The Queen of Sheba

A figure of wealth, wisdom, and global fascination - how did the Queen of Sheba become one of history’s most enduring royal icons? In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Jillian Stinchcomb to trace the enduring story of the Queen of Sheba — from her biblical debut to her roles in Islamic tradition and Ethiopian royal ancestry. Where might her true origins lie? Why has she become such a powerful cross-cultural icon? Discover how this once-minor figure became a legend spanning continents and religions. MORE The Biblical Kingdom of Israel: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SQM9TGIN1DHeFDkYAjuNb Ancient Ethiopia: The Kingdom of Aksum: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ogrAegnatj535vwYHesm6 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Tristan Hughes?

  Hey, guys. I hope you're doing well. I've just finished recording this episode, all about the Queen of Sheba. We finished recording the interview about half an hour ago. I'm now standing outside, getting a bit of fresh air. But, guys, I was blown away by this chat. I had no idea just how many stories we have surviving about the Queen of Sheba, whether that be in Islam, in Judaism, or in Christianity. Our guest to brilliantly talk through all of this is Dr Gillian Stinchcombe from Towson University. I love this chat. I really hope you guys do too. And let's get into it.

• 2:00Tristan Hughes?

  She's one of the most recognizable names from the Old Testament. The immensely wealthy queen from the south, who came to quiz King Solomon on his wisdom. The Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba story begins in the Bible, but it soon stretched way beyond it. From her potential historical roots in southern Arabia, to the Quran story about her, to becoming the ancestor of the Ethiopian royal family. Over the next hour, we're going to explore this enigmatic queen's tale over millennia. This is the story of the Queen of Sheba, with our guest, Dr Jillian Stinchcomb.

• 2:42Tristan Hughes?

  Jill, such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:46Tristan Hughes?

  Now, the Queen of Sheba, she feels like another of these almost top-ranking names when it comes to Old Testament stories. She feels like a household name today, even thousands of years later.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. But you'll find people know the name, but they will often say, you know, I've heard of the Queen of Sheba, but I don't really know anything about it.

• 3:06Tristan Hughes?

  It is a bit of a mysterious name, isn't it? And yet, it's also a name and a story attached to it that has evolved over the centuries. And her importance, it differs depending on the century and also depending on the faith as well.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely. She's kind of this rare figure. She's a non-Israelite woman, but appears in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and is described positively in each of them. And that sort of non-Israelite, but still mentioned positively by each of the faith traditions, puts her in a really unique position for a variety of people to have different understandings, I should say, about her.

• 3:43Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's then delve into the enigmatic story of who the Queen of Sheba is. Let's start with the Old Testament story. So where does the Queen of Sheba story, where does it occur in the Old Testament?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yes, so the Queen of Sheba story occurs in two different spots in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, and they are both embedded in stories of Solomon's life. So Solomon's life story is told in two different parts of the Hebrew Bible. The first is in the Book of Kings. The first and second books of Samuel talk about the rise of David, the rise of the Israelite monarchy. And Kings begins with Solomon and then tells the story of kings in Israel and Judah. And then there's the Book of Chronicles, which is, I tell my students, it's like a recap episode. It tells the history of the world, beginning with creation, up until the middle of the, you know, first millennium before the common era, essentially. And so it retells the story of Solomon's life. So you get the Queen of Sheba story in the first Book

• 4:39Speaker 02

  of Kings, chapter 10, verses one through 13, and then the second Book of Chronicles, chapter nine, verse one through 12. And those stories are almost identical to one another. There's the amount of variation you hear when your mom tells the same story over and over again, you know, slightly different choices of language, but otherwise the same.

• 4:59Tristan Hughes?

  And I know that with the Old Testament, with the Hebrew Bible, it's not as simple as the Book of Genesis is at the beginning. So that was the oldest book written in the Bible. So do we have a sense which version of the Queen of Sheba story, which one was written first and when it was written?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Very good question. I'm glad you asked that. So yes, you're absolutely right. Genesis wasn't written first, just because it's in the beginning. It's placed in the beginning because it describes the beginning.

• 5:24Tristan Hughes?

  The beginning, yes.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  The books of the Hebrew Bible are, you know, they tell a continuous history, actually, from the beginning of the world. And so the Book of Kings, so Hebrew prose writing emerges eighth, maybe ninth century BCE. Before that, you get inscriptions written in Hebrew, but you really don't have people writing prose narratives in Hebrew. It's kind of like, you can study this, like, French history emerges, or French prose writing emerges at a certain point in like, I think it's the 11th century, not a medievalist. Same thing with Hebrew, it emerges like ninth, maybe eighth century BCE is when prose writing is emerging. And the Queen of Shebas, the earliest Queen of Sheba story is the one in Kings, first Book of Kings, first one we found out about. Kings was probably mostly written

• 6:08Speaker 02

  in the seventh century BCE. Most people link it with King Josiah. Many people do, I should say. It's debatable, as dating anything in the Hebrew Bible is. But Kings was edited in later centuries as well. So we get sort of first draft, seventh century. That's probably when the Queen of Sheba story is emerging. And then in terms of Chronicles, Chronicles was written end of the Persian period, I would say, you know, so a couple of centuries later. So Kings is our first version of it.

• 6:35Tristan Hughes?

  But regardless of which version we're using, both of them are writing at least a couple of centuries after it was believed that King Solomon was reigning in, well, in Israel and Palestine today.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. Solomon's rule would have been the 10th century BCE, and there just wasn't Hebrew prose writing happening at that time period. So all of our stories about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba postdate her by at least a century or two. And so I like to think of them as sort of memories of that point in the past. They're written in the historical mode, of course, but it's not history in the same way that sort of modern history is built with evidence and stuff.

