You're Dead to Me - The Queen of Sheba (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Jillian Stinchcomb and comedian Sadia Azmat to learn all about the legendary Queen of Sheba. From her first appearance in the Hebrew Bible, the Queen of Sheba has fascinated Jewish, Muslim and Christian writers. But do we know anything about her as a historical figure? And how has her story been told, used and reinterpreted throughout history? This episode traces the legends written about the Queen of Sheba across Europe, Africa and the Middle East from 600 BCE to today, exploring the ambiguous and contradictory depictions of her as a wise and powerful ruler, an exoticised and seductive woman, the founding member of an Ethiopian royal dynasty, and a possible half-demon!This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by: Jon Mason Written by: Jon Mason, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to Your Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I am a public historian, author and broadcaster and today we are trekking all the way back to ancient Yemen or is it Ethiopia to learn all about the wealth, wisdom and womanly wiles of the legendary Queen of Sheba. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She specializes in religious, biblical and Jewish studies, especially the literary dynamics of biblical figures.

And lucky for us, she's especially interested in issues of gender and power. It's Dr. Gillian Stinchcombe. Welcome to the show, Jill. Hi, thanks for having me on the show, Greg. And in Comedy Corner, she's a stand-up comedian, author and broadcaster. You might know her from her award-winning podcast, No Country for Young Women, or heard her on any number of other podcasts, including the Reheles Duba Book Club with Richard Herring. It's the superb Sadia Asmat. Welcome to the show, Sadia. Hi, thank you for having me. Delighted to have you here. Sadia, first time on the show, Sadia. Hi, thank you for having me. Delighted to have you here.

Sadia, first time on the show. I have to ask, do you like history? Did you like it at school? Yeah, I did. I learned a lot about Stalin and Chotsky. A lot about that. There was a lot of blood. It was violent.

And what do you know about the Queen of Sheba? I don't know anything about the Queen of Sheba at all, at all. Somebody told me about a harem or something like that, so I wanted to ask about that. Have you heard the name Sheba in any capacity as a phrase? Yeah, you know when I was younger, there used to be all these cat foods called Sheba, all these cat food adverts, so I don't have a cat. The whole vibe was very dark and she looked like she loves the cat. So what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. Queen of Sheba, I think is a well-known name, immortalized in the phrase, who do you think you are? The Queen of Sheba of Sheba famously it was in the royal family in a very famous episode of that sitcom that wonderful sitcom but apart from the implication that Sheba might therefore be a lavish lady of leisure who doesn't do anything you might not know much else about her story maybe when I say she bit you are like Sadia thinking of cat food but maybe you're not thinking ancient Queen you may have seen the 1959 film Solomon and Sheba

or the 1995 film starring Halle Berry, which is also called Solomon and Sheba. But who was she? Was she a real lady? Is she more fiction than fact? And what have animal legs got to do with it? Let's find out. All right, Dr. Jill, usually on this show,

we start by asking when was our protagonist born, sort of basic biography questions. That's going to be tricky today, right? Yes, definitely. The Queen of Sheba, as we'll discuss, is a figure that pops up in a lot of religious and literary traditions, but biographical facts are pretty thin on the ground. So instead, we'll be tracing her through different stories told about her through history. Sadia, I was going to ask when in history is our first reference to the Queen of Sheba? You want to guess? You know Cleopatra? She used to like around that times, I don't know what times this was. Well Cleopatra will be about 2,000 years ago roughly, sort of about 30 BCE. So

you're saying roughly 2,000 years ago? Yeah. That's a solid guess. I think we could go earlier. I would say that is a really solid guess, but most people put the time where she would have lived probably ninth or tenth century BCE. So the first written record of the Queen of Sheba is in the Hebrew Bible, known as the Old Testament to many Christians. And she appears in two passages, First Kings 10 and the other one is Second Chronicles chapter 9. These texts probably draw on older materials which were written before 600 BCE, and both of these describe her as a wealthy ruler of a foreign land who makes a visit to the court of Solomon, a biblical king of Israel. Solomon

was the son of David, and Solomon had requested wisdom from God, which he was granted. And after this, he became really wealthy, powerful, and devout. He built the temple and the wall at Jerusalem, as well as palaces, towns, and cities using conscripted slaves from conquered ethnic minorities. Because of all of this, Solomon became very famous in the area and was so famous that the queen of Sheba decided to visit him and test him with hard questions. Is he single?

