HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
The Queen of Sheba is the great Gentile seeker of the Hebrew Bible — a foreign monarch who travels to the ends of the earth after a rumour of Israel’s God and goes home confessing Him. Scripture tells her story in a single passage, but a resonant one: hearing “of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions” (1 Kings 10:1), arriving at Jerusalem “with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.” Solomon answers everything she asks — “there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not” — and at the sight of his wisdom, his house, and “his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the LORD, there was no more spirit in her.” She breaks into blessing: “the half was not told me… Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel.” Gifts pass both ways — her hundred and twenty talents of gold and unmatched store of spices, and “all her desire, whatsoever she asked” from Solomon — and “she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants.” The Chronicler repeats the whole scene almost word for word (2 Chronicles 9:1–12).
Few unnamed figures of the Old Testament were made to carry so much. Jesus turns her into the standing type of the outsider whose faith condemns the faithless insider — “the queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31). On that seed the later traditions grew luxuriant and divergent. Josephus made her “Nikaulis, queen of Egypt and Ethiopia”; the Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast, named her Makeda and told of her union with Solomon, the birth of their son Menelik, and the Ark of the Covenant carried from Jerusalem to Aksum — the charter myth of a dynasty that claimed her blood down to the twentieth century; the rabbinic Targum Sheni to Esther spun the hoopoe-messenger, the riddles, and the glass-floor that made her lift her skirt to reveal hairy legs, and other rabbinic strands cast her as a demon, Lilith-adjacent; and Islamic tradition, reading Qur’an 27:22–44, named her Bilqis and retold the throne and the glass pavilion. Meanwhile the Fathers read her spiritually: the queen who left the ends of the earth for Solomon’s wisdom became a figure of the Gentile church coming from afar to the true Solomon, Christ.
This page is a biographical tradition-timeline: not a life of the Queen of Sheba but a history of what was said and believed about her across the centuries, set out earliest source first. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on or interpret her — the narrative of 1 Kings and its Chronicles parallel, the saying of Jesus, Josephus, the rabbinic Targums and legends, the patristic reading of her as the Gentile church, the medieval Latin legend that made her a prophetess of the Cross, the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, the Islamic Bilqis, and the modern historians and archaeologists who ask whether a real queen stands behind her. The genuinely contested questions — where Sheba lay (Sabaean South Arabia or Ethiopia/Aksum)? was she a historical tenth-century queen? does the Ethiopian Solomonic-descent claim hold? is the typological reading of “the queen of the south” sound? — are weighed on their own argument pages rather than settled by assertion. She is a prime instance of a recurring biblical type — the Gentile who comes to Israel’s God and blesses him — kin to Naaman the Syrian and the Midianite priest Jethro (Jesus invokes her and Naaman alike, in separate sayings, as the outsider whose response shames Israel — Luke 11:31; 4:27), and set against the pagan foils Balaam and Jannes and Jambres.
