by Tosca Lee
I feasted Tamrin in the palace where he delivered gifts and horses sent out to camp before the festival. There were shadows around his eyes and I knew he was already restless, though he promised to visit again in spring.
“The king has said it will never be safe for you to return,” he said when we were alone. And I knew he, too, loved the king in his own way. “Not when it is discovered what you have brought south for safekeeping.”
At the time I assumed he meant the son in my belly.
The spring rains came and the fields turned green. The Levite priests were uncomfortable in my capital, where there was far too much talk of Almaqah. That fall, I sent them across the sea with their cargo, to Punt. I did not understand their loyalty to that golden box, but the day I saw them carry it from the palace, I noticed for the first time that the poles seemed not as long as I remembered the night the king first took me down to the hidden room.
I bid them safe journey in the name of Yaweh and returned to the palace, at peace.
To raise a son, a nation.
EPILOGUE
The ships have come as they do every three years. One fleet south, to Punt. Another east, to Saba’s port in Aden. They are majestic, but not like the caravans I looked forward to all these years. They have not been the same since Tamrin’s passing on the incense road he loved so well. I hope often that he found his destination, somewhere on that journey.
It is the first year Menelik will receive them, I tell the captain proudly. The first fleet he will welcome as king.
The captain wants to know if I miss the throne I abdicated. No, I say, it is much quieter in Punt, except for the cicadas. Yafush, who sits, rather than stands, beside me these days, agrees.
But now, I ask, does he have something for me?
He delivers the scroll, as he has so many times. But this time he sighs.
The king has gone, he says, to walk with his fathers. This will be the last one.
My fingers tremble. I want to be alone.
When I am, I clasp the scroll to my breast before breaking it open. As I read his last song the tears come, but they are not sad.
He has remembered the garden.
He has finished the story, at last.
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm,
For love is as strong as death . . .
Many waters cannot quench love,
Neither can floods drown it.
Make haste, my beloved.
AFTERWORD
Solomon’s unified kingdom broke apart during the reign of his successor, Rehoboam, splitting the ten tribes of Israel in the north from the two tribes of Judah in the south. Jeroboam, returned from Egypt, led the rebellion of the northern tribes after Rehoboam not only refused to lighten the north’s labor but proclaimed he would increase it tenfold. Jeroboam ruled Israel for twenty-two years, and Rehoboam in Judah for seventeen. The two rulers were at war for the duration of their reigns.
Pharaoh Shishak (Sheshonq I, founder of the Twenty-second “Libyan” Dynasty) invaded northern Israel in the fifth year of Rehoboam’s reign, capturing several cities, including Megiddo, and reclaiming Gezer in the process. The famous Bubastite gate in the temple to Amun I in Karnak depicts Sheshonq I carrying off “the treasures of the House of Yaweh and the treasures of the royal palace,” along with Solomon’s golden shields. Jerusalem itself is not mentioned in the list of conquered cities on the gate, whereas it is the only city mentioned in the biblical account. Scholars theorize Jeroboam staved off attack on the capital by paying the items as tribute. Judah subsequently became a vassal state of Egypt.
The Ark of the Covenant seems to have survived Shishak’s invasion (as evidenced by King Josiah returning it to the temple in 2 Chronicles 35:1–6—its only other mention after Solomon’s time), but disappears from scripture and history both sometime before or around the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 589-587 BC when Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple to the ground and razed Jerusalem. The ark, however, is not mentioned in the 2 Kings list of Nebuchadnezzar’s spoils, even though items as small as dishes are. Nor is it listed among the items returned to Jerusalem by Cyrus in the Book of Ezra.
Menelik, the son of the queen of Sheba and King Solomon according to Ethiopian legend, became the first king in the Solomonic Dynasty of Ethiopia—a succession of kings who ruled for 3,000 years until the end of the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
After the sheer volume of research that went into the writing of Iscariot, I naïvely thought reconstructing Sheba’s queen from fragments of history a thousand years earlier would be easy in comparison. In fact, unearthing the enigmatic queen proved a new adventure in hair-pulling for opposite reasons.
