Great Myths and Legends: The Queen of Sheba in History and Legend

so thank you very much Steve and I'm very happy to be here speaking about a topic that I find extremely fascinating and sharing a bit about the Queen of Sheba in myth and legend there's a lot to cover so I'll get straight to the point and kind of be able to kind of explore a bit some of the many many rich and fascinating traditions surrounding this ancient Queen so who is the Queen of Sheba in modern popular imagination especially in the West the image of this mysterious Queen this woman voc's a host of richly potent and yet also somewhat conflicting images on the one hand she's imagined as part of a European fantasy of an erotic and exotic east of great opulence and eroticism this image of this wonderful queen who comes meet Solomon and romances him and is able to have this very kind of lush beautiful both garb and court around her on the other hand she's also within the West and Beyond an exemplar of the ancient African queen of an idea of black beauty and especially of the image of blackness and Africa as involved with in a biblical past in a way that encompasses very few other figures from the Hebrew Bible or Judaism and Christianity and uniting both images especially in modern media film opera and so forth is this image of the Queen of Sheba as having some sort of special romantic or other type of marital relationship with King Solomon to some extent even depicted worldwide from Japan to contemporary films in the in the United States to Africa to Yemen or so forth as being engaged in some type of great love story some type of great partnership with with King Solomon this raises the question of course of to what degree any of these images all of these images reflect the queen of sheba as she was in history and to what degree they also reflect the Queen of Sheba as she is in legend myth rewriting a biblical imagination that goes beyond the biblical past into the Jewish Christian and Western Western cultural imagination and this is the topic that I'd like to discuss here today at least to give a bit of a survey in terms of thinking about what we know the Queen of Sheba both historically and also as she was received as we'll see a lot of the significance and power of the Queen goes beyond what we can recover of her historically what we can recover her in the 10th century BCE and the time of Solomon and ancient Israel beyond to raise unexpected traditions connections ideas that cross a surprisingly global scope and part of what I find fascinating about the Queen of Sheba as an image as a kind of figure who resounds within a fascination in a cultural imagination is that she doesn't just represent a connection to the biblical past she also represents a and enables a series of connections between Judaism Christianity and Islam often in very surprising ways as we shall see as well as between Europe Africa and the Middle East and again often in ways that would surprise us in ways that we don't necessarily find tracing other figures to think about the historical Queen of Sheba who must begin with the Hebrew Bible which is the earliest place in which we find a reference to her within the Hebrew Bible the Christian Old Testament we find two references to her the older of which is 1 Kings 10 this tradition is paralleled within 2 chronicles almost exactly and is the oldest summary that we have of her and also the one that's closest in time to when this Queen may have lived this summary occurs within the context of the biography of King Solomon who ruled over ancient Israel the kingdom of ancient Israel son of King David in around the 10th of the 10th century BC at night BCE the context in which he occurs is the biography of Saul for particularly she rises and the Contras at the end of his life in a discussion of international trade so the involvement of Salomon not just within his kingdom as a as a king as a wise King but also he is kind of his cosmopolitan because his global profile and this is where we encounter the Queen and this this famous passage in which she's mentioned within 1 Kings 10 so within this this submarine were this brief reference to her within the Hebrew Bible on the main features is that she comes because she hears of his fame so we essentially get this this we've been hearing about the perspective of the biography of King Solomon from the perspective of Israel the king himself we get this that the the narrative transports us to this other land Sheba and to the perspective of the Queen and she hears of Solomon's Fame and decides to come visit him so she's given the the she's the motivation in the story um and what we learn of her next is that their two main features that she possesses that she also highlights about Solomon himself one of which is she's curious about his wisdom so she comes to test him and to test him with riddles this is very explicit in the biblical account that she has this curiosity she's heard he's wise and her response as a woman that's the who's thus depicted as quite significant in her own right is the sense that she has a curiosity of wanting to make sure he's wise and to do so in person through her own questions and through tests of questions this results in her Solomon answers all her questions she's come to visit him in perfect person to talk to him and she's her breath is taken away by the degree of his wisdom however this is one element of - that takes place within this story the other reason she's left breathless is that she herself is a queen who comes with great wealth surrounding her yet when she comes to visit Solomon the court of Solomon in Jerusalem she is so impressed by the great opulence the grandeur both of the palace itself and of the temple that he's built to