Related doctrines: Figures of the Hebrew Scriptures — see also Balaam son of Beor · Melchizedek · Nimrod · Enoch · Job · Naaman the Syrian · Jannes and Jambres · Jethro · Rahab of Jericho · Nebuchadnezzar · Og of Bashan · Cyrus the Great · the death of Moses · the curse of Ham · Shem son of Noah · Cain
The whole later tradition grows from a single royal visit and one saying of Jesus that turns on it. 1 Kings 10 introduces her as a monarch drawn by report across a great distance: “when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions.” She arrives in state — “a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones” — and lays before Solomon “all that was in her heart.” He satisfies her utterly: “Solomon told her all her questions: there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not.” It is the sight of his wisdom together with his court and his worship — the house he had built, the order of his table and servants, and “his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the LORD” — that overwhelms her: “there was no more spirit in her.” The Chronicler retells the same scene in almost identical words (2 Chronicles 9:1–12).1
What follows is why the episode mattered so much to the later tradition. The queen answers the vision of Solomon’s kingdom not with a treaty but with a confession that reaches past the king to his God. “It was a true report that I heard in mine own land… Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.” She pronounces Solomon’s servants happy to stand before him and hear his wisdom, and then blesses the LORD by name: “Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel: because the LORD loved Israel for ever, therefore made he thee king, to do judgment and justice.” Gifts pass in both directions — her hundred and twenty talents of gold and a store of spices such as never came again, and from Solomon “all her desire, whatsoever she asked” — and “she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants.” Centuries later Jesus, answering a generation that demanded a sign, makes her the standing type of the outsider whose faith will condemn the unbelieving insider: “The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.” The Gentile queen, the long journey after wisdom, and the blessing of Israel’s God are the seeds of everything the tradition would make of her.2
The earliest post-biblical retelling already re-draws the map. In Antiquities of the Jews VIII.6.5–6 Flavius Josephus (c. AD 37 – c. 100) recasts the visitor as “a woman queen of Egypt and Ethiopia” — planting Sheba in Africa rather than the Sabaean South Arabia its name most naturally denotes, and becoming the first datable witness to the Ethiopian / African localization the Kebra Nagast would later make a national charter. A few sections earlier he had named a queen of Egypt “Nicaule” out of Herodotus (Whiston conjectures the historical Nitocris), the name tradition would fasten on her — though the visit-narrative itself leaves her unnamed. Josephus Hellenizes her: she is “inquisitive into philosophy” and comes to test Solomon “by her own experience, and not by a bare hearing.” He keeps the temple worship among the wonders that overwhelm her, softens her confession from a blessing of Israel’s covenant God into praise of the God “who hath so loved this countrey… as to make thee King,” and adds a piece of Judaean lore — the prized balsam of his own land, he says, grew from a root she gave.3 Full detail »
Where Josephus made the queen a philosopher, the rabbis made her a romance — and, in the end, a demon. The fullest telling is the Targum Sheni (“Second Targum”) to Esther, an expansive Aramaic paraphrase whose long digression on Esther 1:2 has Solomon rule the beasts, birds, and demons, and dispatch a missing wild-cock — the hoopoe — to carry his letter of summons to Queen “Saba” at Kitor, “whose dust is more precious than gold.” She comes; she poses riddles (a tube of paint, naphtha, flax); and Solomon seats her over a floor of glass she takes for water, so that she lifts her skirt to wade and bares hairy legs, drawing his rebuke that hair “is becoming to a man, but to a woman it is a shame.” Beneath the jest lies a darker logic that the tradition draws out by degrees: the hairy leg is the folkloric mark of a demon, and the same stream of tradition de-genders the queen in the Babylonian Talmud (“not a woman but a kingdom,” Bava Batra 15b, reading malkat as malkhuta and pointing to the “Sheba” that raided Job), reads that raiding Sheba of Job 1:15 as Lilith in the Targum on Job, and by the medieval kabbalah — Moses de León, the Zohar — fuses the two: the Queen of Sheba becomes Lilith, a half-human seductress and child-snatching witch. The stately monarch of 1 Kings ends this stratum half woman and half jinn.4 Full detail »
