Sheba

128
WESTERN ARABIA AND THE SHEBA-MENELIK CYCLE
financial demands. The exiles found themselves in a similar position as the
Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were offered
opportunities, and in some cases attempted, to form homelands in the USA,
Canada, Argentina, the Caribbean, Australia, Madagascar, the Kenyan-
Ugandan border, Crimea, Siberia, and Vietnam besides several locations in
the Middle East and in North Africa. Life in Babylon for the Jews was
relatively prosperous and free, but as with many religions and political
ideologies there was always the desire to establish or re-establish what is
dreamed or what has been lost, irrespective of location. The Zadokites
wanted their own state and the offer of New Jerusalem, despite its poor
land, meager resources, mixed population, and dismal infrastructure,
presented the best opportunity of having it.
If by an extraordinary set of circumstances and despite all the evidence
it was found that ancient Israel and Judah were indeed located in Palestine,
a great mystery would hang over the Saudi provinces of Hijaz and Asir,
because the history of the trade routes and the presence of numerous
archaeological ruins indicate there must have been powerful rich states in
the area between ca. 1000 and 500 B.C.E. Sabaea and Aksum, too far from
Assyrian and Babylonian control, continued to prosper and to expand in the
same era, fueled by the same factors that would have sustained states in
Hijaz and in Asir during the same period. Instead we have a detailed record
of powerful, rich states of that era - ostensibly in Palestine, a povertystricken
commercial backwater. It is too coincidental. Judah and Israel must
have been in western Arabia.
The development of Judaism in line with Ezra’s doctrines, the
establishment of the New Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, the brief
period of Jewish independence under the Hasmonean dynasty, the life of
Christ, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and forced dispersal of the Jews
from Palestine have made Palestine the focus of Jewish history from ca.
450 B.C.E. to the mid second century A.D. Despite the comparative wealth
of Jewish historical material from this area during that time, it is
nevertheless important to understand the nature of that Jewish society. The
Old Testament traditions emphasize that the New Jerusalem community
was a theocracy with a high proportion of settlers from the priestly houses
among the returnees. The Persian province of Yehud was small,
approximately seventy kilometers from east to west and forty kilometers
from north to south. It had poor agricultural land and was distant from any
important trade route. The coast was under the control of the Phoenicians.
The Greek historian Herodotus failed to notice either Jerusalem or the Jews