Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 139
Arabian settlements had been populated by Israelites since King David’s
time, basing this conclusion on Arab sources and the Old Testament (1
Chronicles 4:38-43) that state sections of the Israelites massacred the
Amalekites and took their land. Subsequent commentators have dismissed
Dozy’s views but have still not come to terms with the reasons for
widespread Jewish settlement in Arabia. Other writers noted that Hijaz
Jews spoke a dialect known as Judeo-Arabic, phrases from which
Muhammad himself quoted in the Qur’an, a factor that seems to militate
against Torrey, Winckler, and other authorities’ conclusions that the
Arabian Jews were converted Arabs.
Nothing can be ascertained for certain until discovery of archaeological
evidence or ancient documentation. Most likely important evidence exists
in Mecca and Medina; but since both are closed Islamic cities it is out of
the question that any Judaic research can be undertaken in either of them.
The picture that emerges from the dawn of Islam is of large Israelite or
Jewish communities in Yemen and Hijaz, both of unknown origin and
antiquity but with little known about the territory between them.
Linguistic evidence, though certainly not conclusive, has provided
interesting pointers for further research. Arabic is now the language of the
Arabian peninsula. In Yemen there are six non-Arabic dialects, and
elsewhere there are local dialects that differ sharply from the Standard
Arabic taught in schools and used in the media. The local Arabic dialects
are the result of modern Arabic absorbing local languages. Many examples
of this phenomenon exist among English speakers who retain parts of
grammar of unrelated languages spoken by their ancestors several
generations earlier. Speakers of Caribbean English sometimes interchange
he/she and him/her irrespective of the gender of the subject. This is because
the language of their West African ancestors did not differentiate the
gender of the third person singular (for example, in East Africa the Swahili
for “he/she is asleep” is identical – analala). When some Africans switched
to English they carried through the genderless grammar (other African
languages like Maasai and Tigrinya mark the gender in verbs) and passed it
on to their descendants. A British English example would be “I don’t know
nothing,” which is from an Anglo-Saxon dialect where the double negative
was used (like some modern Flemish dialects and Afrikaans). Through
error analysis (mistakes made in the adopted language) researchers can
reconstruct part of the former language’s grammar. Other findings can be
gleaned from vocabulary for local items such as fauna and flora and