Where Josephus gave the queen a homeland, the Christian Fathers gave her a meaning — and they took it from Jesus. On the strength of his own saying, “the queen of the south… came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31), they read her almost with one voice as a figure of the Gentile church: the nations, gathered from the ends of the earth, coming to the true Solomon, Christ. Origen sets the pattern (c. 240), and weaves it into the Song of Songs, where the “black but comely” bride is the Ethiopian queen and “the Church came from the nations to hear the wisdom of the true Solomon… our Lord Jesus Christ.”5 Ambrose of Milan (“the mystery of the Church, which is gathered from the ends of the earth… there the type of Solomon, here Christ in His own body”), Gregory of Nyssa (the “queen of the Ethiopians” as the Gentiles once in darkness, bringing Christ their frankincense and gold), and Ephrem the Syrian (“she is a type of the church”) carry the same reading; Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine press its dominical edge — the outsider’s faith condemns unbelieving Israel; Bede and Theophylact of Ohrid hand it on to the medieval West and the Byzantine East.6 Full detail »
The most widely read of all the later retellings keys the story not to 1 Kings but to Qur’an 27:22–44 (Surat an-Naml, “The Ant”). A hoopoe in Solomon (Sulaymān)’s bird-army brings word of a queen of Sheba whose people “prostrate to the sun instead of Allāh”; Solomon sends her a letter — “Be not haughty with me but come to me in submission” — and, when she resolves to come, has her very throne fetched to his court in an instant by “one who had knowledge from the Scripture.” At her reception she is led onto a glass pavilion (ṣarḥ) she takes for water and “uncovered her shins [to wade through],” until Solomon tells her it is “a palace [whose floor is] made smooth with glass” — whereupon she submits: “my Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I submit with Solomon to Allāh, Lord of the worlds.” The Qur’an leaves her unnamed; the commentators (al-Tabari, al-Zamakhshari, al-Baydawi) and the qisas al-anbiya of al-Tha’labi and al-Kisa’i name her Bilqis, make her mother a jinni, and read the glass-floor trick as a test of a rumour that she had hairy, ass-hooved legs — the same glass-floor / exposed-legs motif the Jewish Targum Sheni tells of her, a shared cross-tradition legend.7 Full detail »
Where the Jewish and Islamic legends made the queen a riddler, a demon, or a jinn-born convert, the Latin Middle Ages gave her a prophetic role that was distinctly Christian. In the legend of the wood of the Cross — grown out of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin tree-of-the-Cross tractates, and gathered into the most-read book of the later Middle Ages, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (c. 1260) — a single tree runs from a shoot Seth plants on Adam’s grave, through Solomon, to Calvary. Coming to visit Solomon, the Queen of Sheba alone perceives its future: “she worshipped this tree, because she said the Saviour of all the world should be hanged thereon, by whom the realm of the Jews shall be defaced and cease” — whereupon Solomon has the wood buried, to be dug up long after for the Cross. In the fuller tellings, and in the art the legend inspired, the timber is a beam or footbridge over a stream that the queen will not tread but kneels before — the stock scene painted across a whole cycle by Piero della Francesca at Arezzo (c. 1452–1466). The Gentile queen who came to marvel at Solomon’s wisdom has become the Gentile prophetess who foresees Christ’s Cross — the Christian counterpart to the Jewish and Islamic legend-growth, and the pictorial complement to the Fathers’ reading of her as the Gentile church coming to the true Solomon. It is legend and reception, not history.8 Full detail »
The last and most consequential of the traditions turns the queen into the mother of a dynasty. The Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast (“The Glory of the Kings”), names her Makeda, queen of ‘Azeb; tells how her merchant Tamrin’s report of Solomon’s wisdom draws her to Jerusalem; recounts the union Solomon wins from her by a trick of an oath and a cup of water (“after she had drunk water he worked his will with her and they slept together”); and follows their son Bayna-Lehkem — ‘Ebna Hakim, “the son of the wise man,” later fixed as Menelik I — back to his father, who anoints him king of Ethiopia under the throne-name David. As he departs, his companions carry off Zion, the Tabernacle of the Law of God (the Ark of the Covenant) by an angel’s command — “had it not been that God willed it Zion could not have been taken away” — and bring it to Ethiopia, where the book teaches God had willed it to dwell. On this narrative rests the charter of the Solomonic dynasty: a bloodline from Solomon and Sheba through Menelik, and the true Ark at Aksum — a charter written into the Ethiopian constitutions of 1931 and 1955 and running, by claim, to the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974. The Ethiopic form is fourteenth-century, its dynastic and relic claims medieval; whether either holds as history is weighed separately.9 Full detail »
