Sheba

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32 THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE Athens. Solomon’s buildings were the First Temple, the Royal Palace (which took twice as much time as the temple to build), the Treasury, and the Judgment Hall (where he placed his ivory throne), a palace for his most prestigious wife (pharaoh’s daughter), and a large structure called the House of the Forest of Lebanon. No trace of any of these exists today. The archaeological record has revealed that during the time of Solomon’s reign Jerusalem was one of about 100 small unfortified villages in a very poor agricultural area inhabited by a people indistinguishable from other Canaanites, who led a marginal existence herding goats, sheep, and oxen. Attempts to link small public works to the biblical record are unconvincing. The famed Siloam “water tunnel of Hezekiah” mentioned above owes its name to a passage in the Old Testament where Hezekiah is credited with building a pool and an “aqueduct” on the “west” side of the city. There are no remains of an aqueduct, and the tunnel (which could of course be described as a kind of aqueduct) is on the eastern edge of Jerusalem. The most important piece of evidence is probably a stone fragment with inscriptions dealing with the misfortunes of the king of Moab at the hands of the Israelite monarch Omri, whom he had nevertheless successfully defied. This is known as the Moabite Stone, a basalt stele from about 850 B.C.E. inscribed with thirty-four lines of text in a script similar to later postexilic Hebrew. The stele was discovered at Dibon, east of the Dead Sea, in 1868. The Moabites were apparently closely related to the Israelites (Ruth was a Moabite), but the prophet Isaiah eventually condemned them as the enemies of God. The Moabite Stone is accepted as proof of the Israelite presence in Palestine, but the stone was most likely erected by Moabites who had fled Israelite aggression elsewhere, perhaps from the trade route hub of Jawf. No trace of Omri’s capital has been found, but the Moabite Stone indicates that Israel, the northern kingdom, was in striking distance of the Trans-Jordan. Beyond Palestine, the Merneptah Stele, dated 1207 B.C.E. and discovered in 1896 in Thebes (now Luxor), Egypt’s ancient capital, has been used as proof of Israel’s existence. The stele is named after the pharaoh who ruled Egypt from ca. 1212 to 1202 B.C.E. Its inscriptions include one line that has been interpreted as saying “Israel is laid waste, its seed is not.” In 1990, Frank Yurco, a researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, identified figures on the stele as ancient Israelites. Michael Hasel, a University of Arizona doctoral student researching the stele, concluded in 1994 that this indicated Israel was an important “socio-ethnic entity in the late 13th century B.C.E., one that is
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 33 significant enough to be included in the military campaign against political powers in Canaan.” It is far more likely that the places mentioned on the stele were in areas of strategic importance to Thebes so that if the reference to Israel really does mean the Hebrew or Israelites of the Old Testament it is a tantalizing hint that they were not in Palestine but either in Africa or in Arabia. Then again, why would the Egyptians have conducted a military campaign in Palestine, where, for economic and strategic purposes, such a venture would be totally unnecessary? The stele omits the names of significant political entities in Palestine. Other Egyptian references in a corrupted form of Akkadian in the Amarna Letters, discovered in 1887, speak of pr (vocalized as ’apiru or hapiru) as being a problem in fourteenth century B.C.E. Canaan. Akkadian is too close to Canaanite/ Hebrew to confuse pr with br, the word for Hebrew. Historians and archaeologists generally concur that the pr seem to have been composed of isolated bands of outlaws expelled from city states; however they were not a separate people. Despite this, given the nomadic history of the Hebrew of Abraham and Moses, and the almost vagrant nature of modern Hebraic groups like the Somali Yibir, there might possibly be a link between the pr and br. Sometimes archaeological finds have revealed biblical names. In 1986, a seal was identified as belonging to Neriah’s son, Baruch, who wrote down Jeremiah’s prophecies in 587 B.C.E, on the eve of the Babylonian conquest of Judah. The seal could have come from Palestine or been brought there from elsewhere. In 1993, archaeologists working at Tell Dan, in northern Israel, discovered an inscription on a piece of basalt that they vocalized to mean House of David and King of Israel. Unfortunately, because Semitic languages were unvocalized in the pre-Christian era, it is impossible to know the precise meaning of isolated inscriptions. Archaeological remains are also open to all sorts of interpretations. Baruch would have been written as BRK, a word that also means “blessing.” Archaeological reconstruction depends on the researcher’s imagination. One part of the ruins at Megiddo has been identified as stables for Solomon’s numerous horses. An alternative view is that they are merely shop stalls. There are references other than the Old Testament that have been interpreted as referring to Judah and to Israel. They all belong to the period after Solomon, when the two kingdoms were divided. The Egyptian ruler Sheskonk (Shishak) ruled from ca. 945 to ca. 924 B.C.E. and his depredations are noted in the Old Testament books of 1 Kings (14:25-26) and 2 Chronicles (12:2-9). Sheshonk’s achievements are listed on the walls of the Temple of Ammon in Thebes. The record
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Page 3 and 4: QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLAR
Page 15 and 16: CHAPTER ONE Sheba, Zionism, and the
Page 37 and 38: CHAPTER TWO The Search for Evidence
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CHAPTER SIX Western Arabia and the
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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