He actually had many, many wives. So not single, but also not opposed to taking on a new lady friend at any point. She asked him about his income, like where he gets his money from. That's a hard question too. Let's get hyper specific on the tiny, tiny details we do have. So Saadia, the Hebrew Bible tells us that Sheba, or the Queen of Sheba rather, gave Solomon 120 talents of gold, plus the large quantities of spices, many precious stones, etc. No cat food, unfortunately. Do you know how heavy a talent is?

5kg? Good guess. Go a little higher. No, don't say 10kg. What is this woman giving gold for? It's like a game show this, higher still. 35kg. Oh my god, this lady is loaded. She is proper loaded.

What does she want from this guy? Well she wants to ask him about his wisdom, obviously. No one's this wise, I'd keep the gold. She's not very wise. So 35 kilograms per talent. She's giving him 120 talents. That is about four tons of gold. So Jill, do we even know where Sheba is?

We don't know, not precisely, where Sheba is. It seems like it's probably generally to the south of Jerusalem, but the Hebrew Bible mentions a place called Sheba 17 times across the whole corpus, and it never really tells us exactly where it is. There are some theories. Many modern scholars have noted on linguistic grounds, it could be Saba, which is on the Red Sea coast, and it's in modern day Yemen, because Sheba and Saba might be variations on the same name. In antiquity, this was a city-state that was controlled at different times by the rulers of both Yemen and Ethiopia, actually. But there are also some

scriptural references to Sheba and Saba as separate places. So the identification with Saba is just, it's not 100% certain. We don't know anything about her. I mean, Jill, I'm starting to worry this episode's in serious trouble because so far we know so little about this person. Do we think the Queen of Sheba was even a real person? We have about as much direct evidence for her as we do of Solomon. All our accounts of Solomon come from hundreds of years later, actually, just like the Queen of Sheba. But the Queen's literary function in the text, I think, is probably more important than if she was real or not, because she's there to demonstrate that Solomon was so wise that he received praise and respect from other powerful and incredibly wealthy

rulers, even from exotic faraway lands. Nice save, Jill. Podcast rescued, I think, is what we're saying there. So after her debut in the Hebrew Bible, the Queen of Sheba then turns up 700 years later. This is in the first century CE. So this is about 2000 years ago. It's in a book written by a famous Jewish writer called Flavius Josephus. His book is called Antiquities. And in his book Antiquities, Josephus does give the Queen a name. The name we've got is, well I guess in modern pronunciation, Nicola. So Josephus is saying she's called Nicola, Queen of Sheba, and he says that she is from Saba in Ethiopia, but he also says

she's ruler also of Egypt. So Jill, why are both getting name change? So Josephus' antiquities is a history of the Jewish people. Josephus was a prisoner of war taken to Rome, and so he wrote this history while living in Rome written a few years after the Romans had actually destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in a sort of violent culmination of their occupation of the area after the Jewish revolt. Josephus was trying to argue for the antiquity and the importance of the Jewish people in terms that his Roman and Greek audience would have understood. Egypt was really respected by Roman society as one of the oldest civilizations they knew

of, and in the first century CE, it had actually become one of the richest provinces of the Roman Empire. And Ethiopia also appears to have had some mystique in Greco-Roman writings. So by visiting Solomon at his court, the Egyptian and Ethiopian queen of Sheba was essentially proving his importance through her own power and economic status, proving to a Roman audience the importance of the Jewish people in historical terms. Will Barron We now get on to our next story and now we're into the Christian age actually. Our next writer is a Christian scholar. He's called Origen of Alexandria. He's writing in the