Set against the ancient witnesses, critical study grades the whole Sheba tradition, and four results recur. First, the kingdom is real: the biblical Sheba is the South-Arabian caravan state of Saba (Yemen) — capital Marib, its colossal dam, its temples to the moon-god Almaqah, its own inscriptions — whose gold, spices, and gems name exactly the queen’s gifts (the material record surveyed by the 2002 British Museum exhibition Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen). Second, her historicity is disputed: a real tenth-century queen behind 1 Kings 10 is plausible — female Arabian rule and Sabaean long-distance embassy are both attested — but no contemporary source names her, and the monumental Sabaean state is best documented only from the eighth century BC, some two centuries after Solomon (Finkelstein and Silberman against Kitchen). Third, her legend is one tradition: the Jewish, Islamic, and Ethiopian retellings form a single cross-fertilizing arc that progressively demonized the queen (the shared glass-floor / hairy-legs motif, the Lilith fusion) and then domesticated her as Bilqis and Makeda (Lassner). Fourth, the Ethiopian charter is medieval: the Solomonic-descent and Ark claims rest on a single fourteenth-century source and read as a dynastic construction, not a tenth-century memory (Munro-Hay). This survey opens the contested questions — where was Sheba? was she historical? does the descent claim hold? — but settles none of them; each is weighed on its own argument page, on the evidence.10 Full detail »
The Queen of Sheba is the fullest instance of a figure who recurs across the Hebrew Bible — the God-fearing Gentile, the outsider drawn from afar “for the name” of Israel’s God, who confesses Him and whose faith indicts complacent Israel. Two questions belong together here: whether that pattern is a deliberately-developed canonical type fulfilled in the Gentile church, and whether this queen in particular is such a type. The theme runs across several timelines — see also Melchizedek, priest of El Elyon, Jethro’s conversion, Rahab in the line of Christ, Naaman’s confession, Nebuchadnezzar’s confession, and — the already-righteous pole beside these converts — Job of Uz, the God-fearer of the nations.
Beyond the single figure stands the broader thesis: that the Hebrew Bible deliberately develops the God-fearing Gentile into a canonical type, later fulfilled in the ingathering of the nations, the Gentile church. It is contested — strong by canonical and biblical-theology lights, resisted by historical-criticism. What holds is the trajectory: the narrators build the slot before they fill it (Solomon prays for “a stranger… out of a far country for thy name’s sake,” 1 Kings 8:41–43, and two chapters later the queen comes “concerning the name of the LORD,” 10:1), and the prophets programme the nations streaming to Zion (Isaiah 56:6–7; Zechariah 8:23; Malachi 1:11; Psalm 87). What outruns the evidence is the unification of a dozen particular narratives into one deliberately-constructed type fulfilled specifically in the Gentile church — a synthesis that leans on the later Second-Temple “God-fearer” category and on New-Testament and patristic reading, and that idealises confessors (Naaman’s henotheism, Nebuchadnezzar’s episodic doxologies) whose own stories are more ambiguous. Trust the trajectory; treat the packaging of the whole into a single deliberate type as the further, disputed layer.
The Fathers’ near-unanimous reading — the Queen of Sheba as a figure of the Gentile church, the nations gathered from the ends of the earth to the true Solomon, Christ — is sound as typology. It is not read into the text but drawn out of a saying of Jesus: he makes Solomon the figure and himself the reality (“a greater than Solomon is here”), and the queen is the one who answers the wisdom. Every load-bearing feature of the antitype is already in the story — a Gentile, from “the uttermost parts of the earth,” drawn by the “fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD,” who confesses that God and brings gifts — and the prophetic vision of the nations streaming to Zion names Sheba’s own gold and incense among them (Isaiah 60:6; Psalm 72:10–11). What to trust is the type; what to treat as a further, looser layer — not part of the sound core — is Origen’s identification of the queen with the Song’s “black but comely” bride and his lean on the Ethiopian localization, coherent embroidery built on catchword links rather than the Solomon→Christ type (which holds whether Sheba lay in Yemen or Africa).
