The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (40 page)

They said I was incoherent when I boarded the ship. This, too, is untrue. I revived sometime beyond Jerusalem to hear the tale being told in camp of how I was smuggled out in plain sight as the people in and outside the city fell away from the ark in dread fear, the riot instantly quelled. Hadad, the king had claimed, was massing on the border in a show of force. So the king rode out with his men bearing the presence of Yaweh lest they attack during the feast.

No one would question the king—not with the ark before them. And no one would ride out toward Edom to find out for himself, though this, in fact, turned out to be true, and it was only the presence of the king and ark so nearby that sent them in retreat a day after we had sailed. This was confirmed by my men who took the land route south with the caravan.

They didn’t believe that I had seen it all. How could I, shut away?

But a wise man once said that only a fool tries to defend vehemently what she knows is true.

The Levites came with the false ark all the way down to Ezion-geber but once there would not turn back. I absolved them in good conscience; the true ark was in the temple. But they refused and said their fate lay in Saba, or wherever the box would go.

I took my leave of the king there, on the shores of his port to the sound of the workers, the prows of the remaining unfinished ships rising up against the sunrise on their majestic bows.

“You must take this ark with you to Saba,” Solomon said.

“But we have no more need of the ruse. And your people will notice if you do not return with it.”

“Give me the
markab
with a covering. Let me retain this part of you as you hold dear the symbol of my god, who has chosen you, in exchange far greater than any vow we might have made. Set me as a seal on your heart. And someday, when our son is a man, you must send him north so that I might lay eyes on him. Make me this promise, so that I may see the two of us together in him, until the day I rise from sleep and see your face before me again.”

He gathered my hands, and kissed them through tears. “Remember me by the sun. Remember me by the moon. Remember me to our son,” his voice broke, “and speak well . . . of this foolish king.”

He was more lovely to me in that final moment than in a thousand before. We clung together before we parted and I stood,
memorizing his face from the prow of the ship, until I could see it no more.

During the weeks at sea, Shara asked often if I was well. I said that I was, though I had not known until then that a woman might survive with the remaining half of a heart. I gratefully entered the tents of those who came out to greet us, whom we greeted in turn with news as we made our way south. To Marib, and the palace.

Wahabil welcomed me with joy and then surprise as I embraced him around my swelling belly.

He would have the heir he had hoped for at last and never know that the name housed in three temples all this time had been his.

“But where is the
markab
?” he asked me alone in my privy chamber.

“In Israel,” I said, “in the palace of the king.”

“But you have brought another in its place,” he said, bewildered.

“I have exchanged a nation for God.”

Three months later, a sandy plume wound its way down from the north. But when we went out to meet them, Asm was not among their number. His acolytes told me he wandered out of camp near the dead salt sea one night and never returned. I could only hope he had received his longed-for vision at last.

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

T
he 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

S
olomon’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

A
fter 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 ornament, 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.