third century CE, so about 1,700 years ago. What's Origen's Origen story for the Queen of Sheba? I would say he has a slightly different take on things. He doesn't have to argue for Solomon's importance in the same way that Josephus did, for instance. Origen wrote lots of commentaries on scriptural texts and one of his most extensive was on the Song of Songs. And the Song of Songs is a poem from the Hebrew Bible in which an unnamed man and a woman describe their love for one another. And it's surprisingly sexy and romantic, actually. Yeah. It's a very famous poem. Do you know it Sardiya? No am I gonna get to read it now? You are yeah. Is that my cue? Can I grab it? So yeah this is the

song of songs and this is the opening stanza so it's the beginning of the poem do you want to read it for us? Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. For your love is better than wine. Your anointing oils are fragrant. Your name is perfume poured out. Therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you. Let us make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exult and rejoice in you.

We will extol your love more than wine. Rightly do they love you. Oh, wow!! Oh my god. Who wrote this? I want this person to write something for me too. I don't know if they're available anymore, Jill. Many people say it's Solomon, actually, Saja, so maybe this is why the Queen of Sheba was so into him.

Oh my god. I like guys who are in touch with their sensitive side. He's cool. I like him. And why is the Queen of Sheba linked to this poem, Jill? So interpretations of the poem vary within and between Jewish and Christian traditions. As you might imagine, it made some people a little uncomfortable that this was so incredibly sexy. Actually, Origen begins his commentary by saying like, this isn't actually about sex at all. Don't get it twisted. I get the same criticism, Gillian. And Origen argued that in some ways, the woman in the poem is the queen of Sheba with much

of the poem smoking in her voice. Building on Josephus's idea that the queen was Ethiopian, he connects the fact of her being from Ethiopia to a line in the poem where the speaker describes herself as black and beautiful. And that makes this the first written example of the Queen of Sheba being explicitly identified as a black woman. And this identity is something that has continued to mean a lot to some audiences of her story throughout history. Mason Hickman She appears again in the seventh century. This is the time of Islam. Dr. Jill, how does Queen of Sheba's story, reputation, her purpose, does it shift at all now that Muslim writers are starting to talk about

her? Yes, definitely. The Queen of Sheba suddenly became very meaningful to writers from different faith traditions in different ways because she's not really needed as a witness to Solomon's greatness anymore. Instead, they're using her to think about difference and power. And we really get a flourishing of new imaginative descriptions of the Queen of Sheba. You've mentioned imaginative depictions. We're talking now magical spirits, Sardiya, talking animals, body horror, and a bit more sexy stuff as well. Do you know jinn? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So jinn is basically like, you can have good gin and bad gin. They're

basically spirits. And so I know that there are some tales that say, you know, after mug rib, which is sunset, you shouldn't really go out because that's when the gin is usually out in the night. And then sometimes it says if the dogs are barking, like it's because they've seen a djinn. Okay, so negative and positive. The djinn are starting to come into stories, but there's another Jewish text as well, Jill, called the Targum Sheni, I think. It's rewriting the book of Esther, I think.

And it's once again, the Queen of Sheba has turned up to meet Solomon. So that's the same. But I feel like the CGI budget has gone up. There's more going on. So what's happening now, Jill? JILL The Queen in these, the text emphasizes that she's an idolater who worships the sun or the sea. And Solomon writes a letter to her demanding that she show deference to him. And she decides to visit. And this text in Targum's Shinita, actually pretty closely parallels a narrative that's also in the Qur'an, Surah An-Naml, Surah 27.

And so in the Qur'an, Solomon also sends a jinn to steal her throne and bring it back to his court. And then he actually tests her by disguising her throne with magic. And she sort of sees through the trick. In the Targum, in contrast, she tests him with a series of riddles. And after really easily answering the riddles, the Queen of Sheba in the Targum declares that Solomon is indeed very wise. All right.

