Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 11
alone, control of trade routes being a bonus. Others, like Judah, had a
disproportionate reliance on controlling trade routes. One highlight of
Solomon’s reign was the state visit of the Queen of Sheba, ruler of southern
Arabia. The Old Testament interprets this visit as formalizing trade
relations. Traditions say that Solomon annexed Taima in northern Arabia.
If so, it would have brought control of trade from the Arabian Gulf.
Some commentators believe that after the division of the kingdom
Israel prospered while Judah went into economic decline. The reason given
is that, unlike Judah, Israel continued to control lucrative trade routes. Omri,
king of Israel (885-874 B.C.E.), built a new capital at Samaria that eclipsed
the splendor of Jerusalem.
Considering the political climate, the history of the trade routes, and
the location of Samaria, none of this seems right. It is difficult to reconcile
the changed circumstances with Israel’s new prosperity. Prosperity under
Solomon had most probably come from taxing the wealth of the Sheban
and Taima trade routes. The people of the northern areas resented the tax
and the enforced labor, and broke away. Yet after the split it was Israel in
the north that prospered, although it is difficult to believe how Israel could
do so with Judah standing between it and the Taima-Sheban trade routes.
Moreover, Israel lacked a port, and the Egyptian trade from the Levant was
seaborne from Phoenicia to the Nile Delta. A second point concerns the
early period of the Hebrew’s Egyptian captivity.
There was one important aberration to this pattern of establishing Iron
Age states – Egypt. Pharaoh Ramses III (ca. 1187-66 B.C.E.) spent the first
years of his reign dealing with the southern expansion into Syria of the
Hittites, an Indo-European people whose empire was centered in modernday
Turkey. The Hittite empire then suddenly collapsed; the blame
generally apportioned to massive attacks by the above mentioned Sea
Peoples, aggressive groups from different parts of the eastern
Mediterranean. These Sea People moved against Egypt itself but were
defeated in two battles, one on land and the other at sea. They retreated and
sailed westward, probably settling in Sardinia, Sicily, or Tuscany (Etruria).
Ramses III’s victory had an interesting consequence, for it spared Egypt the
political upheaval of Iron Age conquest and massive technological change.
But it also raises a serious concern. Egypt was not yet an Iron Age smelting
country in 1166 B.C.E., yet biblical scholarship supports the notion that the
Hebrew who fled Egypt in the Exodus, 100 to 300 years earlier, already
practiced iron smelting, which provided them with weapons that enabled