Queen of Sheba (39 page)

They traveled to the coastal town of Eloth and then rode the two and a half hours to the island port of Ezion-Geber. The queen was interested in every aspect of this port. “Why is it built on this island?” she asked.

“This used to be called Jezirat Faraun when the pharaohs of Egypt anchored their ships here,” Solomon said. “On the landward side of the island there is a natural harbor that shelters any ship from the turbulence of the Red Sea. I paid Hiram the king of Phoenicia twenty thousand kors of wheat and twenty kors of beaten oil for the ten ships he built for me here in this place.”

“And he brought the cedars clear from his mountains?”

Solomon nodded. “It took eight hundred camels just to carry the lumber needed for the ships.”

They spent a day examining the ship she would sail in. There were orders given and provisions added that would make the trip by sea enjoyable. She had sent her camels with Tamrin and Il Hamd on the long land route back to Marib, packed with precious gifts from the king. The more personal gifts were to go with her by sea.

The island had a wall with towers spaced evenly around it, and there was a fortress in which they were given the royal rooms built by Hiram’s men for just such an occasion. From one of the rooms there was a balcony from which they could watch the activity in the sheltered harbor and beyond that view the mountains of the Sinai. From another room on the opposite side there was a similar balcony that looked out to the south from which they could see the vast expanse of sea down which the queen would sail.

“When you leave,” Solomon told her, “I’ll come to this place and watch your ship until it disappears. It’ll be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.”

Because she couldn’t bear to see the pain in his face, she quickly changed the subject. “My love,” she said, “I’m about to leave and you’ve never told me what was of most importance in the world.”

“Still at the last you are asking questions.” Solomon couldn’t help smiling.

“If I am to raise our son, surely I must tell him what his father thought was most important.”

“What do you think I’ll say is most important?” This was the pattern they had followed. He was always testing her to see what she would say before he shared with her his own concept.

She thought for a moment, then her face brightened and her eyes sparkled. “Of course you’ll say great wealth. You have amassed gold and silver and it has permitted you to buy everything for both you and your people. Yes, wealth is most important.”

Solomon shook his head. “A man can have great wealth and be a fool and waste it so that he is worse off than a poor man. So I would say wisdom is of utmost importance. Wisdom with understanding.”

Bilqis was astounded. “Why wisdom?” she asked.

“A man who has wisdom has everything to make him happy. He will know that his life is short, a fool may rule after him and utterly destroy all that he has so carefully built. He’ll begin to look for things that are lasting; things that don’t change and don’t disappear with this short life.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“It’s obvious that when I die I’ll leave all the fine buildings I’ve built, all the gold I’ve collected, the fortune I’ve amassed, my carefully designed crown, the clothes I take such pride in. I can take none of this.”

“There is nothing we can take when we die. This is the ultimate sadness of life.”

“Ah, but you are wrong. My father taught me to view things differently. Before I was born there was another child my mother had that died, and when asked why he was no longer mourning, my father said, ‘He cannot come back to me but I can go to him:’ You see, that is the clue to what is eternal. I will go to my God when I die. He is a spirit and is not left behind in some earthly temple. The people I love are also made of eternal spirit, and they too will be with me there. Everything else will be left here to molder into dust.”

Bilqis stared at him with a look of wonder and amazement on her face. “Our love and the child I carry are eternal. Even the temple you have built and your fine palace is as nothing compared to these treasures.”

“We must never forget this. We may never see each other again, but our child and our love is something that will last long after everything else is gone.”

The next day as her ship moved out into the sea and the sails filled
with the southerly wind, the queen stood at the ship’s rail. She was watching first the man on the balcony who stood there as long as she could see, and then it was the island she watched until it too disappeared. Something within her, a hardness, a fierce independence was crumbling, breaking apart. She couldn’t ever remember feeling such pain. She who had never cried felt tears coursing down her face. It was as though the only thing in the world that really mattered was slowly receding and would soon be gone forever.

Only when the first star of the evening came out was she finally willing to leave the railing, but her eyes were red with weeping and she could not endure speaking to anyone. She had not imagined it would be so painful to love someone. She had never experienced anything that meant more to her than her country and her throne. All of this was new. She wondered if there would ever be an end to this terrible grieving.

It was on the second night a strange healing began to take place. There was something she must remember. Something important. Something he had told her. She struggled to remember just how the words went. “Our child and our love,” he had said, “will last long after everything else is gone.” She repeated the words over and over again trying to understand just what he’d meant.

The child was born before she finally reached home. It was a boy, and she named him David. As she held him in her arms and crooned to him like any peasant mother, she found that she loved him with such a tender, piercingly fierce love that it astounded her. Finally she understood what Solomon had been trying to tell her. “Of our love we formed an arrow,” she said, “an arrow that will shoot into the future where we can never go. Of all the things I’ve done it alone is lasting and eternal.” This child and these words at last brought comfort to the troubled queen.

T
he queen never returned, and Solomon never saw her again. However, in the country of Ethiopia a young man ruled who proudly recorded that he was the son of the great Solomon and the queen of Sheba. This son, as legend tells us, did make one very memorable trip to Jerusalem.

