Suggest an Edit — Queen of Sheba

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Biography

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The Queen of Sheba is known primarily from the Hebrew Bible, where she appears as an unnamed monarch who visited King Solomon in Jerusalem. According to 1 Kings 10:1-13 and the parallel account in 2 Chronicles 9:1-12, she had heard of Solomon's fame concerning the name of the Lord and came to test him with hard questions. She arrived with a very great retinue, camels bearing spices, a great quantity of gold, and precious stones. After Solomon answered all her questions and she observed the wisdom of his court, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the burnt offerings he made at the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her. She blessed the Lord, Solomon's God, and they exchanged gifts; Solomon gave her all she desired before she returned to her own land. The biblical text does not name her, does not give her parentage or dates, and does not describe a marriage or children. The land of Sheba is most often identified by modern scholars with the kingdom of Saba in South Arabia, corresponding roughly to parts of present-day Yemen, a region known from inscriptions for incense trade and monumental architecture in the first millennium BCE. A minority of interpretations have linked Sheba with the Horn of Africa.

Later Jewish literature expanded the story. The Talmud and midrashim discuss her riddles and, in some strands, associate her with demonic ancestry, while the first-century historian Josephus calls her the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia and names her Nikaulis. The New Testament refers to her as the queen of the South who came from the ends of the earth to hear Solomon's wisdom and who will rise in judgment with that generation (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31). In the Qur'an (Surah 27, an-Naml), Solomon's hoopoe reports a queen who and her people worship the sun; Solomon summons her, her throne is miraculously transported, and she eventually submits with Solomon to God. Islamic tradition commonly names her Bilqis. Commentators such as al-Tabari and later storytellers developed elaborate legends about her origin, a possible jinn mother, a throne of extraordinary workmanship, and her encounter with Solomon; some versions include marriage. These accounts belong to religious and folkloric literature and are not independently corroborated by contemporary South Arabian or Israelite inscriptions.

Ethiopian tradition, given written form in the Kebra Nagast (compiled in Ge'ez, probably in the thirteenth or fourteenth century from earlier materials), identifies the queen as Makeda, ruler of Ethiopia. In that narrative she visits Solomon, is impressed by his wisdom, and conceives a son, Menelik I, who later visits his father, is anointed, and brings the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. This story underpinned the ideology of the Solomonic dynasty, which claimed descent from Menelik until the twentieth century, and it remains important in Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo identity. Historians regard the Kebra Nagast as a medieval work of national and religious legend rather than a historical chronicle of the tenth century BCE. Claims of her tomb at sites such as Axum, or in other regions including Timbuktu in later folklore, are not supported by verifiable archaeological evidence tied to a historical individual.

No birth year, death year, birthplace, or burial place for the Queen of Sheba can be verified from contemporary historical sources. Sabaean inscriptions from Yemen document kings and, more rarely, queens, and they attest a wealthy incense-trading kingdom capable of long-distance diplomacy, which makes a royal journey of the biblical type culturally plausible. They do not, however, name a queen who visited Jerusalem. The figure therefore stands at the intersection of biblical narrative, Jewish and Islamic legend, and Ethiopian royal tradition. She has been a subject of art, literature, and music from the Middle Ages onward, including medieval Christian typology that sometimes paired her visit with the Magi or with the Church coming to Christ, but she is not a canonized saint of the Roman Catholic Church with an assigned feast day in the General Roman Calendar, nor did she hold the office of pope or patriarch.

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