Hello La Reina fans. Can we agree on who was the sexiest queen of all time? Of course not, we can't even agree on whose Oscars gown was the most inappropriate. But face it, everyone's heard of the Queen of Sheba! There probably was only one, but that was enough for her to be very, very famous.
The Queen (whose name is given as Bilquis in the Qur'an and Makeda by the Ethiopians) ruled a large area where nowadays we find Yemen, Eritrea and Ethiopia. She came to Jerusalem at one point, with four and a half tons of gold to spend. Can you name any other independently wealthy women from that time? The Bible's greatest 'player', King Solomon, may have loved the Queen of Sheba. You might catch a reference to her in The Song of Songs, a very old love poem that compares women's breasts to fawns and gazelles. The Qur'an mentions that Solomon, who could talk to birds, sent some back and forth to invite the Queen to his kingdom and offered her many luxuries until she admitted that Islam was a pretty good idea.
But let's say that Solomon and this Queen were romantically involved. In the Ethiopian story that's exactly what happened. According to the book of the Kebra Negast, their son, Menelik, came to Jerusalem for his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. While strolling around the city, he decided it would be fun to steal the sacred Ark of the Covenant. Before anyone could stop him, he and the Ark had levitated through the air over the Red Sea and landed in Axum, Ethiopia. So naturally that is where you can go and see the Ark today. No wonder a whole Ethiopian dynasty claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba. Perhaps this helped them be the only country in Africa not conquered by white people.
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