Sheba

QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 65
the queen’s name may have been Bilqis, which was then adopted into
Hebrew deliberately as a word to mean concubine in order to insult and
denigrate her.
According to Ethiopian traditions a ruler named Za Sebado (ca. 1070-
1026 B.C.E.) had a daughter named Ismenie who married the kingdom’s
chief minister. This minister then ruled jointly as king with his royally born
wife from about 1026 –1005 B.C.E. They had two children, Makeda and
Noural Rouz, a boy who died in childhood after being accidentally burned.
Interestingly, the word rouz occurs in earliest known Hebrew and means
“prince”. Makeda was born ca. 1020 B.C.E. and became queen when she
was fifteen, ruling until about 955 B.C.E. when she surrendered the throne
to her son Menelik. Her supposed birthplace is Gulo Makeda, a short
instance to the northwest of Yeha on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border, and her
capital was Hinzat, a town east of Adwa. Gulo Makeda and Hinzat were
two of many prosperous settlements on the route from the Red Sea port
Adulis to Aksum. Hinzat has visible ancient ruins, but no archaeological
work has been carried out there.
This tradition concerning Makeda’s background resembles others from
southern Arabia. A tenth century A.D. Muslim writer named Hamdani, who
died in Sana’a in Yemen, wrote that the Queen of Sheba was born in Arabia,
the daughter of Ekeye Azeb, an Aksumite princess, and Shar Habil, ruler of
Yemen. Hamdani said that the Queen of Sheba’s name was Bilqis and that
she spent part of her youth in Aksum, returning to Arabia just before her
father’s death. A second Yemeni tradition, recorded by Saadiah Ben Joseph
in about A.D. 1702, said that the Queen of Sheba’s father was a chief
minister to the king of Sheba, but that her mother was a jinn (genie). It is
not known if the word jinn has always meant a fantasy being. In other
cultures references to fairies, “little people,” and others of the kind have
occasionally had an historical basis. It is likely that in ancient times farming
and pastoral societies encountered small hunter-gatherer peoples credited
with magical powers - the San of the Kalahari desert and Namibia are
modern examples; and perhaps the Grendel story of the Anglo-Saxon epic
Beowulf refers to a remnant Neanderthal or hominid population now long
extinct. DNA testing in Wales, in mountainous western Britain, has
revealed the existence of a pre-Celtic population remnant related to
highland peoples in Papua New Guinea, 6 giving strength to the belief that
thousands of years ago there was a worldwide population of small huntergatherers
who were obliterated or absorbed by later migrations of farmers
and pastoralists. Their remnants still exist today in Tanzania, southern