Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

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.

The Qur'an gives the episode a full narrative. Sulayman, who has been taught the speech of birds and commands jinn as well as people, reviews the birds and finds the hoopoe missing; it returns with news of a kingdom ruled by a woman with a mighty throne, whose people prostrate to the sun. A letter is sent, the queen consults her nobles and observes that kings when they enter a town ruin it, and sends a gift instead, which is refused. Sulayman then asks which of those present can bring him her throne, and one who has knowledge of the book says he will do it before his glance returns to him, and it is there. Invited into the palace, she takes the polished floor for a pool and uncovers her legs, and on being told what it is says that she has wronged herself and submits with Sulayman to the Lord of the worlds. Later Islamic tradition names her Bilqis; the Qur'an does not.

The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, compiled in Ge'ez and reaching its surviving form in the fourteenth century, tells the visit as the origin of a dynasty. The queen is Makeda; Solomon obtains her by a trick involving a spiced meal and a promise about taking nothing without asking; and their son Menelik, returning to Jerusalem as a young man, leaves with the Ark of the Covenant, brought to Aksum where the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that it remains. The claim of descent from that union was written into the Ethiopian constitution and was the formal basis of the Solomonic line until the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which makes this one of the few cases where a narrative about Solomon operated as constitutional law within living memory.