• 7:10Tristan Hughes?

  So let's explore the story of the Queen of Sheba in the Book of Kings, because I noticed that she takes up quite a few particular verses at the beginning of the Book of Kings. Can you talk us through the story of the Queen of Sheba in the Old Testament?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  So it's just 13 verses in chapter 10. And these are emerging in the Book of Kings when we're being told all about Solomon's reign, which in the Book of Kings, Solomon's reign is marked by having high highs and really low lows.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And she is, you know, Solomon is sort of like the best and worst that kings have to offer, according to the ideology. The Book of Kings has a surprisingly mixed view of kings and kingship as an institution, I should say. And so the Queen of Sheba appears in chapter 10. We've just been told in the Book of Kings that Solomon is really wealthy. He's had really successful trade with Hiram of Tyre and a variety of other figures. He's at the center of all these trade networks. And we're told at the beginning of chapter 10 that the Queen of Sheba heard reports of Solomon's wisdom. And so she came to find him. She heard about him and decided to show up.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And when she showed up, she came with a train of camels bearing spices and gold and precious jewels. So she just basically showed up at his house with a bunch of gifts, like a good house guest, actually. And she came to him with a number of questions. And quite intriguingly, she comes to to test his wisdom, actually. It says that quite explicitly, she comes to test his wisdom, because that's what she's heard reports about. He's famous for being wise. She comes to test him and they have this great intimate moment together. There is no question that she asks of him that he, you know, does not answer her. And that's the first sort of three verses or so. And then the story shifts and we're told then what it was she saw at Solomon's court. She sees all the wonders of his court.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And then she speaks out loud praise of his court. And so she hears reports of him, comes to test him. And then through her eyes and through her voice, the audience gets sort of confirmation that Solomon is exactly as great as the text has been trying to tell us for the last 10 chapters. And, you know, she's, she's a stranger. She has, she has no, you know, dog in this race, right? She's just, she just comes and she tells us that he's exactly as great as these reports have been telling us. And then she gives him a bunch of gifts. She gives him 20 talents of gold and so many spices, more spices than had ever been seen. And we're told basically that Solomon was able to give her an equal amount of gifts

• 9:45Speaker 02

  back, that he was able to, to give back to her, which would have been the expectation in the Iron Age, that when a monarch visits another monarch, you exchange gifts with one another. This comes up in the Iliad and Odyssey all the time as well, which are written sort of around the same time period. So Solomon exchanged gifts and then she goes back home. So it's a very discreet episode of her coming, hearing reports of him and then coming at, coming to visit him and seeing, she acts as a sort of witness to his greatness.

• 10:10Tristan Hughes?

  I was gonna say, so is one of the main purposes behind this particular story in the greater, you know, as you mentioned, the narrative of the Hebrew Bible. Is it almost an affirmation of how great Solomon is, but from an outside ruler coming to see him and then realizing it's not just people within his kingdom who realize how great it is, it is also people who lived in kingdoms nearby who are recognizing just how majestic this figure was?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  That is absolutely right. And I would say it's not even just places nearby, because Hiram of Tyre is nearby. Sheba is presumably a bit further, you know, because she has to hear reports of him, right? She's not a next door neighbor. She lives a little ways over. And the other thing to really emphasize here is that she gives him a hundred and twenty talents of gold.

• 10:53Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  More spices than had ever been seen. The text really underscores to us over and over and over again that she's really wealthy. I like to joke that she's like the Mackenzie Bezos of her day. Because it's so much gold that Josephus, writing in the first century CE, a thousand years later, he's writing for a Roman audience and he reduces it to twenty talents of gold. Because it seems unbelievable that anyone would give a hundred and twenty. It's like saying she came and gave him a gazillion dollars. And Josephus says, it wasn't a gazillion dollars, it was a billion dollars. It's still a crazy amount of money. It's, you know, absurd wealth. So it's not just an outsider, it's a wildly wealthy outsider.

• 11:33Tristan Hughes?

  So that's the story in Kings, Jill. Before kind of delving into the historical basis behind it and like the location of Sheba and so on. With the second story of the Queen of Sheba in Chronicles, are there many noticeable differences between the two? If we've already established that both of these two different stories are written at different moments in history as well?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  So in terms of differences between Kings and Chronicles, the differences in the stories are not so much within the stories themselves. There's a couple of very slight differences, you know. One version of it says there had never before been seen so many spices as she brought. And another one says, since then, nobody has ever seen as many spices as she brought, right? You know, slight difference, but it really doesn't change the sort of force of the narrative or what's trying to be communicated. What is different between Kings and Chronicles is that in the Book of Kings, as I mentioned, Solomon has high highs and low lows. Solomon is the person who builds the temple in Jerusalem. He is incredibly wise. He does all of these great things.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  But in the Book of Kings, Solomon also quite famously worships foreign gods with his foreign wives. And we learn about that almost immediately after the Queen of Sheba narrative. Versus in Chronicles, Solomon has never done anything wrong in his life. He is just a sort of straightforward culture hero. He doesn't do anything wrong. And so in Kings, when the Queen of Sheba comes to visit, it shows that Solomon has this reputation. He's known by outsiders. He's also very good with foreign women. Maybe too good, because that ends up being his downfall just a couple of chapters later. Versus in Chronicles, it's just sort of straightforwardly a witness. So the difference is not within the stories, but actually the context in which they're placed.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  The Solomon of Kings is more fallible, let's say, than the Solomon of Chronicles.

• 13:38Speaker 03

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• 14:29Tristan Hughes?

