Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 131
definition that Jews are a nation, and there are a number of Jews that
accept that definition. There are a number of Jews without any
definition. They are just Jews. I am one of them. I don’t need any
definition. I am what I am. 5
In fact, Jews have been defined since the days of Ezra, often as “real”
and “not quite real” Jews. The kings of the House of Herod, the Roman
client rulers of Judaea at the beginning of the Christian era, were regarded
by the Jerusalem Jews as semi-Jews, recent converts, Arab Jews, or
Edomites (Idumeans), descended from Esau, with an origin just south of the
Holy Land. They may in fact have been Arabian Israelites previously
unaffected by the claims of the Jerusalem priest-caste. The Idumeans were
prepared to build the Second Temple in 19 B.C.E. under Herod the Great
on a grand scale, with 18,000 workmen under 1,000 artisan priests who
used stone blocks weighing between two and five tons. While the Idumeans
may have been part of a Jewish Bedouin population outside the control of
Jerusalem community that were migrating north from Hijaz, much of the
population of Palestine were descendants of non Israelites forced by the
Hasmoneans to convert to Judaism. When Roman rule was established
many of these reverted to their former beliefs. Commentators have included
the Idumeans among the forcibly converted, but at the very least they had
been exposed to Israelites in Arabia from a pre-exilic background.
One of the major reasons for the explosion of Islam from Arabia into
the Fertile Crescent and the corn lands of North Africa was to escape from
the deteriorating Arabian environment. People left Arabia; they did not flee
to it. After the dispersal of Jews from Palestine in the first and second
centuries A.D. Jewish communities were established all over the
Mediterranean world to such an extent that but for the rise of Christianity
there was a possibility that a liberal form of Judaism may have become the
majority urban religion of the Roman Empire.
Even before the Diaspora there is evidence of Jewish intellectual life in
Arabia. Paul, after his Damascus vision, went to Arabia for three years,
where he seems to have acquired information and ancient texts relating to
Christ’s background and early life that assisted his later mission. Waraqah
Ibn Nawfal, a relative of Muhammad’s wife Khadijah, appears to have
possessed ancient Judaic documents concerning the life of Christ. These
were known to the Ethiopians but are now lost.
The Prophet Muhammad was born ca. 570 A.D. in Mecca. His father
died before his birth and his mother and grandfather when he was