Chap. 10
CHAP. X. THE QUEEN OF SABA. SOLOMON'S WEALTH AND SPLENDOUR.
Visit of the Queen of Saba (cf. 2Ch 9:1-12). - When the fame of Solomon's great wisdom came to the ears of the queen of Saba, probably through the Ophir voyages, she undertook a journey to Jerusalem, to convince herself of the truth of the report which had reached her, by putting it to the test by means of enigmas. שׁבא, Σαβά, is not Ethiopia or Meroë, as Josephus (Ant. viii. 6, 5), who confounds שׁבא with סבא, and the Abyssinian Christians suppose (vid., Ludolfi hist. Aeth. ii. 3), but the kingdom of the Sabaeans, who were celebrated for their trade in incense, gold, and precious stones, and who dwelt in Arabia Felix, with the capital Saba, or the Μαριάβα of the Greeks. This queen, who is called Balkis in the Arabian legend (cf. Koran, Sur. 27, and Pococke, Specim. hist. Arab. p. 60), heard the fame of Solomon יהוה לשׁם; i.e., not “at the naming of the name of Jehovah” (Böttcher), nor “in respect of the glory of the Lord, with regard to that which Solomon had instituted for the glory of the Lord” (Thenius); nor even “serving to the glorification of God” (de Wette and Maurer); but literally, “belonging to the name of the Lord:” in other words, the fame which Solomon had acquired through the name of the Lord, or through the fact that the Lord had so glorified Himself in him (Ewald and Dietrich in Ges. Lex. s.v. ל). “She came to try him with riddles,” i.e., to put his wisdom to the test by carrying on a conversation with him in riddles. The love of the Arabs for riddles, and their superiority in this jeu d'esprit, is sufficiently well known from the immense extent to which the Arabic literature abounds in Mashals. We have only to think of the large collections of proverbs made by Ali ben Abi Taleb and Meidani, or the Makamen of Hariri, which have been made accessible to all by F. Rückert's masterly translation into German, and which are distinguished by an amazing fulness of word-play and riddles. חידה, a riddle, is a pointed saying which merely hints at the deeper truth and leaves it to be guessed.
Verse 2-3
As the queen of a wealthy country, she came with a very large retinue. חיל does not mean a military force or an armed escort (Thenius), but riches, property; namely, her numerous retinue of men (עבדים, 1Ki 10:13), and camels laden with valuable treasures. The words יקרה...גּמלּים are an explanatory circumstantial clause, both here and also in the Chronicles,