Scripture never says where Sheba lay, and two localizations have been urged. The South-Arabian identification — the incense kingdom of Saba in modern Yemen (capital Marib) — is sound: the name maps directly onto the Sabaean kingdom’s own (the vowelless South Arabian script reads Sabaʾ / Shəḇaʾ alike), the Table of Nations puts a Sheba among the Arabian sons of Joktan (Genesis 10:28), and the queen’s gifts — camels of spices, gold, and precious stones — are exactly the wares the prophets fasten on Sheba, the byword for the Arabian caravan and incense trade (Ezekiel 27:22; Isaiah 60:6). The Ethiopian/Aksum localization — old (Josephus’s “queen of Egypt and Ethiopia”) and made a national charter in the Kebra Nagast — is weak as a claim about the actual homeland: it is a later re-mapping, and the African polities that could host such a queen (Dʿmt, then Aksum) post-date Solomon. Yet the two are not cleanly exclusive: Sabaean script, cult, and trade crossed the Red Sea into the Horn (the Sabaean-style temple at Yeha), which is what let the African tradition grow. A separate chronological doubt — that Saba itself is best attested only from the eighth century BC — bears on the queen’s historicity, not on which land the name denotes.
Whether a real queen made a real state visit to a real Solomon around 950 BC — the prior question to where she came from — is contested: genuinely disputed, strong by the trade historian’s lights and weak by the epigrapher’s. In its favour, the episode is credible in its general shape: Saba was a real, wealthy caravan kingdom (Marib, the dam, the frankincense road); the queen’s gifts of gold, spices, and gems match its trade exactly (Ezekiel 27:22; Isaiah 60:6); female Arabian rule is attested by the Assyrian “queens of the Arabs” (Zabibe, Samsi, and others); and Saba itself is documented sending an embassy to a distant great king (Itamra’s tribute to Sargon II, c. 715 BC). Against it: no contemporary inscription names the queen or the visit; the monumental Sabaean state and its royal inscriptions are best attested only from the eighth century BC, some two centuries after Solomon (Finkelstein and Silberman against Kitchen); the attested Arabian queens are later North-Arabian rulers, not tenth-century Sabaeans; and the narrative is the shaped climax of the Solomon-glory cycle. The evidence supports the plausibility of such a queen, not the fact of this one — a credible type without a confirmable token; possibility is not proof, and the silence of an age whose epigraphic habit begins later is not disproof.
The Ethiopian charter — that the Queen of Sheba was Makeda, bore Solomon the son Menelik I, and that Menelik’s company carried the true Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, founding a Solomonic line — is weak as history, though it remains historically significant as the living charter of a dynasty. Its two load-bearing claims, weighed separately, fail on the same grounds. The genealogical claim rests on a single fourteenth-century source (the Kebra Nagast) with no early or independent attestation, and reads best as a medieval dynastic accretion: it appears exactly when the “restored” Solomonic line needed a pedigree (from 1270), and the Zagwe king Lalibela before it had claimed descent from Moses, not Solomon. The relic claim — kept distinct and not dismissed for requiring a miracle (the possibility that God could relocate the Ark is not proof that He did) — is likewise late and single-sourced; Stuart Munro-Hay’s investigation concludes the Aksum church has guarded a tabot (an altar-tablet, as every Ethiopian church holds), not the biblical Ark. What is real is not the tenth-century-BC history but the charter itself, which shaped a dynasty and a church for seven centuries.
