Menelik visits Solomon
At a Glance
- Central figures: Menelik I, son of Makeda and Solomon; Solomon, king of Israel; Azaryas, son of the high priest Zadok.
- Setting: Jerusalem, in the court and temple of King Solomon; the journey south to Aksum, as told in the Kebra Nagast.
- The turn: Menelik, raised in Ethiopia by his mother, travels to Jerusalem to meet his father - and Solomon, seeing his own face in the boy, tries to make him heir to the throne of Israel.
- The outcome: Menelik refuses Solomon’s offer and departs for Ethiopia, but the sons of Israel’s nobles - led by Azaryas - take the Ark of the Covenant from the temple and carry it south with him.
- The legacy: The Ark of the Covenant passed from Jerusalem to Aksum, where Ethiopian tradition holds it remains to this day in the Church of Mary of Zion, guarded by a single monk.
Menelik was twenty-two years old and had never seen his father’s face. He had grown up in Aksum under Makeda’s hand, raised among her counselors and priests, and what he knew of Solomon he knew from his mother’s voice and from the ring she kept - the ring Solomon had given her the night of his conception, a gold band with the lion of Judah cut into the bezel. When he was old enough to ask, Makeda told him the truth plainly. His father was the king of Israel. His father was the wisest man the world had yet produced. His father lived in a city far to the north, beyond the desert and the sea.
Menelik said he wanted to go.
Makeda did not refuse him. She gathered a caravan - six hundred camels, gold, spices, incense, the wealth of a kingdom that had no need to prove itself but chose to anyway - and she sent her son north with Tamrin the merchant, the same man who had first carried word of Solomon to her court years before.
The Road to Jerusalem
The caravan crossed the lowlands and the coast and took ship across the narrow sea. They traveled through the lands of the Midianites and up the trade roads that ran toward Judea. Tamrin knew the route from long practice and kept the caravan moving. Menelik said little during the journey. He watched the country change - the flat salt flats giving way to scrub hills, the hills giving way to terraced valleys planted with grain, and finally the grey-gold walls of Jerusalem rising on its ridge.
Word reached Solomon before the caravan arrived. The king’s servants told him that a young man from the south was approaching with a great train of camels and men-at-arms, and that this young man looked - the servants hesitated - like the king himself.
Solomon sent riders to meet them.
Solomon’s Court
Menelik was brought into the throne room on the day of his arrival. The court was full. The elders of Israel stood along the walls and the priests of the temple were present and the foreign ambassadors who kept residence in Jerusalem pressed forward to see the visitor. Menelik walked through them carrying the ring.
Solomon looked at the young man and was silent for a long time.
The Kebra Nagast says that the resemblance was so exact that the elders of the court could not tell father from son. Solomon’s own face looked back at him - the same brow, the same jaw, the same bearing that the old men remembered from Solomon’s own youth, when David’s son had first taken the throne. Someone in the crowd said aloud what the rest were thinking: this was Solomon’s son.
Menelik held out the ring.
Solomon took it, turned it in his fingers, and wept. He embraced the boy and called him by his name - Menelik, which in the Ethiopian tradition means son of the wise man - and he ordered a feast prepared. For days the court celebrated. Solomon showed Menelik the temple, the pillars of cedar, the inner chamber where the Ark of the Covenant rested behind the curtain. He showed him the throne room, the storehouses, the gardens. He showed him everything.
Then Solomon made his offer. Stay, he said. Remain in Jerusalem. Be my heir. Rule Israel after me.
The Refusal
Menelik refused. He told his father that his mother’s kingdom needed him, that the south was his country, that Ethiopia was where he belonged. Solomon pressed. He offered Menelik the crown of Israel twice more, and twice more Menelik declined. The Kebra Nagast does not record Solomon’s face when the refusal was final, but it records what he did next.
Solomon called together the elders and the nobles and told them that since his own son would not stay, each of their firstborn sons would go south with Menelik - a company of Israel’s noblest young men, sent as counselors and companions to the new king. The elders protested. Solomon did not relent. Among those chosen was Azaryas, the firstborn son of Zadok the high priest.
The young men were not happy about it.
The Ark Departs
What happened next depends on who tells it. The Kebra Nagast tells it this way: Azaryas, grieving at his exile, could not bear to leave the Ark behind. The night before the caravan departed, he entered the temple. He made a replica of the tabot - the sacred tablet within the Ark - and placed it on the altar. Then he took the true Ark, wrapped it, and loaded it among the caravan’s goods.
Some accounts say Menelik knew. Some say he did not. The Kebra Nagast says Menelik learned the truth only when the caravan was already deep into the desert, and that when he discovered what Azaryas had done he was afraid. But the Ark did not strike him down. The Ark did not resist. The ground before the caravan was smooth and the winds were favorable and the journey south was faster than the journey north had been, as if the Ark itself consented to the move.
Solomon discovered the theft and sent soldiers after them. The soldiers could not catch the caravan. They returned to Jerusalem empty-handed. Solomon went into the temple and found the replica on the altar and understood what had happened. He sat on his throne and did not speak for a day.
The Arrival at Aksum
Menelik brought the Ark into Aksum with trumpets and singing. Makeda received her son and the Ark together - the son she had sent away and the object that carried the presence of God. The priests of Aksum built a sanctuary for it. The tabot was placed in the holy of holies, and a guardian was appointed, and the line of guardians has not been broken.
Menelik was crowned negusa nagast - king of kings - the first of the Solomonic dynasty. The blood of David and the blood of Makeda joined in one line. The Ark that had rested in Jerusalem now rested in Ethiopia, and the glory that had belonged to Israel passed south.
Solomon lived many more years. The Kebra Nagast does not say whether he ever spoke of his son again. But in Aksum the priests sang the psalms of David in Ge’ez, the old language, and the Ark remained where Menelik had placed it. It remains there still.