God in Jerusalem that she's breathless she's her breath is taken away the story doesn't end here and one of the notable things and one of the reasons why I think the Queen becomes such an interesting figure a fascination and later memory is that she's also rare among biblical women given given not only a perspective of her own but a voice of her own so we not only see Solomon through her eyes she proclaims what's significant about him and she seemed to be a good witness to this and in particular stresses his wisdom and his wealth and connects those wisdom and wealth to her inference that it is because of the God of Israel blessedness through the God of Israel that he has this wisdom and wealth as a result like any monarch would she gives him tribute she gives him money gives him a more gold spices precious stones and this that more than anyone else had done before so her grandeurs emphasized in part to emphasize his grandeur within 1 Kings the immediate context is again international trade so we have no hint of romance no hint of an affair no hint of innocent essence that the Queen we don't get an image of her as a woman we get an image of her as a monarch that's a very significant detail she's a formidable monarch who comes with a great deal of wealth as well as a great deal of wisdom and curiosity and these are all things that make her very unusual in terms of depictions of women in the ancient world in general was in the Hebrew Bible in particular but they're underlined in particular by the immediate context of 1 Kings a biblical account which is the context of a discussion of trade which even before we end the story of Queen Sheba in the middle we get in the middle of it we get this reference to other fleets other people that have come to Solomon so it's clear in other words that the point of the story is not necessarily about Sheba and Solomon in terms of any kind of romantic relationship male and female but essentially she is one prominent example of a royal figure who - Solomon represents his power of international trade and as a result the conclusion to this is that you know Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth and riches and and wisdom the two were paired this sense this context is international trade context where the queen of sheba is more monarch than focused on as a woman as someone who has beauty or other types of features typically associated with the feminine is also the closest thing we know to the historical context of the queen of sheba we do not have direct inscriptional or other evidence for her we don't have any evidence for her outside the bible from this early period of time but what we do have is some indirect evidence that shows that this is a plausible story the plausible story i'm the focus of the text itself is on trade and we know from series of documents as well as inscriptions south arabian inscriptions that there is trade in general between sub I which is probably that the biblical Sheba in its South Arabia upward into both Jerusalem and to the Near East in general this is clearly part of a very active trade route and one inscription in particular this inscription here speaks specifically of trade between this land and the towns of Judah so that is the southern portion of Israel of which the city of Jerusalem is a part so we do have direct inscriptional evidence that says this context of trade makes sense it's plausible we may not know a specific name specific monarchs specific ideas of this particular queen but there's no reason to disbelieve the biblical account it's point that Solomon was richly involved with trade including with South South Arabia and this area of sheba is plausible from what else we know about the biblical past significantly for our purposes this biblical account also covers a lot of what we also see in Western art music and other types of cultural production surrounding the Queen of Sheba much art surrounding her for instance within Western Christian art Western secular art focuses on her journey and really richly imagines the opulence of the retinue with which she comes and this is extending directly from the biblical account and among the same themes of the biblical account this notion that the wealth of Sheba reflects the wealth of Solomon because if she's wealthy grand he is all the more so because she's so impressed by him this main kind of trope that we find within music as well as in within art of Shiva's arrival the moment that she comes also the moment that's so richly conveyed within the biblical story which is otherwise quite brief but does have this moment of breathlessness this kind of this very very striking sense at her ruah her breath left her like she was just so astonished despite the wealth to which she herself was accustomed so we find a large range of eicken graphical images about this particular moment of meeting this moment of arrival and likewise within the Western artistic tradition particularly within medieval Christian art from the second century or is it from the 12th century rather than following we find a lot of interest in this moment in which they're having this conversation and when you see these images I mean one of the things that's so striking about them is within Christian art ancient and medieval Western art you rarely see these moments of a man and woman just involved in conversation so you have these writing and in this case I mean if you look at her face she's very discerning and you have this really very evocative sense of this woman as being someone who's very depicted as intelligent curious and as involved primarily with Solomon in an intellectual endeavor in this sense of this testing this riddling she's both worthy to test him and she may meet her test but it