  So it's quite interesting because we'll delve into later traditions as this chat goes on, where more details are added to Sheba's character. But so from the original story, I guess the image conveyed of Sheba is that she's a rich queen coming from far away to see Solomon. And it's her wealth and her seeking of knowledge and wisdom that is very much, are those the the main things that are emphasized about her?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yes, there is a potential implication of romance in the sort of intimacy of their meeting. You know, she comes to him. There's a potential there, but it is not explicit. Other people pick up that potential later. It becomes a major theme. So I just want to know, it's not entirely absent, but it is more of a loud silence than anything else, I would say.

• 15:15Tristan Hughes?

  It's good to highlight that straight away because I feel now we've really kind of covered the original story of the Queen of Sheba. And now I get to ask about potential historical basis of this. Could there have been a real Queen of Sheba?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  The short answer is yes, absolutely. Because we have an absence of evidence, but that is not evidence of absence. We don't have contemporaneous evidence of the Queen of Sheba, but we also don't have contemporaneous evidence of Solomon either. And there are some people who argue maybe Solomon didn't exist, but you know, by and large, if it's not a barrier for us to think about Solomon, it's not a barrier for us to think about the Queen of Sheba. And there are two locations that are really good potential sites for where the Queen of Sheba might have been traveling from. One of them is in Yemen, and it's a site called Saba. And there's actually a very old sort of Iron Age, maybe even earlier temple there, which to this day is sometimes called Mahram Bil Kees, Temple of Bil Kees.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  And Bil Kees is the Queen of Sheba's name in Muslim tradition. The other location, very close to Yemen, just across the Red Sea, is Ethiopia, which is where the Aksimite Empire was located. I know you guys had a podcast on the Aksimite Empire a short while ago. And so both Ethiopians from Aksim and Yemenis have, both will claim the Queen of Sheba as their ancestor. And frankly, both have a solid historical claim for it because she came via, you know, via camel with a train of camels bearing heavy spices. You know, it seems like she came to Jerusalem from the south across the desert. And we know that in the southern Arabian Peninsula, there was a spice trade going

• 16:53Speaker 02

  from there up to Babylonia and other regions from, I think, records go back, you know, into the third millennium BCE, that we have examples of that. And we also have, not very often, but there is some evidence of queens ruling over this southern Arabian Peninsula. We don't know as much about them as we would really prefer. But the idea that there was a woman ruling over a trade-based kingdom in the south who might have brought spices up north to Solomon, that is a totally plausible historical scenario.

• 17:26Tristan Hughes?

  Because I love the fact that you've highlighted all of that, Jill, because I remember doing something not too long ago on the Nabataeans and how, you know, a few centuries after, of course, the Queen of Sheba and Solomon and so on. But of course, they were overseeing the trade routes of the spices and so on. So if she was bringing gold, spices, incense, and, you know, the main area of the world that you will look at is southern Arabia or across the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden to what is Ethiopia today? It makes sense.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And Ethiopia and Yemen, you know, especially in late antiquity, were sometimes ruled by the same people. So one thing that's interesting, actually, in thinking about the sort of debate about whether she was from Yemen or, you know, modern-day Yemen, modern-day Ethiopia, actually, is it kind of shows that the division of nation-states can sometimes be a bit arbitrary because they're really not all that far away from one another.

• 18:16Tristan Hughes?

  And just one other thing on that original story before we go further forward in time. You mentioned there that she comes with camels. Is it specifically said that it's camels and it's not horses or mules or donkeys or anything? It is specifically camels from Arabia or further afield?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't say from Arabia, but it does say, "The Queen of Sheba heard what was to be said about Solomon due to the name of the Lord, and she came to test him with riddles. She came to Jerusalem with a very great train, camels bearing spices and lots of gold and precious stones." So yes, specifically camels.

• 18:48Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's move forward because that is the original story. But as you've already mentioned, there is a long afterlife to this story in many different religions as well. So when do we next hear of the Queen of Sheba? Is it still in the Bible with the New Testament?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  It is. So our New Testament sources are the next space where we hear about the Queen of Sheba, specifically in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. We get one line, one verse in each of those Gospels, and they probably got it from the same source, probably the Q source. But it says that, "The Queen from the south who came to hear Solomon's wisdom will be a judge of the men of this generation at the end times." So in this story, in the New Testament, it's very, very brief. It's very tantalizing, actually. Not as a historian, I really wish there was more there, more to explore. But what we see is, very interestingly, this figure from the Solomonic past, from Israel's

• 19:45Speaker 02

  history, is being projected forward as a judge, what we call an eschatological judge, a judge for the end times. And that is how she is imagined in this one very short, slightly obscure verse in the New Testament. And that gets picked up in a variety of ways in later centuries.

• 20:03Tristan Hughes?

  But do you think that reveals how, if, you know, the New Testament, and you mentioned sources like, like the Gospels, and also that other mysterious source of the Gospels, Q, is several centuries after the original Queen of Sheba story is written down? Even if it's just a brief mention, does it give us a little bit of an insight into how the Queen of Sheba's story was remembered over those intervening centuries?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yes. It suggests, to my mind, I think in this time period, she's not the most prominent character. You know, she's not getting a lot of screen time, so to speak, in there, but she's still someone recognizable. And notably, too, in the, in the Greek, it says, "The queen of the south who came to hear of Solomon's wisdom." And so it actually doesn't even name her the Queen of Sheba. But this, this actually dovetails with what we've been saying on the podcast, actually, that she probably came from the south, because that's spices coming with camels, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems that they shared the sort of geographic sense of where she was coming from with us. And also that it shows how Israelite history was used to sort of think about the future

• 21:10Speaker 02

  as well, and how maybe different models, different modes of thinking in that way were being utilized in that time period.

• 21:17Tristan Hughes?

  Slight tangent, and just because we recently released an episode all about the apocryphal texts, you know, the Gospels that don't make it into the Bible today. Because there are so many more stories in those apocryphal texts, I mean, does the Queen of Sheba, does she pop up in any of those texts as well?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Actually, no.

