The Hebrew account is short. A queen of Sheba hears of the fame of Solomon and comes to test him with hard questions, arriving with a very great retinue and camels bearing spices, gold and precious stones. She puts to him everything on her mind and he answers all of it; she sees the house he has built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, the dress of his servants and the ascent by which he goes up to the house of God, and there is no more spirit in her. She says that the report she heard in her own land was true but that the half was not told her, gives an enormous quantity of gold and spices, receives whatever she desires in return, and goes home. The passage says nothing about who she was, where Sheba lay, or what happened afterward, and the parallel account in Chronicles adds nothing material.
That silence is the whole reason for what followed. A visit with no stated outcome and a queen with no name became one of the most productive narrative seeds in the Abrahamic world, taken up in Jewish midrash, in the Qur'an, in Ethiopian dynastic history, and in a wide body of legend about riddles, about the hairiness of her legs, and about a glass floor mistaken for water, this last a motif that circulates in both Jewish and Islamic sources and whose direction of borrowing is not settled.