also says a lot about her that that's what she's doing what's interesting then is also what's missing so we have sense of the opulence the sense of its context of trade the exchange of goods the sense of riddling intellectual testing and so forth this interest in wisdom what we don't have is any sense of a merit an affair a romance and also within the biblical account it's not entirely clear how it comes to be that cheaper herself is imagined as African in general and as black in particular so for those types of questions we have to you know move to the history of interpretation how is it that these features came to be how is it that we have a biblical account about this intellectual encounter that becomes later traditions that include some some element of the love story or romance and how is it in particular that she becomes such as a paradigm of an African Queen an ancient African Queen one of the things to note about the biblical account is the billikin actually quite actively denies there being any sexual relationship in part through the contrast with with Solomon's other foreign wives his other foreign wives or come in the chapter afterwards and they mislead him to worship other gods when we look at the count of Sheba in relation to that what becomes very clear is she by contrast doesn't pull him to other gods she acknowledges that his power is the power of the God of Israel so the account of their kind of sexual relationship not only goes against the kind of it's not only something that's not mentioned in the Bible and actually in large part seems to go against the spirit of what the biblical account is drawing up in contrast the later wives that draw the draw solomon astray this image also of their relationship as being one not of marriage love romance but one of two monarchs who recognize one another in part for their wisdom is also notably what we find within the New Testament in the New Testament we find two references to the queen of sheba and in this case it's this image of her as the queen of the south she comes from the ends of the earth and her role is again to recognize the one God the true God in this case in relation to an evil generation that doesn't so just as she recognizes the wisdom of Solomon so - according to the saying of Jesus will she recognize come back in the end times to recognize the wisdom of him who comes after who's even wiser and namely Christ but in both cases we have the notable striking lack of any sexual ization surrounding her and the emphasis is largely on her wisdom she's wise she's wealthy she's a very important monarch those are the images that we find when we turn to the history of interpretation we find two tracks and the interesting things about them is that they both kind of go quite different directions so the first track was in relation to the interpretation of Queen Sheba in Judaism and in Islam so within the earliest Jewish interpretation we find outside the Bible there is some concern for locating her and this is the tradition in Josephus the first century Jewish historian he doesn't large retelling in Greek to Roman audience and the tale of Sheba just as part of his general history of the Jews from antiquity to the present and in the course of doing this he tries explain essentially her story for a Greek and Roman audience and in this account interprets her as being a queen of Egypt and Ethiopia looking at the language of his count'em he's essentially translating the geography of the Bible into the geography of Herodotus and other Greek historians and he also a maybe he elaborates other elements in terms of making her philosopher and so forth as opposed to so more specifically someone who seeks wisdom the interesting thing about this specification though is that it's not the direction in which later Jewish interpretive traditions will go within Jewish Midrash so the biblical interpretation and in in context of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity and the Middle Ages the interest in Shiva becomes quite different and some of it is in this notion of filling these gaps Jewish biblical interpretation Midrash often fills in a sense what's left unsaid in the Bible and fills in those those spaces and in part it does so with regard to the story of the queen of sheba by asking what were the riddles we don't hear of them in the Bible what did she say there number of traditions surrounding them but it's kind of one main line in terms of the way that her story is interpreted it expanded the spaces are expanded the other main way it's interpreted however goes well beyond the biblical account to a kind of completely different direction and in this case and there's just an example of this I'm putting the full text up so we can come back to any questions if anybody's interested but does it give a general summary I mean in one of the targa meme this aromatic translations of the Bible that the story is expanded so it begins not with Shiva deciding to visit Solomon but the opposite there's a bird that comes to Shiva's court who belongs to Solomon reports back to Solomon and this is why Solomon himself sends a letter with the bird for for her to come visit him within these stories that these incredibly elaborate legends and accounts that are striking for the degree to which they don't conform to the Bible itself so what are the key that the main kind of punchline of the story is that she finally comes to visit him he has made this house of glass and then she walks along the floor of the palace of glass and she first thinks its water so she lifts her skirt and he can see her legs her lips are very hairy and this is given to be this example and she's obviously a virgin she's not she's actually deliberately not I'm sexually active