sheba

The Queen of Sheba
'The Queen of the South will appear at the Judgement when this generation is on trial'.
The Queen of the South, being of course, not a football team, but the Queen of Sheba. We learn only a little about her from the Bible, but it is what happens to the story in the telling that is most fascinating. 1 Kings 10 describes her visit to Solomon. She came to 'test him with hard questions' - she wanted to know whether he was really as wise as they said he was. So, the Bible is interested in her because of her mind. She was a wise woman, a Carol Vorderman or a Joan Bakewell. But posterity has remembered her for the rich gifts she brought with her, spices, gold and precious stones, gifts that lend her a kind of oriental exoticism. The text says that she was 'breathless' before Solomon's wisdom and admitted that his God must be the greatest. We are told that Solomon gave her all that she desired. Later readers have assumed that her desires were erotic rather than intellectual and that she was breathless with passion rather than with hard thinking, but its hard to tell. I suppose that whoever has ears to hear will hear it their own way. But whether it was mind or body or both, Sheba is seduced by Solomon. Though almost his equal in money and brains, she gave in and adored him. A foreign queen from a distant land with strange gods, she converted to Solomon and his god. An outsider with an insider's understanding. This is the woman who Jesus later claimed would rise up to condemn unbelievers.
Her story has grown over the centuries and she appears later in Christian and Muslim folklore. In medieval Christianity she is part of the legend of the true cross. The story goes that when she visited Solomon she refused to walk on a bridge because it was made of the wood which would later be turned into the cross of Christ. Her gifts to Solomon prefigure the gifts from those other pagan royals that later visited Bethlehem. In Muslim legend she is a sun worshipper who visits the faithful Solomon. She has a deformity in her lower body which varies from having webbed feet to a donkey's hoof or just exceptionally hairy legs. Solomon heals her of these various ills (in the latter case by inventing a depilatory cream made from lime and arsenic) and she converts to the true faith.
But perhaps the most significant thing about Sheba is that she was black. It's not clear where the land of Sheba was historically. It could have been the Yemen or it could have been North Africa, but traditionally it was definitely Ethiopia. To this day Ethiopian Christians claim to be descended from Menelik, the son of Solomon and Sheba, presumably conceived on that momentous visit. In the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in the roof section owned by the Ethiopians, there is a fresco of Solomon and Sheba. Rastafarians too would see themselves as descendents of Sheba. Christians in these parts of the world have always seen her as black. She has long been associated with the bride in the Song of Solomon, where it says in chapter 1 verse 5 'I am black but comely'. W.B.Yeats wrote in his poem
'Sang Solomon to Shebaand kissed her dusky face.'
But there is a problem. It was the Latin of the Vulgate version of the Bible that introduced the but. 'Nigra sum sed formosa' - I am black but comely. Not black and comely, but comely despite being black. Where African Christians celebrated Sheba's colour, European Christianity gradually marginalised and tried to forget it. In Sheba they had a story of a heathen, foreign woman who had surrendered to the true faith. In her surrender, apparently, she lost her colour too. So from being the story of a wise and resourceful woman, the story changes to one of terrifying will to power and carries with it the church's terror and dread of otherness. The 'other' is overwhelmed, seduced and tamed. Sheba capitulates to Solomon, woman to man, pagan to believer, black to white. Only rarely in European art is Sheba portrayed as black. In one appalling depiction she is black, but with the long golden tresses of a Rapunzel. In Piero della Francesca's fresco in Arrezzo she is almost an English rose, with only one maid in the middle distance wearing a strange hat to hint that she has any connection with Africa at all.
Sheba might have been a match for Solomon and the Bible text almost has it so. But tradition has made him her conqueror and so inspired and validated many other victories of Europe over the orient, of man over women, of 'Truth' over error. But Jesus promised that Sheba would have her day, that she would rise up in judgement. We still live in a world in which the old conquerors are still at work, a world marred by racism, sexism, imperialism, and terrifying will to power. And, as Jesus promised, the Queen of Sheba still rises in judgement. In Britain today you are more likely to suffer harrassment and violence and less likely to find work, if you are black. Just a few miles from here is a detention centre where 120 mostly black men are held without trial, for undetermined periods of time, subject to racist abuse, and many in desperate fear. And the Queen of Sheba rises in judgement. Many black Christians coming to this country feel excluded from 'white' churches and os they set up their own. And the Queen of Sheba rises in judgement.
The people of Israel left Egypt, fleeing from oppression and racism, from a land where foreigners could only be slaves. Joseph had even put it in his will that his bones were to be repatriated. But the Kingdom of God, the place of our dreams, must be one in which no one ever needs to flee, in which the whole earth could be home to any man or woman, in which Sheba and Solomon could be eath other's match, whether in wits or in love. In Christ there is no East or West. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. All are one in Christ. Until earth and heaven are made new, Sheba will still rise in judgement. Until she and all her sisters can be black and comely, until all wisdoms will be recognised, until any Jew could rest his bones in Egypt, until any human being could hold the hand of another in honest and co-equal love, the queen of the south will rise in judgement.
Copyright © 1998 Revd Dr Susan Durber