Giving Gold, Spices and Stones: A Closer Look at the Queen of Sheba's Gift to Solomon in 1 Kings 10

Abstract:After hearing about his divinely gifted wisdom, 1 Kings 10 records that the Queen of Sheba travelled, met, and tested King Solomon with hard questions. Solomon answered her riddles correctly, and the foreign queen gifted the Israelite king with large quantities of gold, spices, and precious stones. In 1 Kings 11, Solomon married many foreign women, lost his wisdom and ultimately, dies. The first argument of this article is that the cultural associations behind gold, spices, and precious stones and the damaging implications they have when evoked in a royal Israelite context predict Solomon's death. The second comes from the idea that both gifted wisdom and interacting with foreign women are contrasted with the teachings in Proverbs. As such, this article reads the Queen of Sheba in light of "Woman Strange," a deviant and seductive character in Proverbs. She is a foreigner, the antithesis to "Woman Wisdom" and uses precious materials, like gold, spices, and stones, to conduct her slippery activities. Therefore, the Queen of Sheba, read as the Strange Woman, gifts Solomon harmful materials to purposefully lead him astray.