• 21:33Tristan Hughes?

  No.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:34Tristan Hughes?

  Not at all.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And this is, yeah. I was almost surprised by how absent she was in basically pre Koranic materials. When I started my dissertation, I thought that I was going to be uncovering all the hidden stories that people just hadn't paid attention to with the Queen of Sheba. But she, she really does not appear in those. There are motifs that appear in medieval versions of the Queen of Sheba that are, are coming up. The Testament of Solomon, uh, some other places, but not the Queen of Sheba herself, actually. It's only when we start getting into the, the church fathers, talk about her a bit briefly.

• 22:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, shall we cover these figures now before we reach the Quran? Over the centuries, we've done the New Testament, stories of the Queen of Sheba, the brief mentions. Who are the next big figures that then mentioned the Queen of Sheba?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  So the next biggest one is Josephus, Flavius Josephus. Yes. Who was a Jewish historian and writer. He was a general during the Jewish revolt against Rome, was captured very early on because he was in charge of the area of Galilee that basically the Romans first came through, conquered it quickly. So he was captured by the Romans. He was eventually taken in as a hostage essentially by the Flavian family, lived out the rest of his life in Rome. And he quite famously wrote our best account of the Jewish revolt against the Romans called the Jewish Wars, Judean Wars, sometimes you'll see. And he also wrote a history of the Jewish people called the Jewish Antiquities. And in the Jewish Antiquities, he has a story of Solomon.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And this is the story where he is, in the Jewish Antiquities, Josephus is writing in Greek for a Roman audience. Romans would have known about the Jewish people because the Jewish revolt, it was a big deal. Capital, you know, catapulted Vespasian and Titus to new heights of fame. Actually, the, the money taken from the Jewish temple in Jerusalem when the Romans destroyed it, that actually funded the building of the Colosseum.

• 23:29Tristan Hughes?

  And you can even see their procession with the, the menorah on the Arch of Titus today in the Roman Forum in Rome. So yeah, this big event in the late first century for the Romans.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so Josephus. Yeah, I wasn't there, but it seems like he kind of capitalized on the interest that these events garnered, and he ends up writing these accounts of the Jewish people for a Roman audience. And in the Jewish antiquities, he is telling the story of Solomon, and he is trying to portray Solomon as a culture hero that would have been understandable to a Roman audience, would have been legible to them, right? And so he tells the story of Solomon. Solomon is, he, you know, wins all these riddling contests, he's extremely wise, he's extremely wealthy. And Josephus describes the Queen of Sheba, he doesn't call her the Queen of Sheba, he says that she is the Queen of Egypt in Ethiopia, who heard reports of Solomon's fame, she was so interested, he wa- she wanted to see it

• 24:22Speaker 02

  with her own eyes, because eyewitnesses are better than merely hearing reports, you know, he goes on, Josephus loves a digression. And he, and so he describes her as the Queen of Egypt in Ethiopia in coming to visit. And this, you know, makes sense, as we've said, Sheba could very well have been in modern day Ethiopia, it certainly fits within the Roman geographic imaginary, where Ethiopia, again, is sort of south of Egypt. But when Josephus is saying that the Queen of Egypt in Ethiopia came to visit Solomon, in the Roman sensibility, Egypt was the wealthiest province in, in the Roman Empire, it was the, the breadbasket, actually, they produced much of the wheat and food that people would eat. So it's saying that she's extremely wealthy, because she's the Queen of Egypt,

• 25:07Speaker 02

  and also, by being the Queen of Ethiopia, she's functionally the Queen of the edge of the known world. Famously, Roman geographers will often say like, oh, and once you get over here, you get to Ethiopia, and also India, like, they don't seem to know the difference between Ethiopia and India, and it's, it is basically because, well, that's just the edge of the known world, you don't actually need to know that they're on different continents, separated by hundreds and thousands of miles. But so he's saying, basically, this queen who came to visit Solomon, in the Roman sort of imaginary, she, her status would have been built up by her being the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia. And so that's a big addition that he makes. And then, as I also mentioned, he says, you know, she gave 20 talents of gold instead

• 25:49Speaker 02

  of 120 talents of gold to try to make it like a little bit more reasonable, even if it's still very extravagant. But he basically follows the plot of the stories that we find in the Hebrew Bible pretty closely.

• 26:02Tristan Hughes?

  So very much using the word Ethiopia to emphasize the distance, that how far away she came from, and the name Egypt to emphasize the wealth to the Roman audience. So it's almost, it feels like Josephus, he's, as you say, he's writing for a Roman audience. He's trying to convey the majesty, the greatness, the extraordinary nature of the Queen of Sheba in the Solomon, in the Jewish tradition, by, you know, using terms and places that the Romans would be like, almost like, you know, they'd be gasping like, wow, in awe, like, wow, she came from where? She was that rich? It feels like that idea almost.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And it's fascinating because it's clear, the Queen of Sheba is like a tool to make Solomon look greater, basically. You know, these are the type of people who would admire him, but absolutely, she's, she's trying to build them both up.

• 26:45Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned also earlier that this is also when we see church fathers starting to talk about the Queen of Sheba. Could you talk a bit about that?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  So the gospel accounts, let's put them second half, first century CE. Josephus is writing in the 90s, like 95, 96 is when the Jewish antiquities tend to be dated. Church fathers, the most important church father, or let's say, the most robust discussion of the Queen of Sheba by a church father, is from a guy named Origen of Alexandria, who was living in the third century, 265, or when some of his homilies are dated. He's from Africa, right? He's from Alexandria, which is northern part of Egypt, culturally a very Greek place, but he himself is, as an African writer, actually. And he reading, he cites Josephus explicitly when he says that the Queen of Sheba was

• 27:38Speaker 02

  the Queen of Ethiopia, that she was, that she was also an African queen. So this is the first time we get an African writer naming her as an African queen. And for Origen, this matters because he understands the Queen of Sheba to be the female speaker in the biblical book of poetry, the Song of Songs.