Sheba’s queen appears in three major works: the Bible, the Quran, and the Kebra Nagast: The Glory of the Kings—the 700-plus-year-old origin story of the Solomonic kings of Ethiopia; Ethiopia’s conversion from the worship of the sun, moon, and stars to the God of Israel; and how the Ark of the Covenant came to purportedly reside in Ethiopia. All three works are considered inspired by their devotees.* All three contain the queen’s legendary journey to visit King Solomon in Israel. But their commonality stops there.
To Jews and Christians, the queen of Sheba is the unnamed Old Testament sovereign of the southern spice lands who visited Solomon with four and a half tons of gold, confirmed his power, and blessed his god—the same queen Jesus proclaims in the gospels will judge the generation of Israel that condemned him. To Muslims, she is the Arabian queen Bilqis, who traveled to pay homage to Israel’s king and converted to the worship of Allah. To Ethiopians, she is Makeda, a woman tricked by Solomon into sleeping with him, who converts to the worship of Yaweh and becomes the mother of a 3,000-year-old dynasty of kings.
Sheba’s queen is also mentioned by the historian Josephus as Nikaulis, the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia, despite the fact that there was no reigning queen in Egypt at the time of Solomon according to most chronologies. Apocryphal books list Sheba’s queen as the product of a lineage of queens, but the historical and archaeological record give no indication of queens ruling in southern Arabia.
What can we truly know of this tenth-century BC queen? The short answer: very little. To believers of the biblical and Quranic accounts or Ethiopian legend, her life is fact. To the historian, her existence is dubious at best.
The Sabaean kingdom spanned the Red Sea from ancient Yemen to Ethiopia. The Sabaeans no doubt existed; the ruins of their temples, dams, and cities are the subject of decades of excavation and research. Sabaean script appears both in Yemen and colonies in ancient D’mt, which would centuries later become the kingdom of Aksum.
The veracity and longevity of the Incense Route is undisputed: Neo-Assyrian texts document trade between Southern Arabia and the Middle Euphrates as early as the beginning of the ninth century, with trade between Southern Arabia and the Levant probably originating a thousand years earlier. Scholars believe that the core account of 1 Kings 10:1–13 was likely written around the tenth century BC, well within this time frame. Pieces of a bronze Sabaean inscription dated ca. 600 BC depict the ibex heads so pervasive in Sabaean art and document trade between Southern Arabia and the “towns of Judah.”
Tantalizing finds point to Solomon and Sheba. In 2012, an archaeological team in northern Ethiopia discovered a twenty-foot stone stele inscribed with the sun and crescent moon, fragments of Sabaean script, and the columns of a temple to the moon god near the shaft to an ancient gold mine. Farther north, copper mines in Edom point to organized activity in the tenth century BC—and an interruption of that activity around the time of Shishak/Sheshonq I’s invasion.
Even so, to say the archaeological record of Sheba’s queen—and Solomon, for that matter—is scant would be generous. Findings specific to either sovereign have yet to be discovered.
In the 1980s, the Israel Museum purchased a 3,000-year-old ivory pomegranate from an anonymous collector. The thumb-sized o
rnament, carved of hippopotamus bone with a hole in the bottom, was thought to top the scepter of a priest. Its inscription read: “Belonging to the Temple of the Lord (Yahweh), holy to the priests,” proving at last the existence of the first temple, built by Solomon. The inscription, however, was declared a forgery in 2004, with the pomegranate itself predating the first temple period.
According to the Quran, the queen was a worshipper of the sun. Shams, the sun goddess, was known and worshipped in ancient Yemen along with a host of other gods, depending on where one lived. The god Almaqah is widespread in surviving texts, and ruins of ibex-adorned temples dot the Sabaean territory. Scholars, however, do not agree on whether Almaqah was a lunar or solar deity.
