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6 Sheba’s Song The Bible, the Kebra Nagast, and the Rastafari PATRICK TAYLOR We must return to the point from which we started. Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. —Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (1989: 26) I start this Caribbean story with a detour or diversion, as Edouard Glissant would call it, or rather a series of diversions, in the expectation of arriving at a point of entanglement in modernity referred to as creolization. My first detour is centered around the passionate poetry of two young lovers. The woman exclaims : Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses! Your sweet loving is better than wine My lover, my king, has brought me into his chambers. We will laugh, you and I, and count each kiss, better than wine I am dark, daughters of Jerusalem, and I am beautiful! Dark as the tents of Kedar, lavish as Solomon’s tapestries. (Song of Songs 1:2–5)1 Now, King Solomon was a lover of women and women loved him. (The Bible tells us so.) He had many wives, seven hundred, and many concubines, three hundred. Many were foreigners, like the Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 11:1–8). Solomon is mentioned in the Song of Songs, and the great love poem, a very intimate dialogue between two lovers, has traditionally been attributed to him, despite internal evidence that this is improbable (Bloch and Bloch 1995: 10–11, 21–23). Let us assume, however, that Solomon did love some of his queens and they him with the intensity of our two lovers. Now, Solomon was famous: for his wisdom and righteousness, for the prosperity of his kingdom and strength 66 Patrick Taylor of his God. So we are told that the Queen of Sheba determined that she would visit him. She showered him with wealth and he “gave to her all that she desired, whatever she asked . . . and she turned and went back to her own land, with her servants” (1 Kings 10:13; see also 2 Chron. 9:12). Solomon’s father David had willed that “Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God” (Ps. 68:31; see also Ps. 72). Could the Queen of Sheba be Queen Makeda of Ethiopia who, according to Ethiopian tradition, fulfilled David’s wish by becoming Solomon’s lover, thereby conceiving the child that would bring Judaism to Ethiopia? Was this the origin of the dispersed Jews of Cush (Isa. 11:6, 11, 12), including the author of the Book of Zephaniah (Zeph. 1:1, 3:10)? The Bible suggests that Ethiopia became Jewish, then Christian. According to the Christian Bible, Christianity was first introduced in Ethiopia by an Ethiopian eunuch, a minister of Queen Candace, who was a converted Jew; he had come from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to worship and was reading Isaiah when the disciple Philip met him and converted him to Christianity (Acts 8:27–38). I start with this diversion because of its entanglement in cross-cultural, indeed cross-racial, encounters: Can the Song of Songs, and the biblical text as a whole, be read as a passion of hybridity? Do not see me only as dark, the sun has stared at me. My brothers were angry with me, they made me guard the vineyards. I have not guarded my own. Tell me, my only love, where do you pasture your sheep, where will you let them rest in the heat of noon? (Song of Songs 1:6–7) The Bible’s silence around the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba begs for further readings. One such reading is provided in the Qurān with the references to Bilqis, the Queen of Sabā (the Arabic word for Sheba). With the poetic richness of the Qurān, a messenger informs Solomon of a great queen who worships the sun: “I come from Saba with positive news. / I found a woman reigning over them, / and she has been favoured with everything; / and she has a throne that is magnificent” (27:22–23). Solomon sends an envoy to the queen, requesting that she not rise up against him, but instead surrender to God. Bilqis consults her advisors and decides...

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