Perhaps we can catch a glimpse of this young prince as he stands on the quay watching the men load a ship with the gifts he is taking with him. He is excited. This is the first time his mother has allowed him to travel without her. He is going to visit his father in the strange, far-off country to the north.

Undoubtedly both Tamrin the trader and his mother have told him often of her daring trip to visit the king of this country. He has been told of the gifts they exchanged and how his mother had finally given the king a prized, white horse. Then, perhaps, his uncle Rydan would tell how the king had written into the state agreement that his best gift to the queen would be an heir. “And you,” he would say, “are that heir.”

He had always known that someday he was to set sail for that far-off country to visit his father. He twists the crudely made ring on his finger. It has been his father’s and before that his grandfather’s. When he was a child his mother had tied it around his neck and then later after he had promised to take care of it, she let him wear it.

Tamrin and a huge retinue of men from his own tribe are to make the trip with him. They are to sail to the port of Ezion Geber where Solomon’s garrisons will meet them and escort them across the Sinai to the town of Gaza.

“I’m giving you the city of Gaza, my son,” his father had written. “It will be a permanent possession, a resting place before you travel on to see me in Jerusalem.” He had seen the scroll and read the words himself. He noticed that in the scroll he had been addressed by his personal name of David and not his kingly title of Menelik I.

The names of places, the writing on the scroll, and the accent of the
messengers were all foreign to him. For the first time he felt hesitant about going. After all these years of longing to meet his legendary father he found himself afraid. “What if my father doesn’t acknowledge me? What if he is disappointed?”

He could have spared himself the worry. Tradition tells us that before he even arrived in Jerusalem the people mistook him for Solomon. At the court of his father he was immediately recognized and picked out of the milling tribesmen he had come with. “I don’t need to see the ring,” Solomon said. “Without a doubt you are my son.”

It was a joyful reunion. All that Solomon had found lacking in his other sons was abundantly present in this handsome young man. Menelik, like Nathan’s son Mattatha, enjoyed studying the law with the priests. He was interested in hearing all that his father had learned about animals and plants and he asked questions about truth and wisdom much as his mother had done.

Though it had been agreed on from the beginning that Menelik had come only on a visit, still Solomon loved him so, and he determined not to part with him. He actually toyed with the idea of replacing Rehoboam with Menelik. Unfortunately, as time passed there were those who grew jealous of Solomon’s attention to Menelik, and they plotted against him.

When Solomon realized the ill will toward his favorite son, he reluctantly agreed to let him return to Axum. Before agreeing, however, he extracted from his priests a promise that each would send his eldest son with Menelik back to his country. These young men, who were well versed in the temple rites and rituals, were to take with them replicas of each item in the temple’s furnishings. With these they would set up a temple and worship just as they did in Jerusalem.

I like to think that perhaps it was for this son that Solomon collected his proverbs. His bits of wisdom gleaned over the years would be of great help to the young king.

As Solomon watched him go he must have realized that nothing in Jerusalem had changed. Rehoboam would be the next king at his death and undoubtedly Jeroboam would return from Egypt to cause him trouble. He could well believe that just as Ahijah had predicted, ten of the tribes would go to Jeroboam while only Judah and Benjamin would be left to Rehoboam.

What he didn’t know was that only five years after his death, the pharaoh, Shishak, would march up and Rehoboam would buy him off with the riches his father had carefully amassed. The three hundred golden shields of the house guards, treasures from the palace, and most of the golden objects from the temple itself were all taken by the greedy pharaoh. Shishak recorded this entire campaign on the south wall of the temple at Karnak, where it can be seen today.

Four hundred years after the Davidic line first came to the throne, the glorious temple Solomon had built was destroyed. The people were taken into captivity and their country became a Babylonian province.

As to Menelik I, the son of the leopard queen and the king who was known as the lion of Judah, he established a kingdom that until the rise of Islam extended over most of Ethiopia and Yemen. He built a beautiful capital at Axum and a port city at Adulis. As we might expect, he is supposed to have built many of the dams that can still be found in the highlands. These dams were used to store water and to irrigate the land during the dry season just as they did in Marib.

In 1904 the tomb of Menelik I was found in a large mausoleum. The coffin contained the body of a king still wearing his golden crown. The crown was carefully removed and has been placed with other crowns of the Ethiopian kings in the famous cathedral of St. Mary of Zion in Axum.

Haile Selassie was the last king to rule in Ethiopia. At his coronation he rode his horse through crowds of excited people up to the gates of Axum. Here, under the sign of the coptic cross, he cut a symbolic cord and, like those many kings before him, declared, “I am the son of David and Solomon, and Ibna Hakim.” Ibna Hakim means “son of the wise” and is another name by which Menelik I was known.

Stranger still, in the church of St. Mary of Zion, the ark of the covenant is still supposed to reside.

Solomon had hoped his temple would last down through the ages, or that his line of kings would still rule in Israel. How surprised he would have been to find that the son born of his love for a queen who came seeking truth would have descendants that would rule down to the twentieth century in Ethiopia, a country he never even visited.

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The Queen of Sheba
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