• 27:55Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, okay.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  So this can feel like it's a little bit left field, you know, for people who know various texts of the Bible, it's less surprising. But so the Song of Songs is a very weird biblical book, I would say, because it's really erotic love poetry. You know, it talks about your breasts are like towers. It has things that are, yeah, no, it describes each other's bodies and how they're. And it's a conversation between a man and a woman who are very sexually interested in one another and, you know, they're young lovers. And so this was, it's a beautiful bit of poetry and for church fathers like Origen, it was a bit scandalous. And frankly, a bit weird too. Why is this book of love poetry included in Jewish scriptures? Why does it matter?

• 28:38Speaker 02

  For Origen, the reading was, this is, Origen read this allegorically, read the text allegorically. And for him, it was a conversation between God and the Christian church. But it's also a conversation between Moses and his Ethiopian wife. And it's also a conversation between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Because one line in the Song of Songs says, I am black and beautiful. And so it's the woman describing herself as black. So that's why Moses' Ethiopian wife and the Queen of Sheba, who is the Queen of Ethiopia. And Ithiops in Greek means literally burnt face. So it very much has to do with, it signifies dark skin to people who are reading and writing in Greek in particular.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  So in the Song of Songs, the female speaker within the poem says, I am black and beautiful. Origen has a number of explanations for this and they don't. The thing about allegorical reading is that all of these readings are true at the same time. That's how allegory works for church fathers. But one of these readings is the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. And this really is, I would say, one of the major starting points of people reading Solomon and the Queen of Sheba as having a romantic relationship. There was potential for that in the, in the Hebrew Bible, but it's never made explicit. And by reading the female and male speaker in the poem of Song of Songs, as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, it really underscores this idea that they had a romantic relationship with one another.

• 30:03Tristan Hughes?

  And this is all because Origen is kind of theorizing the Queen of Sheba to have been the author of that love poetry then, is it? So he's kind of theorizing, he's saying like two plus two must equal four when it comes to this particular story. So, so it seems almost, as you say, with these early church fathers. It's always they're trying to deduce stuff which is left a bit open-ended from the original stories.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I would say it's actually Solomon who's said to be the writer of it.

• 30:30Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, sorry, my apologies.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Solomon is the author of it. But so she's a character basically within the poem.

• 30:35Tristan Hughes?

  Got it. Thank you.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Is how he reads it. Yes. Because Solomon, he's also said to be the author of Proverbs, Song of Songs. There's a competition going between David and Solomon as to the things that they author in later centuries. But yes.

• 30:48Tristan Hughes?

  And is the Song of Songs in the Old Testament today? If you've got a Bible out today, it is part of the official text?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 30:55Tristan Hughes?

  I had no idea. I'd have to look it up.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yes, it's in the third section, or well, if you're reading a Christian or a Jewish Bible, but in the Jewish Bible, it's in the section called the Writings. And so it's right near Proverbs and Psalms, essentially, which are the other poetry collections in the Bible.

• 31:10Tristan Hughes?

  And do you think this reflects, because you mentioned already like the importance of the Queen of Sheba. Let's say we're in the First Testament with the Gospels are being written in the first century. She doesn't seem to be at the forefront at all. But if Origen is talking about her in the third century, and this is time where you really start seeing the rise of Christianity, particularly in the following century, in the fourth century. Do you think by the time of late antiquity, that the Queen of Sheba's story has gained more popularity and more color has been added to it?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  What I think actually is that by the time of late antiquity, the Queen of Sheba's story has actually become a problem in a way that it wasn't previously. And the color gets added to it more in the Middle Ages than late antiquity. I think late antiquity is when the problem emerges and then it gets sort of solved in later centuries. And I say that precisely because of the rise of Christianity. Because when Israel is a relatively small, not very powerful nation-state that gets conquered by the Babylonians and the Persians and then the Greeks and eventually the Romans, there needs to be an external witness, someone coming from outside Israel saying, Solomon really is just as great as everyone has said, et cetera, et cetera.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  When Christianity emerges, and I think what's really important to remember, third, fourth, fifth, sixth century Christianity, even to this day, Christianity is not a monolith, but there was a staggering variety of Christianities in late antiquity, you know, in ways that sort of shock students when you talk about, you know, Gnostic beliefs and all these other things.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Council of Nicere and so on and all of that kind of stuff, yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. And when Christians are claiming Solomon and all of a sudden Solomon isn't some obscure culture hero from a sort of marginal population, but instead is a central hero of this past, all of a sudden, everybody is claiming Israel's past for themselves, right? Christians, Jews, you know, variety of groups, eventually Muslims also understand the Israelite past as their own. And so when that's happening, all of a sudden, you don't need an external witness to Solomon's greatness anymore. Everybody knows how great Solomon is. They actually want to claim him for their own. So then what's the Queen of Sheba doing? Why is she even there? We don't need her in the first place. And frankly, how could she come to test him with hard riddles?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  How could she come and be as wealthy as him, maybe even wealthier than he is, right? Before, she's used to prove his status, but now his status is supposed to be virtually incomparable. So how is it that in a lot of ways, she's kind of his equal, coming to meet him on his own terms? And I think that's why we see so much development in the Middle Ages, actually, is that her status at first was the thing that made her useful, and actually later, it's the thing that kind of makes her a problem. And notably, it's only after Christians and Muslims also start claiming the Israelite past that we start to get stories of the Queen of Sheba maybe being like part jinn or part demon or sort of monstrous in some way.

