*Originally published on May 9, 2023.
Ideas53:59The Many Afterlives of the Queen of Sheba
To some, the Queen of Sheba is a holy figure. To others, she's a demon in disguise.
She's been portrayed as a politically astute diplomat in certain accounts — and a vainglorious seductress in others' retellings of her life.
She's been immortalized in music by Handel, Beyonce and the Dolly Dots; portrayed on screen by Barnum and Bailey; and brought to life on screen by Gina Lollobridigida and Halle Berry.
Debates over the Queen of Sheba have roiled for centuries. Was she a human or a djinn? A wise woman or a temptress? And — given the lack of archaeological evidence — was she a real historical figure, or a figment of multiple imaginations?
"Her life has been highlighted by so many people, only to knock her down and say that she didn't exist or she's not good. Just think how powerful that personality must have been in the history of all our cultures — Christianity, Judaism, Islam and in some African countries as well," said anthropologist Shahla Haeri, author of The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority, Gender.
"Her DNA is in our very culture."
A wise woman and a diplomat
The Queen of Sheba appears in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran, and the Kebra Nagast — a medieval text often described as the "national epic of Ethiopia." Each account revolves around her meeting with Solomon, son of David and king of the Israelites, in Jerusalem sometime roughly between 900 and 1000 BC.
In the Hebrew Bible she is a wealthy monarch who comes to test Solomon with "hard riddles" and leaves astonished and impressed by what she saw. In the Kebra Nagast, she is a philosopher-queen who enters into a dialogue with Solomon because of her love of wisdom, and later has a child with him. In the Quran, she is summoned to Solomon's court after he hears stories of a powerful but heretical queen who worships the sun.
The story in the Quran highlights her wisdom and prowess as a diplomat. After receiving a threatening letter from Solomon, she consults her advisers.
"They say, look, we all are men of war. We are willing to follow your orders. Tell us what to do. And we will wage battle royale on your behalf," said Haeri.
"And she says, No, no, this is important. We can't take it lightly. When kings attack a village, a place they subject the people to misery … So she goes on an act of diplomacy herself.
"She saved herself and her people. But this has been completely forgotten by the exegetes and the biographers who seem to have been fixated on the sexual dynamics," said Haeri.
The era of the exegetes
The Queen of Sheba's story morphed dramatically when it was taken up by exegetes, the interpreters of passages in holy texts like the Bible or the Quran.
"She comes from beyond the known region and then disappears into the unknown," said Jillian Stinchcomb, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. "So there are what I would call loud silences around this figure … there's breathing room for exegetes and interpreters to project their own creativity and to have space to think with this figure."
For her male biographers, she becomes a transgressive figure whose body is vetted and controlled, and whose life is modified to make room for male power. And while there is no indication of a sexual relationship between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon in the Hebrew Bible or the Quran, many later reimaginings of her life pair them off.
For Stinchcomb this "comes down to this discomfort with the Queen of Sheba's power, that she couldn't be a queen on her own, that she has to be linked to a man and preferably a man like Solomon in order to justify her position."
The wildest retelling of the Queen's encounter with Solomon from the Jewish tradition appears in the Targum Sheni to the Book of Esther — the second Aramaic translation of the Book of Esther. It was most likely written in the late seventh or early eighth century.
It features what would become a key aspect of the Queen of Sheba's cultural mythology: her hairy legs.
In the Quranic account, Solomon plays a trick on the Queen of Sheba by paving the floor of his palace with glass. Believing it's water, she lifts her skirts to keep them dry.
In the Targum Sheni, the aim of the trick is to reveal whether or not she has hairy legs. When it turns out she does, Solomon's response is immediate and harsh: "You're a beautiful woman but hairiness is for men. You look absolutely disgraceful."
In some texts in the Islamic tradition, the Queen of Sheba's hairy legs — and her political power — are traced back to her supernatural heritage, and she is recast as the daughter of a human and a jinn. (In Arabic mythology, the jinn are powerful spirits capable of taking on different shapes and have the free will to be good or evil.)
"It is to say that she's not a human," said Haeri. "She's neither a man nor a woman. Her mother was a djinn, [or] her father was a djinn. So the jinns helped her to be powerful in one way or another. So she's really outside of the patriarchal order of gender relations."
A precedent for women's political authority
While the Queen of Sheba was reimagined by male exegetes to "downgrade" her status, as Haeri argues — she's also been reimagined and upheld as a precedent for female political authority.
"The first woman who seriously drew my attention to her was a woman in her veil in Iran, whom I was interviewing for a video documentary on Iranian women who had nominated themselves as presidential candidates in 2001," said Haeri, who was born in Tehran.
"The first thing she told me, she said, 'Look, we have in the Quran a woman, the Queen of Sheba, who ruled her country and her people.' So she assumed legitimacy for herself on the basis of what's in the Quran."
In Yemen — which, alongside Ethiopia, claims to be the true home of the Queen of Sheba — her memory has taken on a new urgency.
"Yemen used to be ruled by queens. I hope one day this country goes back to normal, and we lead," Yemeni documentary filmmaker Yousra Ishaq toldThe Cut in 2018, in an interview about life as a woman in a war zone.
She was referring to both the Queen of Sheba, and to Queen Arwa, who ruled for 71 years as Queen regent, Queen consort and outright Queen in the 11th and 12th century.
Arwa is often described as the "Little Queen of Sheba." Like her predecessor, she was a politically astute leader who tried to avoid bloodshed. She valiantly preserved her throne from warring tribes and the meddling of the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. She remains the only woman in Islamic history to hold both political and religious mandates as a leader.
"Now we're at a very, very, very low time for women, especially in Yemen," said Ishaq.
"But the whole concept of a queen, Queen of Sheba, Queen Arwa gives me hope that this time will end. These groups, these religious ideologist groups will end. And the culture, the history would continue."
Guests in this episode:
Shahla Haeri is a professor of anthropology and a former director of the Women's Studies Program at Boston University, and one of the pioneers of Iranian anthropology. Her books include Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran, No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women and The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority, Gender.
Jillian Stinchcomb is aDirector's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey working as a postdoctoral fellow in the "Interactive Histories, Co-Produced Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" project. In 2020, she defended her dissertation, "Remembering the Queen of Sheba in the First Millennium," a reception history of the Queen of Sheba across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian texts from the biblical to the early medieval period. She works with material in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Ge'ez.
Safia Aidid is an interdisciplinary historian of modern Africa and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her research addresses anticolonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders, and state formation in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on modern Somalia and Ethiopia.
Eyob Derillo is a reference specialist in the Reading Room of Africa and Asian Studies at the British Library, and previously served as curator for the library's Ethiopic and Ethiopian Collections. He is a Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, focusing on the history of Ethiopian magic.
Yousra Ishaq is a director and producer in Yemen, facilitating local productions and coordinating multinational teams including international media outlets such as the BBC and PBS. In 2017, she co-founded the Yemen-based film foundation and production company, Comra Films.
*This episode was produced by Kamal Al-Solaylee and Pauline Holdsworth.
