Historical
Considerations
It may be
difficult to prove and/or accept every detail surrounding the visit of the
queen of Sheba according to 1 Kgs 10 at face value, explaining why not a few
scholars have dismissed the story as fiction. However, the narrative does not present
itself as such and does clearly refrain from unrealistic embellishments.
Although there is little doubt that the Hebrew Bible was edited at a later
stage, the Former Prophets definitely included earlier traditions and dwelled
on important historical events that took place well before the text was
composed, edited, and transmitted (Uziel and Shai 2007, 163-64; Emerton 2006).
Unfortunately,
there are no extrabiblical sources explicitly mentioning David, Solomon, or the
queen of Sheba, but this lack of evidence is not very surprising, given that “all
Syro-Palestinian inscriptions of the tenth century refer to local affairs and
shed no light on international relations” (Na’aman 1997a, 58). In addition, the
distant wester campaigns of the Assyrian kings, who usually documented
interactions with foreign rulers on nonperishable materials, did not begin
until the ninth century BC. Moreover, textual information was once written on
soft materials, such as papyrus, may have been lost.
Although
King Solomon is nowhere mentioned, his dynasty, and therewith his father’s
name, is referred in the famous Tel Dan stela (ninth century BC), where the
Davidic dynasty is called the “house of David” (בית דוד Aḥituv 2008, 472).
One of the
major achievements of Solomon’s reign was the building of the temple in
Jerusalem. Circumstantial evidence from archaeology lends support to the claim
that the temple of Jerusalem and its implements “were more likely built during
the time of King Solomon than in any other period of the history of Israel and
Judah” (Zwickel 2015, 151; cf. Mazar 2014, 360; Dever 2017, 352). The nucleus
of the relevant text (1 Kgs 5:15-9:9), even though it seems to have a
complicated literary history, was most likely composed in the latter part of
Solomon’s reign (Galil 2012). Furthermore, Shoshenq I’s/Shishaks (Sagrillo
2015) raid through the central Judean hill country in the later tenth century
BC (1 Kgs 14:25-28) must have been inspired by the existence of a substantial
political power in the Levant, in this case believed to be Judah (Dever 2017,
334; Kitchen 2017; Mazar 2010, 30-31; cf. Lemaire 2009).
It is noteworthy
that Israelite and Judahite kings mentioned in inscription are attested in the
times and sequence as outlined in the book of Kings, while no king unknown from
both books appears to them (cf. Hendel and Joosten 2018, 106-7). The recollection
of major foreign kings, such as Shishak and Hiram, is also accurate, and minor
kingdoms, such as Moab, are attested as well. Mentions of foreign kings are
associated with the right places and times, except for Ben-Hadad, whose
identity poses some difficulties (Halpern and Lemaire 2010, 136). Taken
together, the foregoing strongly suggests that the queen of Sheba is not a
fictive person and that her appearance has bene recollected accurately.
However,
relative to the queen of Sheba herself, there is, so far, no evidence for her
existence from the earliest ASA inscriptions onward. Therefore, the queen of
Sheba has sometimes been associated with North Arabian queens, such as Samsi or
Sabibe (cf. Retsö 2003, 173-76). Others, such as Kenneth Kitchen (2010, 382),
regard the queen of Sheba “as the consort of a ruling mukar-rib (paramount
ruler) of Saba who gave her executive power to bargain with Solomon on trade
matters.” Nevertheless, André Lemaire (2010, xxii) provides a condensed version
of a historian’s skepticism toward 1 Kgs 10: “It is always difficult for a
historian to appreciate a tradition that is mentioned only once in a historical
record, especially when that record consists of a complex literary tradition within
a book, the last redaction of which is probably to be dated more than four
centuries after the initial event and about twenty-five centuries ago. It is
all the more difficult that this event would have taken place in the tenth
century BC, a generally obscure enough period in the history of the ancient Near
East.” Lemaire thinks that some details of the narrative reveal deuteronomistic
ideology and should be regarded as secondary (xiii; cf. Briend 1996). After a
careful consideration of the meagre inscriptional and archaeological evidence
from neighboring cultures of the tenth century BC, he finally concludes that “this
diplomatic Sabean embassy could well have been historical” (xxiv). More recent
inscriptional evidence from Yemen lends support to this conclusion, strengthening
the case for a well-established Sabaean hegemony early in the first millennium
BC (§5.1.1.2). Behind the story of King Solomon and the queen of
Sheba is at least the historical awareness that there were trade relations
connecting Palestine and south Arabia from the early first millennium BC (Nebes
2014, 15; cf. Master 2014, 89). (Martin Heide and Joris Peters, Camels in
the Biblical World [History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant 10; University
Park, Pa.: Eisenbrauns, 2021], 260-61)