The visit and its wonder (KJV): “And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones… And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not” (1 Kings 10:1–3); “And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built… and his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the LORD; there was no more spirit in her” (1 Kings 10:4–5). The parallel account is 2 Chronicles 9:1–12 (“she came to prove Solomon with hard questions at Jerusalem… and there was nothing hid from Solomon which he told her not”). ↩
The confession, the gifts, and the departure: “the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard… Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel” (1 Kings 10:7–9); “And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store… And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked… So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants” (1 Kings 10:10–13). The saying of Jesus at the demand for a sign: “The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42; par. Luke 11:31, “the men of this generation”). ↩
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews VIII.6.5–6 (Niese §§165–175), in William Whiston’s translation (Penelope, University of Chicago): “There was then a woman Queen of Egypt and Ethiopia: she was inquisitive into philosophy… she being desirous to be satisfied by her own experience, and not by a bare hearing… They say also that we possess the root of that balsam which our countrey still bears by this woman’s gift.” The name “Nicaule” (Whiston’s note: “Perhaps Nitocris”) is given at VIII.6.2 (§158) to a queen of Egypt out of Herodotus; the visit-narrative leaves her unnamed. Fuller quotation and context on the Josephus detail page. On his dates and the completion of the Antiquities c. AD 93–94: “Josephus,” Wikipedia. ↩
The rabbinic legend is drawn together on the detail page. The Targum Sheni to Esther (the hoopoe / “cock of the wood,” the letter to Kitor, the three riddles, and the glass floor at which the queen bares “hair on her feet” — “hair is becoming to a man, but to a woman it is a shame”) is quoted from Paulus Cassel, An Explanatory Commentary on Esther (Edinburgh, 1888), Appendix I, pp. 275–284; a fragment is mapped at Sefaria. The Talmud’s de-gendering (“malkat Sheva… the kingdom [malkhuta] of Sheba… ‘And Sheba fell on them’ (Job 1:15)”) is Bava Batra 15b (Davidson); Job 1:15’s “Sheba” is read as Lilith (“Queen of Zemargad”) in the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Lilith.” The kabbalistic Queen-of-Sheba = Lilith identification is reported by Gershom Scholem, “Lilith,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, who traces its origin to the Targum on Job 1:15, notes that the Zohar itself only hints at the demon-queen material, and names Joseph Angelino’s Livnat ha-Sappir as the explicit locus (the queen’s riddles as a reprise of Lilith’s seduction of Adam) — reported here at one remove through that survey; no clean verse-anchored Zohar passage naming the queen was located. On the Targum Sheni’s late-Byzantine / early-Islamic date, “Targum Sheni,” Wikipedia; the standard study of the whole demonizing arc is Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba (Chicago, 1993). ↩
Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs II (on Song 1:5, “I am black but comely”), in the digitised translation: “these things so greatly befit the person of the Church which comes from the nations to Christ… according to her figure, the Church came from the nations to hear the wisdom of the true Solomon… our Lord Jesus Christ”; the bride as “that Ethiopian woman… black indeed for the ignobility of my race, but beautiful because of repentance and faith.” Cf. Origen, Fragment on Matthew 277 (on Matthew 12:42): “The church of the Gentiles, which in truth is gathered ‘from the ends of the earth,’ fulfills the place of the queen of the south… the true Solomon… who is Christ.” Written c. 240; on the date, “Origen,” Wikipedia. Fuller quotation and the whole chorus on the Fathers’ detail page. ↩
Ambrose of Milan, Exposition of the Gospel of Luke 7.96 (text): “the mystery of the Church, which is gathered from the ends of the earth… there the type of Solomon, here Christ in His own body.” Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 7, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Luke 11: “as she was queen of the Ethiopians… so in the beginning the Church of the Gentiles was in darkness… thither came the Gentiles, and offered to Christ the frankincense of piety, the gold of divine knowledge.” Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron 11.4: “she is a type of the church.” Jerome, Commentary on Matthew (on 12:42), text (“the faith of the Gentiles is significantly set above that of Israel”); John Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew 43, text; Augustine, Sermon 72A.1, text; Bede, On the Gospel of Luke, text; Theophylact of Ohrid, Commentary on Luke (on 11:31), text. All collected, with fuller quotation, on the Fathers’ detail page. ↩