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• 35:06Speaker 03

  How does the Quran then contribute so centrally to this next step in the Queen of Sheba story?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So, I should say first, there are other church fathers besides Origen who mention the Queen of Sheba, but it's very brief, it's always in passing. And in Jewish texts from the same period, what we call rabbinic texts, there's one mention of the Queen of Sheba and it's someone saying, "She's not the Queen of Sheba, it's actually the Kingdom of Sheba who visited." And it's doing a little bit of a pun, but so there really was not very much interest in her. The Quran emerges in the 7th century, and a lot of audience members might know this, but for those who don't, the Quran assumes that the listener knows a heck of a lot about the Bible and the biblical past. It'll just introduce Abraham, or Moses, or Solomon as characters, and it just assumes that the audience knows exactly who you're talking about.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And so in the 27th surah of the Quran, we are told that Solomon and David had the ability to speak with animals. They had the, yeah, they just had this ability, they could speak with animals, and also djinn, and also demons. And the Quran tells us that actually Solomon and David had armies that consisted not only of human troops, but also djinn troops, animals, birds, demons, et cetera, et cetera. There are parallels to this in other late antique traditions as well, the Quran isn't unique in saying this, but it is the first scripture that says this. It's, and so it makes these assertions, and then it says that one day, Solomon was sort of mustering his troops, he was gathering all his troops up together, starting to do

• 36:40Speaker 02

  a roll call, and there was one bird that is missing from his muster. And he's really mad about it. I mean, you know, the the bird has essentially gone AWOL, right? No military looks kindly on people going AWOL. We're birds in this case. But the bird comes back and says, you know, I have encompassed, I've understood, I've seen something that you haven't seen. There's this land called Saba, where, you know, gold sits in the streets like dung. They worship the sun instead of God, and also they're ruled by a queen. So it's a weird place for all these reasons, topsy-turvy. And so Solomon ends up writing the Queen of Sheba a letter via this bird. The bird acts as a sort of messenger between them, takes this letter to the Queen of Sheba.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  She reads the letter, and they just immediately start having a comedy of errors with one another. Solomon asks her to "come Muslimin," which means "as a Muslim," but it also means "in submission," because Islam is just submission to God's will. So she reads him saying "come Muslimin" as "come in submission to me." And she says, "Ugh, kings are always doing this. They come into cities, they make those who are most high into the lowest. This is terrible. What am I gonna do?" She asks her advisors for help. They're a little bit useless. They just say, "We'll do whatever you say." So she decides to send him a bunch of gifts. And in the Hebrew Bible, when they, when Solomon and the Queen of Sheba exchange gifts, it's a sign that their relationship is really solid,

• 38:05Speaker 02

  that they respect one another. When, in the Quran, when the Queen of Sheba sends gifts to Solomon, he thinks she's trying to bribe him. And he's like, "Basically, why does she even think she could bribe me? I'm favored by God. I don't need like paltry human gifts." And so he says, you know, basically, like, "She's trying to bribe me. What's going on here?" He turns to his jinn and say, you know, basically, "Can you help me out with this?" One of his jinn ends up bringing the throne of the Queen of Sheba into Solomon's court and disguising it. And when she comes to visit, she is asked, you know, "Do you recognize this throne?" And she says, "It's as if it was my own." So there's something there where she's able to sort of see through the magic of the gin.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  And nobody's, and frankly, it's not very well explained. It's a very laconic story. But then immediately after this attempt at a trick, she goes into his court where he had a crystal floor, a glass floor. She steps into the court and she thinks the glass floor is water and she lifts up her skirts, revealing her legs. And Solomon says, "What are you doing? It's not water, it's glass." And she says, "Oh my goodness, I've been so mistaken. I'm going to worship God alongside you." It's a very, it's kind of, it's a very weird story. But as someone who's read it many times at this point, what I think happens is that she realizes that she's made a mistake with this glass floor.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  And it causes her to realize that she's also been mistaken by worshiping the sun instead of the one true God. And so her mistake with the glass floor ends up being this point where all of a sudden she converts essentially. She becomes a believer in the one God, which was not the case in the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, she says explicitly, "Your God," you know, Elohechah, "your God must be great to put you on the throne." Because in the ancient worlds, different countries, you know, different countries worship different gods. But in the late antique world where the Quran emerged, all of a sudden monarchs all believe in the God of Israel, right? Different polities believe in the God of Israel. And so there's a bit more competition.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  And in this case, she's a rare positive figure who converts to the worship of the one God. You know, a sort of like pre-Muslim, we might say. And this is not something that happens very often in the Quran. This is only, only a handful of people end up doing this before the Quran because the Quran is the best witness and reason for people to convert. So apologies, apologies for the length of that answer. So the significance of the Quran in the story is that it retells the story of the Queen of Sheba's visit and it inverts several elements that were present in the biblical story, right? Gifts all of a sudden are a sign of bribery instead of a sign of friendship. There's this new motif of there being glass crystal floors that cause the Queen of Sheba to sort of lift up her skirts and reveal her legs.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, she now worships the God of Israel. And these three new elements are, sort of change everything after this and, and set the scene for the variety of changes that emerged in the Middle Ages.

• 41:12Tristan Hughes?

  Joe, before I ask a bit more about that, you did mention in passing there the jinn. I have heard the name the jinn before, but actually I don't quite understand completely what they are. Could you briefly explain what the jinn are?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  So jinn in English oftentimes we hear it as genie, you know, sort of Aladdin situation.