which is why she doesn't take care of her but partially this is also connected to that that essentially the invention of mayor haribabu cream but so I'm the point being that it goes well beyond the Bible and in this completely different direction which includes a number of details that it's hard to make sense of if we think of it as interpretation expansion of the Bible the thing that makes it even more interesting in this regard is that these particular traditions that we find within rabbinic Midrash so typically Jewish biblical interpretation these books that are concealed with interpretations of the Bible are incredibly closely related to traditions in the Quran and there's much debate among scholars which which traditions come first how are they related to each other exactly but for our purposes it suffice us to note that this figure this Queen is in part traditions about her serve to connect Judaism and Islam and traditions about the shared past in somewhat surprising ways and the adoption of a number of these traditions is I mean it's quite striking so within the Quran itself within the tradition of surrounding Sheba I was made explicit that the whole story goes into effect because the same type of bird a Hoopoe it leaves the court of Solomon visits the land of Sheba and then comes back to report so within the Quran itself this is mentioned it's mentioned that the bird reports that she's her whole people is worshipping the Sun and the bird also brings a letter the tradition is very we had a very long tradition very complex he brings a letter and there's an exchange between Sheba and Solomon and the whole theme of the Sura at least the portion of the Sura surrounding Sheba is this notion of questions of appearance and reality so she because of satan it says explicitly within the surah she thinks and she and her people think that the son is God the Son above whereas actually there's only one God likewise Solomon writes to her asking her to come in submission which is it within the Arabic upon she could come in submission as a monarch on the one hand but he's also asking her the same term is the same route as Islam and Muslim so this notion he's asking her to come as a Muslim so essentially to convert from polytheism to belief in the one God which is precisely what happens and it happens in part because he first of all has a demon come take her throne bring it to his court change its appearance and then asks her if she recognizes it so this kind of senses playfulness around appearance and reality with him in this time doing the testing instead of her and lastly this moment where he has a quart of glass so his his palaces of glass the floor is all glass she starts to step on it says oh this is glass draws up her skirt and then that moment she recognizes actually this is not this is not glasses this is not water it's glass and at that moment she recognizes that all this time she's been misled by appearances in terms of reality and she converts to Islam she recognizes Solomon as a prophet and converts to Islam in the sense of submission to monotheism as opposed to idolatry and polytheism this too is a kind of interesting moment of exchange between Judaism and Christianity because I mean this this tradition which is otherwise puzzling within an Islamic context actually has parallels with in late antique Jewish mysticism so within had hallowed literature there's this common trope of there being this test the water test the mystic who ascends to heaven encounters a glass floor that looks like water and either they say water water and haven't recognized the reality of where they are don't have the discernment to ascend to heaven and then art you know thrown back down to earth by angels or they do recognize what it is and go above so even here we have this fascinating interchange where in some ways it doesn't quite make sense to ask whether the Jewish or Islamic accounts are first because what's so striking about them is that these traditions surrounding this figure are clearly in some type of conversation they a shared horizon on the biblical past on the shared past the past of Solomon the past in which Sheba serves to kind of connect unexpected areas this is a connection also continues with in medieval Islam and medieval Judaism tradition surrounding both icono graphical traditions and literary traditions around the Queen of Sheba are very rich traditions involving courts of demons she's given a particular name Bilkis she's sometimes said to be the the daughter of the king of Yemen and a jinn a demon so she's a kind of a kind of mixed sometimes it's said that that's why her legs are so hairy she has demonic blood in her or at least that that's why I'm Solomon want to see her legs in these tradition of these traditions she and Solomon marry and they in some she doesn't but throughout the traditions one of her main functions is to underline that he's a prophet and part of what he does is he brings her to Islam it is a polytheist someone who worships the Sun he convinces her of the truth of monotheism the oneness of God so when she submits to him she's submitting to him in the sense of of recognizing the reality of monotheism even in a world in which the Sun Moon and stars seem to have power this is the same complex of traditions that also informs medieval Jewish especially legendary literature such as the alphabet of Ben Sira in which we also find in some cases she's connected to Nebuchadnezzar and we have this rich legendary complex surrounding her in which she's associated especially with the invention of hair removal techniques and again things that we wouldn't couldn't imagine from the biblical account but it's at point to a very distinctive world in which we have a shared world