Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 149
No such debate has eventuated. Despite this, commentators have continued
to debate Salibi’s ideas, mostly on the Internet. Chris Khoury, writing on
February 25, 2003, aptly summarized the situation:
Upon scouring whatever journals I could for book reviews and
commentary on Salibi’s work, I found much ridicule, scorn, and
disregard but virtually no substantive criticism.
The same year the University of Arizona’s William Dever, Professor of
Near Eastern Archaeology, published his Who Were the Early Israelites and
Where Did They Come From? in which he dismissed Salibi’s work as,
“a notorious book ... thoroughly discredited, of course, by critics on all
sides.” 9
During his career Dever received over US $1,300,000 in grants to dig at
sites believed to be from ancient Israel, in particular Gezer, and served as
director of the Albright Institute (1971-75). He had vast experience in
academic editorial, lecturing, supervisory, and research work, and
publishing, yet the word Arabia does not appear once in his eighteen page
résumé. He and others with deep but exceedingly narrow experience are in
no position to judge research on subjects in which they have never
professed any interest and of which they are profoundly ignorant. Any
scholar with an elementary knowledge of Arabian Judaism would have
responded in a more academically professional manner to Salibi’s ideas.
Salibi elaborated on his ideas in three later books: Secrets of the Bible
People (1988), Conspiracy in Jerusalem: the Hidden Origins of Jesus
(1988), and The Historicity of Biblical Israel (1998). He placed the
development of the early Israelite religion in the “ring of fire” volcanic
region of Yemen and the Egyptian captivity not in Egypt itself but in an
Egyptian colony in Arabia, in either the Asir or Jizan regions in the south.
The beginning of the Hebrew captivity has been assigned to either ca.
1800 or ca. 1600 B.C.E. The Egyptian Middle Kingdom rulers
Amenemhet I (ca. 1938-1908 B.C.E.) and his son, co-regent and later
monarch, Sesostris (ca. 1918-1985 B.C.E.) re-established the capital at
Thebes. From there they annexed the south as far as the Second Cataract
and perhaps had some involvement in their Asian borderland. Speculation
spurred by biblical interest points to Palestine, but economic logic suggests
it is more likely that the Egyptians were more focused on controlling the
Hijaz trade routes to ensure luxury goods were channeled towards the Red