Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam

Abstract

Over the centuries, Jewish and Muslim writers transformed the biblical Queen of Sheba from a clever, politically astute sovereign a demonic force threatening the boundaries of gender. In this book, Jacob Lassner shows how successive retellings of the biblical story reveal anxieties about gender and illuminate the processes of cultural transmission. The Bible presents the Queen of Sheba's encounter with King Solomon as a diplomatic mission: the queen comes to test him with hard questions, all of which he answers her satisfaction; she then praises him and, after an exchange of gifts, returns her own land. By the Middle Ages, Lassner demonstrates, the focus of the queen's visit had shifted from international sexual politics. The queen was now portrayed as defying nature's equilibrium and God's design. In these retellings, the authors humbled the queen and thereby restored the world its proper condition. Lassner also examines the Islamization of Jewish themes, using the dramatic accounts of the Queen of Sheba as a test case of how Jewish lore penetrated the literary imagination of Muslims.