Solomon's wisdom test

At a Glance

• Central figures: Makeda, queen of the south, ruler of a kingdom rich in gold and spice; Solomon, king of Israel, builder of the temple in Jerusalem; Tamrin, Makeda’s chief merchant.
• Setting: Jerusalem and the court of Solomon, as told in the Kebra Nagast; Makeda’s journey from her kingdom to test the fame of Israel’s king.
• The turn: Makeda presents Solomon with riddles and trials to measure his wisdom, and Solomon answers every one - then devises a test of his own.
• The outcome: Makeda acknowledges Solomon’s wisdom as genuine, abandons the worship of the sun and moon, and embraces the God of Israel before returning south carrying Solomon’s child.
• The legacy: The Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, which traces its origin to the union of Makeda and Solomon, and the line that would one day bring the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum.

Tamrin came home from Jerusalem talking. He could not stop. He had been to Solomon’s court with six hundred camels loaded with frankincense, gold, and black wood, and what he had seen there had ruined him for ordinary conversation. The temple. The cedar pillars brought from Lebanon. The throne with twelve carved lions. The king who sat on it and spoke to foreign ambassadors in their own languages, who settled disputes between farmers and princes in the same afternoon, who called birds out of the sky and they came.

Makeda listened. She listened for days. Tamrin spoke at meals, on walks through the palace grounds, in the evening when the fires were lit. He described the way Solomon’s servants moved - silent, precise, anticipating his hand before it gestured. He described the water channels cut through stone. He described a judgment Solomon had given between two women who both claimed the same child, and how Solomon had offered to cut the child in half, and the true mother had cried out, and Solomon had known.

Makeda sat with this for a week. Then she called her caravan masters and told them to prepare.

The Caravan South to North

The journey was not short. Makeda traveled with seven hundred and ninety-seven camels, mules beyond counting, and wagons loaded with gifts - balsam, sapphires, gold in bars. Her attendants numbered in the hundreds. She did not travel as a petitioner. She traveled as a queen going to meet an equal, or to determine whether an equal existed.

The Kebra Nagast does not describe the road in detail, but it was long, through desert and scrubland and along trade routes that Tamrin knew well. Makeda had time to prepare. She was a queen who worshipped the sun and the moon, and she had heard that Solomon’s God was greater than either. She wanted to see for herself.

When the caravan arrived at Jerusalem, Solomon received her with ceremony. He gave her a palace near his own. He sent food from his own kitchens. He waited.

The Riddles

Makeda did not come to admire. She came to test. The Kebra Nagast records that she put hard questions to Solomon - riddles, problems of governance, puzzles that had no easy resolution. Some of these are preserved. Others are suggested by tradition.

She brought children before him, boys and girls dressed identically, their hair cut the same length, their faces washed clean of any telling mark. She asked Solomon to separate the boys from the girls without touching them. Solomon ordered water and basins brought forward and told the children to wash their faces. The boys splashed. The girls cupped the water carefully. Solomon pointed and sorted them without error.

She brought him two garlands of flowers - one real, one made by her finest craftsmen from silk and wax, so perfect that no eye could tell which had grown in soil. She asked him to say which was true. Solomon did not touch them. He ordered the windows opened. Bees entered the room and went to the real flowers and ignored the false ones. He pointed.

She brought him a question: a wooden pipe, bored through with a spiraling passage, and a thread of silk. How to pass the silk through without uncoiling the pipe? Solomon tied the silk to an ant and set the ant at one end. The ant walked the spiral and emerged with the thread at the other.

Each time Makeda watched. Each time Solomon answered not with force or wealth but with observation - he watched bees, he watched children, he watched ants. His wisdom was not a thing he spoke. It was a thing he saw.

The Feast and the Oath

When the riddles were finished, Makeda acknowledged that Tamrin had not exaggerated. Solomon’s wisdom was real, and the God who had given it to him was greater than the sun she worshipped. She said this plainly, before Solomon’s court.

Solomon, for his part, had been watching Makeda. Her intelligence. Her authority. The way she held silence before answering, the way she governed her retinue without raising her voice.

He prepared a feast for her departure - rich food, spiced and salted. The Kebra Nagast is precise about what happened next. Solomon made Makeda swear an oath: she would take nothing from his house without permission. Makeda, who was wealthy beyond most kings, found this almost insulting. She swore.

The food was heavily spiced. The wine was sweet but not enough to quench thirst. In the night, Makeda woke with a dry throat and reached for a vessel of water that had been placed - perhaps by design - near her bed. She drank.

Solomon appeared. He said she had taken something from his house without permission. Water. She had broken her oath.

Makeda looked at him. She understood. The water was nothing. The oath was the frame. Solomon had tested her as she had tested him, and his test was quieter and more dangerous than riddles about flowers and silk thread.

What She Carried South

The Kebra Nagast states that Makeda and Solomon lay together that night. Whether this followed from the broken oath or from mutual recognition, the text does not trouble itself to distinguish. It records the event as it records all events - as something that happened because God intended it.

Makeda stayed in Jerusalem for some months. When she left, Solomon gave her a ring. He told her that if she bore a son, she should send the boy to him when he was grown, and the ring would be the proof.

Makeda returned south. She bore a son. She named him Menelik - Ibn al-Hakim, the son of the wise man. He grew up in his mother’s court, hearing Tamrin’s stories just as she had, and when he was old enough he took the ring and went north to find his father.

But that journey belongs to Menelik. Makeda’s journey ended where it began - in her own kingdom, changed. She no longer worshipped the sun. She carried Solomon’s child and Solomon’s God and the memory of bees finding real flowers among false ones. She had gone to test a king’s wisdom and found it genuine, and in the testing she had been tested herself, and the water by her bed had taught her something no riddle could.

The line she founded would endure for nearly three thousand years. Every emperor who sat on the throne at Aksum, at Gondar, at Addis Ababa, traced his blood back to that night in Jerusalem, to a queen who drank water in the dark.