Makeda and Solomon's union

At a Glance

• Central figures: Makeda, queen of Ethiopia and ruler at Aksum; Solomon, king of Israel and builder of the great temple in Jerusalem; Tamrin, a merchant of the south who served Makeda’s court.
• Setting: Jerusalem and the royal court of Solomon, as told in the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian national epic compiled in Ge’ez from older sources.
• The turn: Solomon, having pledged not to take Makeda by force, extracted from her a counter-oath not to take anything in his house; he then set a trap of thirst and salted food so that she would reach for water in the night and break her oath first.
• The outcome: Makeda conceived a son, Menelik I, who would become the founder of the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia.
• The legacy: The Solomonic line of Ethiopian emperors, which claimed unbroken descent from Menelik I through the last emperor Haile Selassie, and the conviction that the covenant between God and Israel passed south to Ethiopia through this union.

Tamrin came back from Jerusalem smelling of cedar and speaking of a king who could answer anything. He had gone north with six hundred camels loaded with gold, frankincense, and the dark hardwoods Solomon needed for the temple. He had stayed months. He had watched the king judge disputes, receive foreign delegations, and command knowledge of beasts and plants and the movement of stars. Tamrin had seen courts before. He told Makeda this one was different.

Makeda listened. She asked questions. She asked more questions. Tamrin answered until he had nothing left, and still she asked. Then she was quiet for several days, and at the end of those days she ordered her caravan masters to prepare provisions for a journey to Israel.

The Caravan North

The queen traveled with seven hundred and ninety-seven camels and mules beyond counting, loaded with gifts - spices, gold, sapphires, wood of fine grain. Her retinue filled the road for a distance it took time to walk. She did not travel light because she did not intend to arrive as a petitioner. She intended to arrive as a queen testing whether Solomon’s wisdom was real or merely the talk of merchants.

The journey was long. The Kebra Nagast does not say how many weeks or months, only that the distance was great and that Makeda endured it because the desire to know was stronger than the difficulty of travel. She came into Jerusalem and was received at Solomon’s court, and the king rose from his throne to greet her.

He gave her a house near the palace. He sent food from his own table every day - thirty measures of fine flour, ten fat oxen, five measures of fine grain, provisions in abundance. He treated her not as a subject but as a fellow sovereign. Then he waited, because Solomon understood that a queen who crosses a desert to test your wisdom will not be rushed.

The Testing of Wisdom

They spoke. The Kebra Nagast records that Makeda put hard questions to Solomon and that he answered every one. The text does not preserve all of the questions, but the shape of the encounter is clear: Makeda came armed with the accumulated learning of her own kingdom, and Solomon matched it and exceeded it. She was not humiliated. She was changed. She said to him that the wisdom Tamrin had described was only half of what she now saw with her own eyes.

Solomon, for his part, watched Makeda with growing attention. She was tall and beautiful and she spoke with the authority of someone who had ruled since youth. She governed a wealthy kingdom. She worshipped the sun and the moon and the stars, as her people did, but under Solomon’s influence she began to turn toward the God of Israel. She declared that she would worship no other god but the God of Solomon.

This declaration was significant. It meant that when she returned south, she would carry more than gifts and memories. She would carry a new faith.

The Oath and the Water

Solomon desired Makeda. He desired her openly, and she knew it. But Makeda would not be taken. She said she would not lie with him. Solomon considered this, and being Solomon, he proposed an arrangement.

He said to her: I will not take you by force. I swear it. But you must swear in return that you will take nothing in my house by force, nothing that belongs to me.

Makeda looked around the room. She was a queen with her own gold and her own kingdom. She had no need to steal from Solomon’s house. The oath seemed easy. She swore it.

That evening Solomon prepared a feast for Makeda. The cooks, on his instruction, made every dish rich with pepper and salt and spice. The meat was salted. The bread was seasoned. The sauces burned the tongue gently and left behind a thirst that built over hours. Solomon placed a jar of fresh water beside the bed where Makeda would sleep, in plain sight, and then he retired to his own chamber nearby. He did not sleep. He waited.

In the deep part of the night Makeda woke. Her throat was dry. The thirst from the salt had settled into her body and she could not ignore it. She reached for the jar of water and drank.

Solomon appeared. He said: you have broken your oath. You have taken what is mine.

Makeda set down the jar. She saw it. Water - the simplest thing - and she had taken it without asking. Solomon had been careful with his trap. It was small enough to seem like nothing and binding enough to release him from his own oath. He had sworn not to take her by force, and he had not. She had broken her word first.

They lay together that night. The chronicles do not dress the scene in romance. They record the exchange of oaths, the breaking of one, and the consequence.

The Dream and the Departure

Before Makeda left Jerusalem, Solomon had a dream. He saw the sun depart from Israel and settle over Ethiopia, blazing with a light that would not return north. He woke disturbed and did not tell Makeda what he had seen.

Makeda departed with her caravan. Solomon gave her gifts and a ring - a token by which any child of theirs could be identified. She traveled south, back across the desert, back to her own country.

On the journey home, or shortly after her return to Aksum, she bore a son. She named him Menelik - Ibn al-Hakim, “son of the wise man” in the Arabic tradition, though the Ge’ez text gives the name as Bayna Lehkem. He grew up in his mother’s court. He had Solomon’s face.

The Line That Did Not Break

Makeda raised Menelik as her heir. When he came of age, he traveled north to meet his father, and what happened in Jerusalem on that visit - the Ark, the departure, the transfer of the covenant - belongs to another telling. But the root of it was here, in the salted food and the jar of water and the queen who crossed a desert because she heard a merchant speak of wisdom.

The Solomonic dynasty that Menelik founded claimed the throne of Ethiopia for nearly three thousand years. Every emperor traced his blood back to that night in Jerusalem. The Kebra Nagast made the claim scripture. In the church of Mary of Zion at Aksum, the Ark rests still, guarded by a single monk who never leaves. The covenant moved south, as Solomon’s dream foretold, and it did not return.