of speculation about the biblical past and about these figures what we don't find within the Jewish and Islamic accounts whoever answers to some of our other kind of main horizons in terms of interpretation and primarily the association with Africa she's pretty consistently within those traditions associated with Saba Sheba in South Arabia and thus also with Yemen for these traditions we have to turn especially back to Christian exegesis and the image of Ethiopia so Christian X is used about Ethiopia and Christian exegesis in Ethiopia if you recall flavius josephus already in the first century the jewish historian had called her the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia this doesn't get really picked up much within Jewish literature but it does get picked up a lot within Christian literature so already in the 3rd century BCE with origin of Alexandria when a Christian who is from Egypt he's very explicit about the queen of sheba being Ethiopian and also being black he does so especially within his commentary to the song of songs which he reads is an allegory between Christ and the church but with his images the allegory between Christ and the church is also a discussion from Solomon representing Christ to a queen at time Sheba representing the church for him this is incredibly important that she's black because and Ethiopian because partially it means that she's not Jewish she's not from Israel she's foreign she she's a type of the inclusion of non Jewish peoples in the promises to Israel through Christ so for origin she becomes this very important figure and she also becomes one of the kind of keys to reading the Song of Songs in a Christian allegorical manner for it to mean something beyond a sense of why is this love song in the Hebrew Bible since this is not a love song between Christ and the church this is allegorical and it also speaks to the inclusion of non-jews by his reading in the process she really emphasizes precisely what we saw within the biblical account wisdom of sheba so this new firm that she's this woman of extreme discernment and as a result we received one of the most positive images of blackness and especially black womanhood that we find within the ancient world this was in the Western ancient world within within Christianity and it's a very kind of striking image whereas very she becomes very noble intelligent curious wise and these are the features of her that get elevated within this context it's because of origin and this line of interpretation surrounding the queen of sheba as ethiopian and as a symbol of the inclusion of non-jewish nations to the ends of the earth within the promises to Christianity that we see also see within much although not all Christian art these images of the Queen of Sheba as black it's not present within all medieval Christian art but in much of it this is one of the images surrounding her and you always have some images here from you know stained glass manuscripts that some statuary it's unclear but at least seems to be that's also what's a vocht but especially from the 12th century on there's an interest in depicting her in relation to ideas about a worldwide mission and this interest results in these kind of really strikingly regal images of a blackness of of her as a black Queen we do find in some manuscripts and some examples also the Congress so it's not all positive images we do find some cases in which these illustrations of sheba do exactly what the bible doesn't that is the bible contrast sheba as wise and so forth with the foreign wives of solomon who draw her mystery into idolatry and we find some examples of that although strikingly the more positive examples remain they remain more dominant so both both types of imageries exist as this imagery of a whites white queen of sheba but it's notable that we do find nevertheless this very significant imagery an Ethiopian black queen of Sheba who sought him very positively we might ask thinking about this so is this association just an invention is this just a sense of people reading Josephus and thus coming up with this whole line of interpretation allegory exegesis that departs from the historical situation we discussed at the at the very start and to think about this it's actually worthwhile to to think about geography for a second so Sheba in biblical times sub I is what would in in you know currently this region in Yemen which and within a kind of modern geographical thinking we tend to think in terms of continents so this kind of Arabian world would be quite different than an african world we often think in terms of ethnicities modern senses of ethnicity where if we think of someone as arabian Yemenite or so forth it would be different from them being african or black but it's notable that within an ancient context especially of trade that this the proximity to ethiopia especially to ancient ethiopia Aksum is actually remarkable they're separated by a tiny the smallest point within the red sea leading me out to the Indian Ocean and their relationships by trade or even tighter in a world in which the main circulation is by water that these two regions with Yemen biblical Sheba ox ooh the ancient late antique medieval Ethiopia are actually part of the same cultural domain so there is some notion of this connection when we think in terms of this ancient or medieval concepts of the world and concept of the connectivity of the world it's from this tradition within MIDI ancient and medieval Ethiopia that we find the richest traditions about the queen of sheba which is the traditions with which I'll conclude in part because they bring together so much of a different horizon but also encompassing a lot of the traditions we've already surrounding her so