Though we are given far more about the life of King Solomon (who reigned roughly 970-930 BC by most chronologies) than of Sheba’s queen, he wears a slightly different face in each of the three major accounts that mention him. In the Bible, he is the all-wise king who ultimately failed to follow the dictates of Yaweh—who granted him the knowledge he asked for and the riches and power he did not. In the Quran, he speaks the language of animals and even insects, learns about Sheba’s queen from the curious hoopoe bird, and commands jinns to deliver her throne to him before her arrival. Arabic legend says he forced her to reveal the true nature of her feet with a pool of water in his throne room.
In the Kebra Nagast, he is the wily king who resorts to trickery again—this time to persuade the queen to sleep with him. He later loses the Ark of the Covenant to the Judean honor guard he sends home with Menelik after his son’s visit. According to lore, Solomon only intended to send a copy of the ark with Menelik so that he might worship Yaweh in his faraway home. But Menelik, concerned about Solomon’s growing apostasy, has the guard smuggle the true ark out of Jerusalem, leaving the forgery in its place. Today many Beta Israel “Black Jews” of Ethiopia claim lineage from Menelik’s Israelite cohort. (Others claim descent from the ancient tribe of Dan.)
Though evidence of a royal city near Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and other buildings dating to the time of Solomon confirm biblical references to his projects, many scholars dispute the claims of Solomon’s wealth and influence as inflated.
And so we turn from here to that mystical third player in this drama: the ark.
The idea of an ark as a battle standard is not unique to Israel. The markab served a similar purpose in wartime, though to my knowledge was never infused with the spiritual power of Israel’s Ark of the Covenant—a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Gold chests containing sacred objects occur throughout ancient history. (Such a processional chest discovered in Tutankhamen’s tomb elicited a flurry of sensationalism in 1922. The dimensions for the pylon-shaped chest, however, were not the same as those for the Ark of the Covenant, and Tutankhamen’s “ark” bore the likeness of Anubis.)
What really happened to the Ark of the Covenant has been the subject of countless searches, legends, conspiracy theories—and of course Hollywood movies—ranging from locations in Israel, Egypt, Arabia, Ireland, France, and even the U.S. by more than a few Indiana Jones look-alikes.
The obvious answer is that the ark was taken by Nebuchadnezzar in his 587 BC siege of Jerusalem. The ark, however, is not mentioned among the list of goods seized from the temple in 2 Kings 25:13–15 or Jeremiah 52:17–22—a list that details items taken from the temple columns and bronze sea cauldron, down to shovels, dishes, and wick-trimmers. Only the apocryphal 4 Ezra 10:19–22 mentions the plundering of the ark—a book generally thought to have been written 90-100 AD and in response to Roman invasion. I find it incredible that Jeremiah, the “Weeping Prophet,” would fail to mourn the capture of the ark in his musings. Nor is the ark listed in the items returned by Cyrus to Israel in the Book of Ezra.
According to 2 Maccabees, Jeremiah buried the ark in a cave on Mount Nebo just east of Jerusalem prior to the invasion, keeping it “until the time that God should gather His people again together.” In The Lost Ark of the Covenant (2008), Tudor Parfitt postulates it was later removed from Israel to Yemen.
Most interesting to me for the purpose of this book is the tradition of the ark and ark replicas in Ethiopia. Every Ethiopian Orthodox Church keeps a tabot—a stone slab representing the tablets of the ark or a replica of the ark itself. Without a tabot, the church is not considered consecrated. That said, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church also claims to have the real thing. Ask the guardian of the ark—a monk of no other name committed to the lifelong office of tending the holy relic in secret—at the Chapel of the Tablet in Aksum and he will attest that the ark is under his protection. The only downside is that he’s the only one allowed to see it.
Given the tradition of ark replicas, one “conspiracy” theory caught my eye in particular—an idea based on the peculiar attention given to the length of the ark’s poles when it was installed in the temple (2 Chronicles 5:9). Also, according to 1 Kings 8:9 and 2 Chronicles 5:10, there was “nothing in the ark” other than the two stone tablets of Moses, excluding mention of the jar of manna and Aaron’s budded staff. The theory here being that a fake with much longer poles was installed in the temple and the true ark hidden, ostensibly, for safe-keeping.