• 41:28Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  But the sort of Disney version of a genie in a bottle is unsurprisingly, doesn't really match what our historical records say about them. So especially in, I should say, Middle Eastern folklore generally, but especially Muslim folklore is what I'm most familiar with. Jinn are beings, they're actually not dissimilar from humans, but humans are made from earth, right? We know this from Genesis that Adam, you know, Adam and Eve were made, well, not Eve, but Adam was created out of dirt of the ground. Jinn are created of fire. That's their sort of essential element. And so jinn are able to do magic. They have access to certain powers and they are supernatural.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Almost isn't even the right term for them because they exist in a parallel world, in a world that is parallel to what's happening with humans. But most of the time they don't interact. Only in very rare circumstances do you get something like Solomon has jinn who serve him under a very particular terms of a contract, essentially. But yeah, so jinn, imprecisely, I would say are supernatural beings who are sort of born of fire and they make, but they're also kind of oftentimes trickster figures who appear a lot in folklore.

• 42:39Tristan Hughes?

  So Joe, thank you also for explaining the story of the Queen of Sheba in the Quran in so much detail. Because once again, like with the original story, if it was really important, because it's such an important part in her evolution over the centuries. And the key points as you've highlighted there, so the giving of gifts now seen as a sign of bribery, the mistaking of the glass floor, the lifting up of her skirt, showing her legs and the conversion, well, to Islam, to the one true God, the end of it. And you mentioned before that how it had seemed as if the Queen of Sheba by the late antiquity had become a bit of a problem for early Christian and Jewish writers. So how does the Quran story and this changing story of the Queen of Sheba?

• 43:21Tristan Hughes?

  How does it almost act as a board, a springboard for the development of the Queen of Sheba's story as we get into the medieval period? And figures from all faiths trying to figure out how the Queen of Sheba no longer is a problem and is actually beneficial in their eyes, I guess.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So some of the Jewish traditions are maybe from the same time period. There's a bit of debate about which came first. I think that debate is a bit of a chicken or egg situation. It actually just speaks to the fact that Jews and Muslims were sharing stories with one another. But so there's these two Jewish texts. One's called Targum Shanee to Esther. A targum is an Aramaic translation. Shanee just means second. So it's just the second Aramaic translation of Esther. And in that story, Solomon controls armies of birds and djinn and demons, just like the Quran. The Queen of Sheba hears, you know, gets a letter from him, comes to visit him. But in the Targumic story, when the Queen of Sheba lifts her skirts and reveals her legs, she reveals that her legs are very hairy.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  And Solomon tells her, "You are beautiful like a woman, but hairy like a man. And hair is great on a man, but it's shameful on a woman." Essentially, she becomes a joke, a bit of a laughing stock. She confirms that Solomon, "Oh, you're just as wise as I heard." She gives him a lot of gifts and she goes home. But it really sort of diminishes the sort of significance of that story. But so much about that is quite directly parallel to the Quran. In older scholarship, they'll say the Targumic story is the precursor to the Quran. Like, basically, it's what the Quran got its material from. More recent specialist work on targums suggests it's not that straightforward, but that's not important for our purposes. The other significant Jewish story that comes out, and this one is probably from the ninth or 10th century, from Baghdad, probably, Islamic

• 45:06Speaker 02

  it Millu. It's our earliest surviving parody written in Hebrew. It's called The Alphabet of Bensira. And it has a lot of very smart schoolboy humor, which includes like a lot of lewdness and jokes. And so one of the stories within that is that the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, and she revealed her legs, which were very hairy. And so Solomon invented a depilatory of arsenic and lime, a ne'er, a hair-removal cream, to remove the hair from their legs, so that they could have sex with one another. And in the alphabet of Ben Sira, there's nothing about wisdom. So, you know, there's no mutual respect that they're really concerned about. It's that she was hairy and then they ended up having, Solomon found a solution so that they could be paramours, shall we say.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  So we get some influence there, probably, even if the story sort of originated in Jewish tradition, went into the Quran. I, I think there's a sort of back and forth that's happening with Jewish and Muslim sources, especially Jews living in the Islamic world, which was the majority of Jewish people surviving, you know, alive towards the end of the first millennium. Starting in around the 11th century, that is when the Quran actually becomes available in Europe. This partly has to do with the Crusades and new circulation of materials. But starting around that period, we start to see in Latin Christian sources, so European Christian sources, stories about the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon and there

• 46:33Speaker 02

  was a pool of water on the ground and she sees, and she has to walk through the pool of water, for instance. So all of a sudden, in Christian materials, you start to see, or maybe she walks over a pool of water, you know, on a bridge that's over the pool of water. But all of a sudden, you start to see this association of water in or around the site of her meeting with Solomon that didn't exist anywhere beforehand. And I assume comes from Muslim and Jewish folklore that circulated and eventually worked its way into early Christian, into this medieval Christian tradition. That is the European sort of Christian side of it. And we could talk more about the legends that that's associated

• 47:13Speaker 02

  with. But the other bit that I think is significant here is also in the medieval period, we, there emerges a tradition in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tallahedo Church, an Ethiopian tradition written in Gaze. It's a text called the Kebir Nagast. That was, it was written, early Colophon's, early marginal notes of early manuscripts say that it was translated in the 13th century from Arabic. And the Kebir Nagast tells the story of the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon's court. It says that they have a child together. That child was Menelik I, who is the founder of what later became the Solomonic Dynasty. And so in that, but that story, the Kebir N'Gast in particular, it's translated from Arabic and the Quran is the first and longest Arabic document.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  So anything written in Arabic is in some way shows some influence of the Quran. That might be too bold of a statement. So in any case, the Ethiopian tradition also was influenced by Muslim tradition as well. So these are what I would consider the two main threads of it, and they both show indirect, but definitely present influence of Quranic tradition.

• 48:17Tristan Hughes?

