Sheba

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172 THE ARK OF THE COVENANT AND ISRAELITE INFLUENCES astride the caravan route from Sheba. It was in Jerusalem that Solomon built the First Temple and had the Ark of the Covenant placed within its inner sanctum where only the high priest could enter. Given Salibi’s unawareness of the Sheba-Menelik Cycle, his hypothetical locations are remarkable. Whereas Shiloh was somewhat distant, both Jerusalem and the City of David were in easy striking distance of Ethiopia. This southern location is supported by a passage in the Chronicles 2:14-16 speaking of Ethiopian (probably Kws in Asir) and southern Arabian military campaigns against Judah. The accounts of the Cushite kingdom of Napata assisting “Tyre, Sidon, Israel and Judah” defy the Assyrians before Shabaka (ca. 712-698 B.C.E), the southern-based Cushite pharaoh of Egypt conquered the Nile Delta, cannot possibly refer to a Palestinian-Levant scenario. The Napata kingdom, based between the 3 rd and 4 th Nile cataracts west of what in now Port Sudan, prospered from Red Sea trade and would have intervened in western Arabia to protect what must have been its trade links with Arabian Judah that Assyria wanted to divert north. If western Arabia was the location of the Old Testament, it explains that region’s strong and ancient Ark tradition, which was finally extinguished in the late 1920s by the puritanical Islamic Wahhabi sect. Hebrew, Arabic, and Ge’ez names for the Ark of the Covenant are respectively tebhah, tabut, and tabot. This puzzled Theodor Nöldeke (1836- 1930), a German Semitic scholar who published works on Aramaic, Syriac, and Classical Arabic as well as histories of the Middle Eastern areas and Persia. He had a reputation for questioning conventional wisdom, doubting the historical existence of Abraham and his alleged home city of Ur. However, his imagination was unable to fathom the Medina dialect word for the Ark of the Covenant, tabut, which he termed “an atrocious monstrosity.” Despite his liberal reputation and views on Abraham, Nöldeke fully accepted that later figures in the Old Testament lived in Palestine and spoke Hebrew. The Hebrew word for the Ark of the Covenant was tebhah. The word tebhah evolved into Palestinian Aramaic tebhotha. Then, after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, many Jews fled to Arabia, allegedly introducing many Old Testament traditions to the Arabs, who also adopted some of their vocabulary. When one language borrows from another, changes are made according to that language’s grammar. Aramaic loan words that have endings (suffixes) in ah change to ut in Arabic. The Aramaic-speaking Jews would have passed the word tebhotha (Ark) to the Arabs, who would have adopted it as something like tebhothut. However,
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 173 the Meccan Arabs used tabut, which meant that they had taken the word before 400 B.C.E. directly from Hebrew tebhah and put their own suffix ut on it, forming the word tabut. That is why Nöldeke was perplexed. More interestingly, before the prestige of Qur’anic Arabic displaced other dialects from the seventh century A.D. onwards, the word used in Medina was tabuh, taken directly from Old Testament Hebrew without the modification used by the Meccans. The evidence showed that Hebrew must have been spoken in the Medina region long before the Jews adopted Aramaic, and that made no sense to Nöldeke. He could not accept that Arabia had an ancient Ark culture and had taken the word directly from an ancient local Hebrew source. Chaim Rabin, writing about the ancient West Arabian language, concluded that “Ethiopic (Ge’ez), then, must have received the word (tabut/tabot) somehow via West Arabian, through channels as yet unknown to us.” This supports the hypothesis that the Ark itself was from western Arabia, and, as narrated in the Sheba-Menelik Cycle, stolen there and taken to Ethiopia. Debate continues as to whether or not Ge’ez words may have been taken directly from ancient Hebrew vocabulary. The main candidates are ’arami (pagan) and ‘arb (eve of Sabbath). In other cases it is difficult to distinguish between Hebrew, Aramaic, or Syriac (an Aramaic dialect) sources. Sixth century A.D. Syriac-speaking Christian missionaries, the Nine Saints, were responsible for mass evangelism and introduced new theological vocabulary. Their word for Ark was qebuta. In November 1962 the late Professor Maxime Rodinson assessed the theories of all authorities concerning the word tabot, concluding that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had adopted it after A.D. 1400 as an ecclesiastical affectation. Rodinson quoted Rabin’s work in his survey so it is astonishing that he completely ignored Rabin’s list of western Arabian Hebrew-isms. 1 The Old Testament is vague about the fate of the Ark of the Covenant and consequently many explanations have been forthcoming, almost all hamstrung by the belief that the Old Testament was located in Palestine. The Sheba-Menelik Cycle provides the most detailed explanation for the Ark’s disappearance, but there is a rival Arabian-based theory. Of the few spared divine wrath in Mecca for opposing the desecration of the Ark was a Jurhumite leader who was then appointed the Ark’s guardian. The Jurhum, of Yemeni origin, controlled the Ka’bah until the fifth century A.D. and the region’s other most important pilgrim shrine at Najran near Yemen, which also contained a mysterious stone. If the Jurhum did indeed possess the Ark,
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Queen of Sheba and Biblical Scholar
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QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLAR
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CHAPTER ONE Sheba, Zionism, and the
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CHAPTER TWO The Search for Evidence
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CHAPTER THREE Writing the Old Testa
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CHAPTER SIX Western Arabia and the
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Sheba

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