Sheba

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WESTERN ARABIA AND THE SHEBA-MENELIK CYCLE
Kamal Salibi had intended his hypothesis to provide an answer both to
the dilemma of Old Testament archaeology and to the unexplained ruined
cities astride the ancient trade routes that followed the escarpment edge in
Saudi Arabia. He probably expected his suggestions to be taken as
courteously and seriously as his past publications on Lebanese history.
Salibi’s work was certainly not warmly received. Strong opposition came
from Israel, where Salibi’s work was interpreted as an attempt to undermine
the basis of the Jewish state. From other quarters, John Day, the editor of
the Oxford Bible Atlas, condemned Salibi’s hypothesis as “total nonsense”
while Cambridge University’s Professor John Emerton and London
University’s Tudor Parfitt’s stand against Salibi rested on their somewhat
curious assertion that Hebrew had never died out as a living language.
Pennsylvania’s Professor James Sauer denounced Salibi’s book before he
had read it and stated, “Jerusalem and Hebron are exactly where the Bible
says they are.”
Philip Hammond of the University of Utah, in 1991, criticized Salibi
for reaching historical conclusions by examining, primarily, linguistic and
archaeological evidence. He concluded:
A proper review of this book would unfortunately subject the reader to a
volume far larger than the one being reviewed. The sheer enormity,
page by page, of “identifications,” transmutations, blatant historical
error, misconceptions, and similar problems with the scholarship,
preclude considerations within the scope of any “review.” It is difficult
to understand how such a volume could have been foisted upon an
unsuspecting public. Perhaps the scholarly reader will find a certain
degree of amusement in appreciating the skill of the author in his
attempted linguistic exercises, but the lay reader might, regrettably, be
misled by the appearance of the “scholarship” presented. To assume that
similar, or even identical, place names are proof of “identity” between
two places is palpably absurd. To declare that archaeology, with its
modern chronometric techniques, cannot place occupations correctly is
contrary to fact. To ignore the linguistic analyses of Biblical Hebrew
from the Masoretes to modern scholarship is presumptuous. To dismiss
casually all modern scholarship in the field is unscholarly in the extreme.
To display ignorance of published archaeological and other data in favor
of selected, “favorable” quotations is likewise not the way knowledge is
advanced. In short, this reviewer can see no reason why this volume was
published, either in its original German edition, or in English translation.
W. Sibley Towner of Union Theological College in Richmond, Virginia, in
1988, felt that “The weight of millennia of tradition and all of modern
scholarship...all work powerfully against his thesis” and found it “not