is a tree, which when its top is removed can be made into a moving ship. The second: Produced from the ground, man produces it, while its food is the fruit of the ground. The answer is a wick.

  Christian tradition brought its own layering. Origen wrote a voluminous commentary on the Song of Songs, and the mystical reading of that text as referring to the queen became influential for centuries. The New Testament calls her the queen of the South who came from the uttermost parts of the earth. The Revised Standard Version of 1952 translates a passage from the Song of Songs as I am very dark, but comely; the New Revised Standard Version of 1989 renders it I am black and beautiful. Jerome's Latin version reads Nigra sum, sed formosa.

  One legend held that the Queen of Sheba brought Solomon the same gifts that the Magi later gave to Jesus. During the Middle Ages, Christians sometimes identified her with the sibyl Sabba. The scholar Edward Ullendorff argued that the Ethiopian name Makeda is a corruption of Candace, the name or title of several Ethiopian queens from Meroe or Seba, including the queen whose chamberlain was converted to Christianity under Philip the Evangelist in 30 AD.

• 7. Five Centuries of Art

  ›

  By the 12th century the queen had become a fixture of European sacred art. The cathedrals at Strasbourg, Chartres, Rochester, and Canterbury all include depictions of her in stained glass windows and doorjamb decorations. The Klosterneuburg Monastery holds an enamel depicting a black woman in Romanesque style. A window in King's College Chapel, Cambridge, shows her standing in water before Solomon.

  Lorenzo Ghiberti cast her into the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery. Benozzo Gozzoli painted her in frescoes in Pisa. Piero della Francesca's frescoes at Arezzo, dating to around 1466, include two panels on her visit to Solomon as part of a cycle on the Legend of the True Cross. That cycle connects the wood from Solomon's palace, which the queen revered, directly to the wood of the crucifixion.

  In literature, Boccaccio's On Famous Women follows Josephus in calling her Nicaula and names her queen of Ethiopia and Egypt, with a palace on a large island called Meroe in the Nile. Christine de Pizan, in The Book of the City of Ladies, also calls her Nicaula and places her at the top of a list of dignified female pagans, praising her for secular and religious wisdom. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus names her Saba.

  Gerard de Nerval's 1851 novel Voyage to the Orient recounts a tale told in a Turkish cafe in which the queen, here called Balkis, loves not Solomon but his chief craftsman Adoniram, also known as Hiram Abif. Solomon grows jealous, learns of a plot against Adoniram, and willfully ignores it. Adoniram is murdered and Balkis flees.

  Leopold Sedar Senghor's poem Elegie pour la Reine de Saba, published in his Elegies majeures in 1976, used the queen's figure to broaden his concept of Negritude to include what he called Arab-Berber Africa. O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi invokes her as a benchmark of wealth and beauty to measure a woman's hair.

  George Frideric Handel composed an oratorio called Solomon in 1748, first performed in 1749. Its interlude known as The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba has since become one of the most performed orchestral miniatures in the classical repertoire. Charles Gounod, Karl Goldmark, and Ottorino Respighi each devoted major works to her story in the 19th and early 20th centuries. On screen, Gina Lollobrigida played her in the 1959 film Solomon and Sheba, with Yul Brynner as Solomon.