The Queen of Sheba Mistook Solomon's Glass Floor for Water

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Her Foot Came Down on Glass

The queen stood at the threshold of the great hall. Water lay across the floor in front of her, bright and unmoving, at the foot of the seat where Solomon waited. She bent, gathered the heavy hem of her gown in both hands, and raised it to wade across. Her bare foot came down on dry stone.

There was no water. The floor was glass laid over pale marble, polished until it swallowed the light and gave back the picture of a flood. Solomon looked at her uncovered legs and saw they were thick with hair. He did not look away. "Your beauty is the beauty of a woman," he told her, "but your hair is the hair of a man. On a man it is an ornament. On a woman it is a blemish."

She had crossed a desert to strip his reputation bare. He had stripped her first, in the space of a single step.

A Bird Darkened Kitor

It had started with a bird. Solomon held court over more than men, and at a muster of every winged creature in his kingdom he found the hoopoe missing from the ranks. When the bird came back it spoke of a country far to the south, the city of Kitor in the land of Sheba, where the dust was gold, the trees had grown from seeds of Eden, and a queen knelt each morning to worship the sun.

The king's scribes wrote a letter, bound it to the hoopoe's wing, and sent the bird south at the head of a darkening cloud of wings. The queen walked out at dawn to pray and found the sky above Kitor gone black. She tore her robe. Then she loosed the letter and read a summons from a king she had never met: come to Jerusalem, or his armies and his spirits would come to her.

She did not believe a word of the reports. A king who understood beasts and birds and demons. A king who commanded the spectres of the night. A throne of gold from Ophir that no other kingdom could copy. So she loaded her camels with spices and gold and the hardest questions her wise men could invent, and set out to see the wonder, or to break it.

Seventy-Two Lions

Benaiah met her at the city gate. She took him for the king and climbed down from her mount. He told her he was only a servant who stood before Solomon. If she had not seen the lion, he said, she had now seen its den.

The throne itself was a machine of gold. Twelve lions faced twelve eagles. Seventy-two lions in all, seventy-two eagles, six steps, a seat no other king had matched. Solomon had gone ahead to sit in the chamber of glass. That is where the illusion caught her, and that is where he read her before she asked him a single riddle.

Nuts on the Stones

She set traps that looked like games. She lined up children of the same height, dressed in the same clothes, and told him to tell the boys from the girls. Solomon called for roasted ears of corn and handfuls of nuts and scattered them across the floor. The boys snatched them up with bare hands. The girls drew them in from under their garments, too modest to bare their arms, and he named each child without a miss.

She brought him men, some circumcised and some not, and asked him to sort them. He gave a sign to the high priest. The Ark of the Covenant was opened. The circumcised bowed low as the light poured out of it. One snare after another sprang shut on nothing. Every secret she set before him was already lying open in his hand.

"I have heard of you and your wisdom," she said, when the floor was still in her bones. "If I inquire of you, will you answer?" He said the Lord gives wisdom. Out of His mouth come knowledge and understanding. She inquired. He answered.

She Turned the Camels South

By the end she had stopped testing him. She blessed the God who had set such a man over Israel, gave the king a fortune in gold and spices and gems, took gifts of his own in return, and turned her camels back toward the south.

She had come to unmask a fraud. She left as his witness. The floor that looked like water, the king who read her before she spoke, the riddles that broke one after another against his calm. The camels walked the same desert home. The queen on them was not the same woman who had torn her robe under a black sky in Kitor.