  Jo, we're running out of time, but I've got a couple more questions to ask. I mean, first off, if we keep on Ethiopia, so the Kebir N'Gast, which is the sacred scripture of Ethiopia, isn't it, the Kingdom of Aksum and following? But is that why you then get that strong association with the monarchs of Ethiopia, all the way down to Haile Selassie, you know, in the 20th century, claiming descendants to be the descendants of the Queen of Sheba? Is it because of that, the Kebir N'Gast and that story which emerges in the medieval period?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yes. I should note that that is building on earlier tradition. So the translation occurs in the 13th century. The Arabic tradition is said to have been translated from Coptic, which is a very, very old language. We know that the Queen of Sheba had been associated with Ethiopia since Josephus in the first century CE, and African writers had understood her as African from Ethiopia since the third century with origin. And it could have been earlier as well. These are just our earliest written sources. But yes, the, the version of the Kebir N'Gast that we have, the, the Ethiopian tradition is one that emerges in the Middle Ages, and that is definitely the basis of the claims made by the Solomonic House, including and especially Haile Selassie.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  And that descent from Solomon is why Haile Selassie was considered Rastafari, a Messiah in the Rastafarian movement.

• 49:34Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. We've got to go back to the hairy legs quickly then, because isn't there one tradition where the Queen of Sheba, she doesn't just have hairy legs, she then becomes half queen, half beast?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  It depends on the source that you read, but yes. So there is a Muslim version of the story written by a writer named Al Tawbari. And he says that the Jin under Solomon's control were very nervous that if he married the Queen of Sheba and had a child with her, that their child would then rule over the Jin forevermore. So they really wanted to prevent a relationship between them because they were afraid that they would be enslaved to their children, essentially. Versus if they didn't have a child, then they would be free of their contract upon Solomon's death. And so according to Al Tawbari, the Jin told Solomon that the Queen of Sheba had donkey legs hidden underneath her skirts, essentially. And according to Al Tawbari, this is why they set up this crystal palace, actually, is because it was meant to trick her.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  The Quran has allowed silence. Was it on purpose or not? The Quran doesn't tell us, but Tawbari says it was on purpose. They set it up to trick her and she lifted her skirts and it wasn't donkey legs. It was just that she was very hairy instead. And that's where it sort of comes in. But you also find there's a variety of traditions in the Latin Christian tradition. We'll say that she maybe had leprosy on her legs or that she had some sort of physical deformity on her legs. And when she walked through the water to visit Solomon, in some versions of the story, the wood of the true cross, which is the wood that eventually gets used in Jesus's cross, was floating in the water and it magically cured her legs. There is a French statuary tradition that was lost during the French Revolution, but we have images drawn from people

• 51:13Speaker 02

  that show versions of the Queen of Sheba with goose feet under her legs. And that seems to either be a tradition about her hiding goose legs or maybe that is signifying the leprosy that she was hiding under her skirts. But there is this idea, note there, that her being an animal, by having like sort of hairy mannish legs under her skirts and then her having a physical disability, actually are all sort of tied together there, which sort of shows how one of the interesting ways that like humanity and human normativity can be sort of constructed through a character like this.

• 51:45Tristan Hughes?

  Jill, we don't have enough time to explore all of these other stories. I know there's one with the Greek Orthodox tradition, isn't there, which links her back to the ancient Greek prophetess? There's the Sibylle oracle and all of that. But it just shows, isn't it? It's not just Latin Christianity, Greek Orthodox Christianity, different ideas of the Queen of Sheba. We've explored Islam and of course the Jewish tradition as well, and Ethiopian Christianity too. Do you think this diversification in the story of the Queen of Sheba as the centuries goes on, do you think that is paramount? Do you think that is central as to why she remains, why her name remains so important, why we know the name, the Queen of Sheba, why it is a household name today? Do you think that's central to it?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  I do think so, but I think it reflects something even more central, which is the fact that the Queen of Sheba, her story is marked by these loud silences all around. We don't know where she's from. We don't know the questions that she asked Solomon. There's a lot that we don't know. And she both affirms Solomon's greatness, right? That's what she's done sort of from the beginning. But she also stands as a sort of something outside of Israel, something outside of Solomon. So even in the earliest version, she has this doubled function of someone who sort of affirms traditional, let's say patriarchal, you know, order, but also on the flip side stands as a symbol of a woman, female authority figure outside of Israel. And the fact that she does both of those in the beginning, I think is one of the reasons why we have such a multiplicity

• 53:10Speaker 02

  in later centuries, is people sort of wrestling with this central ambiguity of her character and having a certain amount of freedom. You'll find versions of the Queen of Sheba where she affirms hegemonic power structures, and you'll find versions of the Queen of Sheba where she is the sort of outsider who challenges those power structures. Those are both valid textual readings of our scriptural sources.

• 53:33Tristan Hughes?

  Jill, this has been so, so fascinating. We've gone from the early first millennium B.C. or BCE, whichever you prefer, all the way down, basically to the present day. She's such a remarkable figure. Last but certainly not least, Jill, you have a new book coming out all about the Queen of Sheba?

• 53:47Speaker 02

  I do, yes. It's called The Queen of Sheba: Between the Bible and the Cavern of Ghosts. And I'm giving it to my publisher in just a couple of weeks.

• 53:54Tristan Hughes?

  Fantastic. Well, I'll keep an eye out for that when that finally does come out. Jill, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Tristan. This was a great experience.

• 54:08Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Gillian Stinchcombe talking through the story, The Legacy of the Queen of Sheba. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I loved exploring this story of the Queen of Sheba, and no doubt we'll be doing more episodes surrounding famous tales from the Old Testament in the months and years ahead. Thank you once again for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you would also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.