The Islamic narrative is drawn together on the detail page. The Qur’an is quoted from the Saheeh International translation as displayed verse-by-verse at Quran.com (the hoopoe’s report from Sheba, 27:22–24; the letter “Be not haughty with me but come to me in submission,” 27:29–31; the throne fetched “before your glance returns to you,” 27:40; and the glass pavilion at which “she thought it was a body of water and uncovered her shins… I submit with Solomon to Allāh, Lord of the worlds,” 27:44). The Qur’an leaves her unnamed; the name Bilqis (from Greek pallakís / Hebrew pilegesh, “concubine”), the Himyarite genealogy, the jinn-mother, and the hairy legs are supplied by the commentators (al-Tabari, al-Zamakhshari, al-Baydawi) and the qisas al-anbiya of al-Tha’labi (d. 1035) and al-Kisa’i — see “Queen of Sheba,” Wikipedia (Islamic tradition) and Encyclopædia Britannica. On the glass-floor / hairy-legs motif shared with the Targum Sheni and its reading as a “demonizing” of the queen, the standard study is Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba (Chicago, 1993). ↩
The medieval Christian legend is drawn together on the detail page. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, “The Invention of the Holy Cross” (compiled c. 1260), trans. William Caxton (1483): “And when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, she worshipped this tree, because she said the Saviour of all the world should be hanged thereon, by whom the realm of the Jews shall be defaced and cease. Solomon for this cause made it to be taken up and dolven deep in the ground” — and the queen is named among the five “finders” of the Cross (“of Solomon in the Mount of Lebanon, and of the Queen of Sheba in the temple of Solomon”). Text in the reader’s edition of Caxton by Richard Stracke, christianiconography.info, and the Golden Legend, vol. 3, Fordham Medieval Sourcebook. On the wood-of-the-Cross legend’s roots (the Gospel of Nicodemus; the Latin tree-of-the-Cross tractates) and on Piero della Francesca’s cycle at Arezzo (c. 1452–1466), whose panel “The Queen of Sheba in Adoration of the Wood” shows her kneeling before the beam, see “True Cross” and “The Legend of the True Cross,” Wikipedia; on the Legenda Aurea itself, “Golden Legend,” Wikipedia. ↩
The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast (“The Glory of the Kings”) is quoted from E. A. Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (London, 1922): Makeda and the merchant Tamrin (§§21–24); the union — “after she had drunk water he worked his will with her and they slept together” (§30); the birth of Bayna-Lehkem / ‘Ebna Hakim, later Menelik I (§32), and his anointing as king under the name David (§§33–39); and the taking of Zion — “had it not been that God willed it Zion could not have been taken away forthwith” (§48). On the fourteenth-century date (the colophon’s translation in the reign of ‘Amda Seyon I, c. 1314–1322) and the book as charter of the Solomonic dynasty restored in 1270, see Budge’s Introduction and “Kebra Nagast” and “Solomonic dynasty,” Wikipedia (the 1931/1955 constitutional descent-formula; Haile Selassie deposed 1974). Fuller quotation and context on the Kebra Nagast detail page. ↩
The modern grading of the whole tradition is drawn together on the survey page. On the archaeology of Saba and Marib and the South-Arabian identification: Joshua J. Mark, “Kingdom of Saba,” World History Encyclopedia; Kenneth A. Kitchen, Documentation for Ancient Arabia (Liverpool University Press, 1994–2000); and St John Simpson (ed.), Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (British Museum Press, 2002). On the historicity debate (florescence “only in the eighth century B.C.”): Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (Free Press, 2001), weighed on the historicity argument. On the demonizing tradition: Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba (University of Chicago Press, 1993). On the Ethiopian charter and the Ark: Stuart Munro-Hay, The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant (I. B. Tauris, 2005), weighed on the Solomonic-descent argument. ↩