Thursday, June 8, 2023

Martin Heide and Joris Peters on the Historicity of the Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon (1 Kings 10)

  

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 Aituv 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)