Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 115
The Monophysite dream of world domination was not yet dead.
Abreha consolidated his hold on southern Arabia and then attacked north to
secure the lucrative pagan religious pilgrim center and marketplace of
Mecca. In A.D. 552, his army, accompanied by an elephant, was repulsed.
In A.D. 542, the Great Dam at Marib, 680 meters wide and built in the
eighth century B.C.E., broke, and Abreha used a labor force of 20,000 to
restore it. However, in A.D. 570, the dam was washed away in a great flood
that rendered it irreparable until the late twentieth century. The loss of the
dam brought an end to the high culture of southern Arabia, whose ruling
elite depended on control of the dam’s water surplus and the revenues from
the agricultural prosperity it sustained.
But for the plague, world history might have been very different. Caleb
and Yusuf ruled highly organized agricultural and trading states that were
more than 1500 years old. To them it seemed inevitable that one or the
other would conquer the whole peninsula and impose his religion on the
Arab inhabitants. Whether or not this would have led newly converted and
united Monophysite or Jewish Bedouins, like the Arabs between A.D. 632-
711, to abandon Arabia attacking westward to Spain and eastward to India,
is highly questionable. Islam ignited the Arab Bedouin soul to an extent
Judaism or Christianity never had, irrespective of the economic factors that
propelled them away from Arabia in search of better conditions.
Monophysite or Jewish conquest of Arabia from Yemen would have
broken the power of the Meccan shrine and installed co-religionists in
power in the urban areas but probably would have been unsuccessful in
converting, let alone uniting and inspiring, the desert tribes. Islam was
particularly suited to the aggressive nomadic way of life, while Christianity,
with its ambivalent passivism and dependence on an agricultural peasantry
maintaining a large church hierarchy and edifices, was not. The Israelite
faith of Moses’ desert wanderers seemed better suited to the Bedouins, and
some tribes were already Jewish; but the faith’s racial exclusiveness and
hereditary class system militated against Judaism becoming an Arab mass
movement. It is likely that a Monophysite or Jewish victory in Arabia
would only have delayed the rise of Islam. Nevertheless, the possibility was
always there that Caleb or Yusuf could have been leaders on a global scale.
Few could have foreseen the rise of Islam, in particular its success in
uniting a people obsessed with blood feuds and petty rivalry, let alone the
exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persian empires due to mutual conflict.
Their exhaustion and decimation by plague enabled the Islamic Arab
armies to pour out of the peninsula and not only take control of the area