Roberta Kells Dorr. The Queen of Sheba. HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.
In I Kings 10:1-13, the Queen of Sheba visits King Solomon
of Israel. She has heard of Solomon’s
wealth and wisdom, and she is coming to Solomon to see if the report she has
heard is accurate. She asks Solomon
difficult questions to test his wisdom.
Roberta Kells Dorr’s The
Queen of Sheba is a novel about this famous encounter, but it includes
other biblical stories as well. Solomon
in this book is the Solomon of the Book of Ecclesiastes (assuming Solomon wrote
or is depicted in Ecclesiastes): brooding, disenchanted with life, and feeling
as if life’s pursuits are an empty chasing after wind. Events of I Kings 11 are depicted in Dorr’s
book: Solomon’s construction of pagan temples in Israel for his foreign wives;
the Edomite Hadad’s troubling of Israel; and the events that would lead to the
Ephraimite Jeroboam’s revolt against Solomon’s kingdom, as well as the
secession of Northern Israel from it.
There is also a side-story in Dorr’s book about Badget, an
Israelite merchant with two wives, one kind and the other bitter because she
cannot have a child. This story is not
in the Bible, but, in Dorr’s book, it sets the stage for the infamous story in
I Kings 3:16-28. In I Kings 3:16-28,
King Solomon proposes to divide a child in two when two mothers are claiming
the same child, and the child’s mother begs Solomon not to do so.
There are cases in which Dorr draws conclusions from the
biblical narratives. Like some biblical
scholars, Dorr maintains that the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon was
related to trade, as Solomon’s building of posts at the Red Sea threatened
other countries’ trade. Solomon in the
Hebrew Bible is married to the Pharaoh’s daughter, and the Pharaoh in I Kings
11:18-19 favors Solomon’s enemy Hadad.
Dorr constructs a story in which Solomon’s beloved Egyptian wife is a
spy for the Pharaoh.
Of course, Dorr takes some poetic license. In Dorr’s book, Solomon’s Egyptian wife
adopts Jeroboam as her son so Jeroboam would succeed Solomon on the throne, as
she competes with Solomon’s Ammonite wife Naamah, the mother of Rehoboam (who
actually will succeed Solomon). The
Queen of Sheba is named Bilqis, and she becomes disillusioned with paganism
when she tries to sleep with the moon-god in order to have a child, only to
find that he was really the priest. That
launches her on a search for truth, and she becomes curious about the peculiar
God of Israel. Solomon and the Queen of
Sheba have a child, who would rule Ethiopia.
(Dorr draws here from a mixture of history and legend.)
The book had parts that I especially liked. First, there was the comparison between the
Queen of Sheba’s method of arriving at judicial decisions with that of King
Solomon. The Queen of Sheba’s method was
very pragmatic and reasonable: it took into consideration the various interests
involved and what would benefit them and her interests as Queen. But her method was not exactly just. Solomon, by contrast, was under the authority
of the Torah and valued justice and truth.
Second, there was Solomon’s loneliness as king. Because people acted formally around him, he
could not be friends with many people.
The scene in which Solomon pretended to be his brother Nathan around the
Queen of Sheba was good, in light of this.
Third, the discussion between the Queen of Sheba and the
priest of the moon-god Ilumquh after the Queen discovered the priest’s
impersonation of the deity was interesting.
The Queen says, “Without truth the whole world has gone mad.” The priest says: “Who is wise enough to know
if there is an Ilumquh. If there isn’t,
there should be. If he doesn’t speak, he
should speak. It’s not our fault if we
must at times speak and act for him” (page 62).
I was rather ambivalent about the spiritual journeys of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Regarding Solomon, his rationale for building pagan temples was not
particularly convincing: he wanted to appease pagan gods. This could have been developed more, but Dorr
would have done better simply to have stuck with another theme in her book:
that Solomon was not actually convinced of the pagan gods’ power but rather
sought to appease his foreign wives, whom he married in a pragmatic attempt to
maintain peace with other nations.
Solomon’s struggle between pragmatism and his belief in God was a
positive aspect of this book, as was Solomon keeping his faith even after
hearing God’s plan to punish his kingdom for his sins.
Regarding the Queen of Sheba, she asked good questions about
Israelite religion and how that compared to her own----questions pertaining to
such issues as justice, idolatry, and human sacrifice (which the Torah forbids)
and Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac.
At the same time, she seemed rather credulous in accepting the
historicity of biblical stories, which was slightly inconsistent with Dorr’s
attempt to depict her as a rigorous pursuer of truth.
Good book, overall!