I have two questions. First of all, why does she keep going to see him and he's not going to see her? She's making all the effort in this relationship. I don't like it. He couldn't even send a car for her or something. Did they have a car back then? I don't know, but she's doing a lot of the legwork and I feel badly for her on that. And then the other thing I wanted to say is, like their relationship seemed to shift

because before it was, she was just like, you know, praising him all the time. And now they're playing games with each other. There's another element of the story that's different as well. Sadya do you want to guess what's interesting architecturally about Solomon's palace when the Queen of Sheba shows up? Is it floating? Oh that's a good guess I do like that guess. Yeah if Sadya wrote that on an exam she would definitely get partial credit from me. In both the Quran and the Targum Shani to Esther, this is one of the interesting parallels to them. Solomon's palace is described as having

a room with glass floors, which the Queen of Sheba mistakes for water. She sees this room with glass shiny floors and she lifts up her skirts to avoid the water. And then Solomon explains that it's just glass. And in the Quran, she sort of realizes her mistake with the glass floor. And it's very abrupt, but then she says, I've been mistaken about my religious practice. And so she rejects her son worship in the Quran to convert to worshipping God alongside Solomon, which you could phrase as converting to Islam. But since it's before Muhammad, we might just say, converts to the worship of the one true God. And the Targum actually really makes a dig at her because in that text, when she lifts up her skirts, she reveals that she has really hairy legs.

And Solomon says that she's beautiful for a woman, but hairy like a man, and hair is shameful on a woman. I didn't shave my legs today. Me neither. The hairy legs, Jill, are starting to be critical of the Queen of Sheba. She's a foreigner, she worships the wrong god, she's got hairy legs. Is that also appearing in later versions as well or is this a one-off? No, this is something that keeps appearing. For example, in the 9th century alphabet of Ben-Sira, which is an anthology of tales, it's a Jewish text, very parodic, very humorous. And in this particular text,

Ben-Sira is called to the court of Nebuchadnezzar, who is a biblical king of Babylon. And Nebuchadnezzar asks Ben-Sira a series of 24 questions, most of which are about animals and are also pretty crude and rude. So one question that Nebuchadneazer had was how to shave the head of a rabbit. And Ben-Sira answers with a story of the Queen of Sheba. And in the story found in the alphabet of Ben-Sira, after seeing her hairy legs, Solomon invents a paste, a depilatory cream, which removes her body hair. And Solomon then promptly sleeps with her, no concern about her consent in one way or another is listed in the text.

Oh my god. And then Ben-Sira does this big reveal and says that this actually, this encounter between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon was how Nebuchadnezzar was conceived. And just to note, Solomon and Nebuchadnezzar lived centuries apart from one another. This is really not meant as a history, but a parody, making fun of everybody involved. Let's talk about a writer called Al-Tabari, who in the 10th century, he's giving us an even more wild version of the stories. We've already heard about, you know, supposedly she's having Nebuchadnezzar as her son and there's sort of various magical things happening.

She's now called Bilqis and she comes from Yemen. Bilqis is a nice name. That's my auntie's name. Is it? She died. Oh, I'm sorry. It's a nice name, though. It's a beautiful name, isn't it? Bilqis. So, Al-Tabari's renamed her. He's relocated

her to Yemen. He also claims that she has murdered her tyrant husband in order to take his throne and that one of the djinn's under Solomon's control has heard a rumor about her appearance. Do you want to guess what the rumor is, Zadia? Mmm... she's pregnant. Oh, good guess! But no, it's the legs again. But this time... Oh, she's growing a hair back? Yeah, more than that. She's got donkey legs, Jill. Explain, please.

Yes, so in Tabari's version of the story, the djinn under Solomon's control are really nervous that if Solomon falls in love with the Queen of Sheba, they'll have a child and then that child will be able to rule them forever. So they tell Solomon that actually underneath her skirts, the Queen of Sheba is hiding donkey legs. And so then Tabari says that the glass floor wasn't, you know, a coincidence. It was actually

another trick set up by Solomon to get her to lift her skirts and show off whether or not she has donkey legs. It turns out, luckily, maybe that she just has hairy legs. What's the problem with donkey legs, by the way? I mean, it's basically meant to indicate that she's a demon. I think they're not good jinn because they're like, trouble making. So we hear that the jinn goes up to the heaven and the lowest part of the heaven, and then they start like hearing the angels who are like, you know what's going to happen. So that's where the rumors come from, because they don't hear all of it.