within Ethiopian Christianity so native to Ethiopia we find a work called the Kebra Nagast which was put into writing in its present form in the 14th century India as an ancient Ethiopian so this this text is this national epic which covers a kind of origins of the Ethiopian monarchy and it does so with an incredibly strong interest and focus on the Queen of Sheba the text is a bit over a hundred chapters 40 of them are dedicated to the story of Sheba that's how prominent she is so if you imagine within the Hebrew Bible we find this one chapter talking about her within the New Testament we find one you know one saying that's repeated twice even within the Chron we have part of a major Sura but there's nothing to this degree it's really expansive retelling and significantly for our purposes this retelling really is for not just from her perspective but talks about her importance in a way that goes beyond Solomon's importance and she's thought of incredibly positively and a number of traditions are brought in but with really an emphasis on her so what happens within the Kebra Nagast so here and this is a kind of some of the illustrations of her she's also his major figure in terms of imagery Ethiopian imagery as being this this figure of this Queen but she within this story first of all she chooses of her own accord to visit solomon and it's really explicit in this case she wants wisdom that's what she's going for she's wholly motivated by the search for wisdom she becomes a philosopher queen she goes to visit him she there's no sense of her testing or whittling him but a real sense of them engaged in intensive philosophical conversation there are two philosophers engaged with one another in conversation two monarchs these two major figures she is very chaste and she resists Solomon's advances although he tricks her into having sex with him and he does this through this elaborate measure where she he won to spend the night in his castle she's like this is not a chaste woman this is a bad idea and he's like I won't won't take anything from you if you don't take anything from me she's like okay sure then she Heath he makes her a meal that's extremely salty and so in the middle of the night she gets up and she wants a glass of water and he was like well I could only come I said okay sure so she trick he tricks her and as a result of this she has a son although the interesting thing about this tradition is that she remains a virgin so she's likened to Mary in this regard so she remains virginal but she has a son through Solomon who then becomes an heir to him I said he looks exactly like Solomon they're identical except he's black so there's this image of him as being you know in countenance and identical figure and also a figure who is a second David so Solomon and Sheba son so grand figure he Solomon wants him to stay he decides to go back home when he goes back home a number of Cortese come with them and one of the things that they do is they bring the Ark of the Covenant he doesn't know about it at the time but they bring it he realizes once it's there in Ethiopia you know nothing bad has happened so it probably belongs here and we'll keep it so as a result you have this this I mean this is a very lengthy and beautiful story that goes through this kind of epic account of the origins of Ethiopian kingship does so with an interest in Sheba Shiva's son and also emphasizes in this case the sense that the glory of Israel and the promises of Israel actually shifted to Ethiopia and Solomon himself is made to recognize that so a sense that the importance of Ethiopia thus becomes larger at the end of the story than the importance of Israel in Solomon for our purposes one of the things that's interesting about this this is a sense in which we do find within these Ethiopian traditions a lot of similarities with earlier traditions a lot of kind of pulling on other traditions about the queen of sheba the points at which it becomes most distinctive though is that it we centers the story around her the story isn't using her to talk about another figure whether it's to talk about Solomon and Israel whether it's to talk about a type of the Church of something that will come after whether it's to talk about this pre-islamic Muslims instead it really becomes about her and about her as being the head of a kingdom and the head of a kingdom that has its own holy sacred lineage that begins with her and is also rooted and rooted in her son but also rooted in her own wisdom her chastity her discernment and her kind of Wiegel power which brings us essentially to a very interesting point of connectedness where just as we have seen her as a figure stories about her connecting Judaism and Christianity and Islam so - especially in the traditions in the Kebra Nagast she reminds us of the connectivity of Ethiopia Africa and so forth within the biblical world within the world in which Judaism and Islam took shape and within the world in which Christianity spread thank you you

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 48,743

Rating: 4.4103584 out of 5

Keywords: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, History, Science, Philadlephia, Bible, Solomon, Sheba, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Ethiopia, Great Myths, Great Legends

Id: 0Ph7OPwzmVc

Length: 39min 17sec (2357 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Best known from the Bible's account of her marriage to the wise king Solomon, the Queen of Sheba has attracted the curiosity of Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia. The lecture traces tales about her from Israel to Ethiopia, and explores how traditions about her have traveled between different religions and connected different regions.