Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 51
because without doing so, their existence would be pointless. To them the
return to the Promised Land was divinely ordained.
There is no question that the Jews established a theocracy in Jerusalem
ca. 400 B.C.E. and later ruled their own independent kingdom. It is not at
all certain that this Jerusalem was one and the same place as Solomon’s
Jerusalem.
Professor Thomas Thompson, whose archaeological work was
discussed in the last chapter, commented on 21 August 2000 on this
writer’s belief that Old and New Jerusalem were not the same place:
We need a scenario to explain how the misunderstanding of the
tradition’s geography came about. Conspiracy theories are difficult at
best.
This is a very difficult problem to resolve and the answer probably lies
in unrecorded discussions in Babylon. There had been two promised lands;
one for Abraham, the other for Moses. Jewish tradition identifies both in
modern Israel/Palestine although, as shown later, western Arabia is a far
more likely candidate. The resolution to Thompson’s proposal lies
somewhere in the continuum between agenda and conspiracy. Ezra’s group
was later severely criticized for doctoring the Old Testament but at the
same time the final books of the Old Testament appear to suffer from an
enormous lack of editing.
In ninth-century A.D. Babylon and Galilee such an issue was probably
of no consequence. Palestinian Jerusalem had been Ezekiel’s dream. It was
the child of Ezra, the site of Herod’s great temple, and the capital of the
great rebellion against Roman rule. But were the Old Testament texts
deliberately vocalized accordingly to fit the scenario that Palestinian
Jerusalem had been the Solomon’s Jerusalem and Palestine the Promised
Land? Certainly the Masoretes made Old Testament locations match their
own worldview. The original text said Abraham came from R, Noah’s Ark
rested on dry land at rrt, and that Joshua crossed the h-yrdn to reach the
Promised Land. The Masoretes placed vowels in these words to match
place names they knew. They decided that Abraham came from Ur in
Mesopotamia and the Ark of Noah came down on Ararat. The original text
for Abraham’s first home is R, which is vocalized elsewhere as `Ir meaning
city as in the City of David. As for Ararat being the Ark’s resting place, rrt
more likely means a high place (as in the Arabic word herrat) than a
mountain in Turkey near the place where they were editing the final version