And then they kind of mix the truth into it. So someone said if you know all those fortune tellers and stuff, somehow they can tell you something factual about you. But it's like there's one truth mixed in a hundred lies. But then they're not great people. So they mess it up as well. Ah, well don't trust the djinn then. Alright so Jill, we now have a Queen of Sheba, not with donkey legs per se, but has been described as maybe having donkey legs by people who want to break apart any sexual relationship between her and Solomon. But it feels like the dynamic is shifting a little

bit again, that the story of Queen of Sheba keeps mutating, doesn't it? Definitely. There's a clear power imbalance between the Queen and Solomon in these versions. Arguably you could say the story is Solomon in these versions. Arguably, you could say the story is becoming more gendered. She's a joke for not fitting stereotypical gender norms, but she's forced to conform by the end of the story where it says that Solomon gives her a cream to make her legs smooth and feminine again. But other factors might also be important, especially the Queen's idolatry. Her function now seems to be to show Solomon's superiority over unbelievers in both Muslim and Jewish traditions. But the Queen is just

really hard to pigeonhole. She recognizes Solomon's greatness in the Bible and God's superiority in the Quran. And perhaps related to that, she is consistently portrayed as beautiful and desirable despite unconventional appearance and behavior. What do you make of this, the Queen of Sheba story so far in terms of her reputation? I just think she's going to a lot of effort. And I feel like she's quite strong as a character, like almost what we would think of as a masculine strength.

So she seems to be as strong as a man and a woman, basically, she's very tough. So she's not needy, she's not like me. I will be texting him every day. Come on, Solomon, leave your wives, all of them. Just let it be me and you. We're into now medieval Ethiopia, which is a Christian culture, isn't it, Jill, that becomes Christianised. So where are we now with our history of Queen of Sheba in Ethiopia? So Ethiopia is actually one of the earliest political entities that has mass conversion over to Christianity. Very, very old Christian history, but our manuscript tradition for

them starts around the 13th century. And in this period, we start to get this text called the Kaabernagast, which is a selective history of Ethiopia, which justifies the rule of the Christian dynasty that came to power in the 13th century. And the Cabernet gas states that the Queen of Sheba had ruled over Ethiopia and it gives her a different name. This one is Makeda. And this history portrays her and, you know, it's national epic really, portrays her as a wise, capable and moral. And maybe the reason they emphasize these qualities so much is because for one of the first times it's written by a community who claimed her as their own. The Queen of Sheba in the beginning of the story worships the son, but when she learns

of the wisdom of Solomon, she's persuaded to worship the God of Israel. She visits Solomon and they have a philosophical discussion, but on the last night of her visit, he sort of tricks her into having sex. Another text which shows no concern for consent, although in this case, the literary value of that is that it shows that she's not sexually promiscuous despite having a child outside of wedlock. So as a result of this encounter, the queen gives birth to a son, Menelik, and Menelik the first is claimed as the ancestor of the ruling dynasty of Ethiopia, known as the Solomonic dynasty. And that dynasty ruled right up until the 20th century and included

Haley Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, who's worshipped as a prophet or a messiah by those of the Rastafari faith. And his claims of descent from both Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were written into the Ethiopian constitution of 1955. Wow, that's a lot to take in there, Sardiya. So she's got a new name, Makeda. So this is her third name now. Because it was Bilkis before, wasn't it? It was, and before that was Nicola. And now the mother of Menelik I, who is the founder of the Solomonic dynasty. Jill, the Deborah and Auguste, it's not just known in Ethiopia, because it also then has an influence on how the Queen of She Solomonic dynasty. Jill, the Keberna Gaste is not just known in Ethiopia

because it also then has an influence on how the Queen of Sheba story is understood further west. Definitely. So some of the claims from the Keberna Gaste appear in European texts from as early as the 1400s and parts are translated into French and Portuguese by the late 16th century and into English by 1682. The emperor's proclaimed descent from the Queen of Sheba is mentioned in US newspapers from 1704 and she became really popular in the 19th century as a symbol of African-American pride, appearing in newspapers and novels.