Others believe the ark still resides in Jerusalem and that all questions will be answered the day the mount is better excavated—which may be very long in coming due to the extreme sensitivity of the site where the Dome of the Rock sits today. That said, the Temple Mount Sifting Project, dedicated to excavating the debris of a hole dug (to great criticism) into the temple platform in 1996-1999 to build the El-Marwani Mosque, has unearthed some spectacular finds in the 20 percent of rubble sifted so far. You can follow the progress of the project at: templemount.wordpress.com.
Jerusalem is rife with underground tunnels, including the one by which David famously took the city (possibly discovered in 2008 by Dr. Eilat Mazar), and a tunnel system adjacent to the Western Wall. No doubt many more tunnels lay hidden beneath the Temple Mount.
A couple of additional notes:
1. I’ve no doubt committed a cultural sin in eliminating the aleph (’) and other notations from Sabaean proper nouns in order to spare readers (and myself) names such as Amm’amar, Ma’dkarib, dht-Ba’dån.
2. Bilqis’ “fearless or reckless” ibex urn is imagined, though the statue of Astarte with the wax plugs in her breasts is based on a figurine of the goddess discovered in Tutugi, Spain, that dates to the sixth or seventh century and performs the same “miracle.” Religious machinations were not unknown in the ancient world—and about to get more common.
In the end, even though Solomon and the queen of Sheba have yet to show themselves in the archaeological record, they are as vividly alive as though their palaces still stand to the Ethiopians who claim the queen of Sheba as a vital part of their national identity and to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, for whom the veracity of David and Solomon’s unified kingdom underpins the unfolding story of their faith.
As for me, I assert that we don’t need artifacts to know something of either monarch: their questions, foibles, hurts, joys, triumphs, and losses are not unique—they are, in fact, the same as our own . . . if only with a little more gold.
* Other sources that proved invaluable to me:
Queen of Sheba: Treasures From Ancient Yemen, edited by St. John Simpson (Trustees of the British Museum, 2002)
Sheba: Through the Desert in Search of the Legendary Queen, Nicholas Clapp (Nicholas Clapp, 2001)
Ancient South Arabia: From the Queen of Sheba to the Advent of Islam, Klaus Schippmann (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001)
Arabia Felix: From the Time of the Queen of Sheba, Jean-François Breton (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999)
Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, Robert G. Hoyland (Routledge, 2001)
Solomon & Sheba: Inner Marriage and Individuation, Barbara Black Koltuv (Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 1993)
Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger (Penguin, 2007)
Of additiona
l interest:
From Eden to Exile: The Epic History of the People of the Bible, David Rohl (Arrow Books, 2003)
The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant, Graham Hancock (Arrow Books, 1997)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book is a journey of a thousand thank-yous and amazing companions—those who plan the route, travel alongside us, come to our aid, direct and encourage . . . and then, miraculously, do it all again.
Thank you to my readers for your intrepid souls, your encouragement, your bacon anecdotes, and for keeping me company through my marathon sprees. Every book is for you.
The pathfinders: Dan Raines and Meredith Smith of Creative Trust, who have yet to (visibly) flinch at my next harebrained idea. Jeanie Kaserman, who reads print so fine it cannot be seen by the naked eye.
My editor, Becky Nesbitt, and assistant editor, Amanda Demastus, who carve beauty from the storm of my early drafts. Jonathan Merkh, Rob Birkhead, Brandi Lewis, Jennifer Smith, Bonnie MacIsaac, Chris Long, Bruce Gore, and the entire team at Howard, thank you for your excellence.
Cindy Conger, who keeps me on track and sane. Mark Dahmke, who helped me search the ancient sky. Meredith Efken, who plodded through the early stages with me over Korean tacos. Stephen Parolini, who ran alongside me through the first draft with off-handed Star Wars references—your hilarity keeps me from hating you for your brilliance.
The experts: Dallas Baptist University professor of Old Testament Dr. Joe Cathey, who never exhausts of my myriad weird questions. Professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa Dr. Robert L. Dise Jr., Pastor Jeff Scheich, and new friend Jon Culver—thank you for lending your experience, intellect, and time.