But then we see another take in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's a circus, isn't there, Jill? Yes. The Queen appears on stage, on screen, canvas and in print all over Europe and North America. There are operas like Charles Gonneau's 1862 La Reine des Sables. There's poetry by Yates and others. And there's the circus show by the Ringling Brothers called Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which featured more than a thousand employees, 335 horses, 26 elephants, 16 camels, and other assorted animals that traveled on 92 rail cars. Wow. These versions generally played on stereotypes, focusing on the Queen of Sheba as a wealthy but sexualized figure,

and it was usually portrayed by a white performer. This version led into cinema portrayals in the 20th century, and despite her adoption as a black role model, it wasn't until 1995 that the Queen was portrayed on screen by a black actor, in this case Halle Berry. So it's been quite the journey, Zadia. We've dragged you around several countries, many centuries, she's had three different names. How do you feel about the Queen of Sheba now?

I think she's pretty cool. I think she's like not what you normally, I guess, think of as a typical figure of history. And it's nice to have like a very rounded explanation of her because somebody told me that she's very sexualized. And it doesn't seem that that's the case from what we've discussed. So not that there's bad if it is, but all this animal stuff, it feels like there was a bit of haters going on with her. So, you know, I'm on her side. This is the part of the show where Sadia and I relax in the golden thrones of our glass floored podcast palace while Dr. Jill teaches us something we need to know about the Queen of Sheba. So my stopwatch

is ready. You have two minutes, Jill, please take it away. So we don't have access to the historical figure of the Queen of Sheba. We don't have evidence of anything she wrote, nor are there any historical accounts from the period she lived which describe her. And instead, we have inherited historical evidence that emerged no less than a couple of centuries after she would have lived and then a wide variety of oral traditions. I sometimes meet people who are disappointed that we don't have access to the real queen of Sheba. But what I find most fascinating about the figure is the way she functions

as a cipher to a storyteller's values. And what I mean by this is by paying close attention to how one or another story of her visit is told, we can see concerns about difference in power emerge. The Queen of Sheba and Solomon are different genders, have different religious practices and are of different nationalities, ethnicities or races, depending on how the story is told. And those factors are all always present, but they're emphasized differently in different narrations. The Bible has virtually nothing to say about her gender, for instance, which is somewhat surprising in light of how central femininity is to modern retellings. In another historical shift, the Queen of Sheba isn't presented as a foreigner in Ethiopian and Yemeni stories about her, but rather as an ancestor. She's claimed as an us rather than a them. These stories are used as evidence in debates, like whether

or not women could be good rulers or debates over who is the political and religious inheritor of Solomon's authority. So while we might not have access to the real Queen of Sheba, the figure does have real effects in the world. And perhaps more importantly, the lack of direct evidence really sharpens debates that are always at play in the world. And perhaps more importantly, the lack of direct evidence really sharpens debates that are always at play in the writing of history. The quality and nature of evidence always matters, but so does the narrative crafted through that evidence. And the Queen of Sheba really forces us to ask if our story is a good one, and if so, good for what?

Joe Thank you so much. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the delightful Dr. Gillian Stinchcombe from the Institute for Advanced Study. Thank you so much. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the delightful Dr Gillian Stinchcombe from the Institute for Advanced Study. Thank you, Jill. Thank you so much for having me, Greg. Had a lovely time. And in Comedy Corner, we had the sensational Sadiya Asmat. Thank you, Sadiya. Wooo! I love you so much. Thanks, guys. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we hitch up our skirts to reveal another historical mystery. But for now, I'm off to go and shave my legs because Solomon has given me a complex. Bye! Can you just tell me who he is? No. Has he got any distinguishing features? He's anonymity.

What's his name? Banksy. I'm James Peake and I'm on a mission to find out how Banksy became the world's most famous and infamous living artist. He could literally be anyone. Banksy essentially humiliates the art world. With dealers, critics and someone who once worked deep inside Banksy's secret team. Do you wish you didn't know who he was? Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of Banksy. The Banksy Story with me, James Peake on Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds. How does he smell? Like paint.