This picture is my first official request since I started this website. (Shout out to Aunt Rose!) It seems that it came up on the History Channel. It may have been part of their show “The Real Queen of Sheba.” I caught some of it but never saw the whole thing.
This is a follow up to last weeks post, where the Queen of the South (a.k.a. the Queen of Sheba, as seen in 1 Kings 10:1-13) is referenced more as a metaphor for the faithlessness of the people as opposed to a historical account. The queen traveled across the known world to hear the wisdom of the Israelite King Solomon. Jesus uses this as a metaphor where he, as the son of God, has more direct knowledge of God than anyone else in the history of the world, and yet the people that he traveled to see are ignoring or rejecting him. He's just letting them know that it'll be no use crying to him later because they've already had their chance to be saved.
For you geography buffs, experts believe Sheba was located in Yemen or possibly in Africa at either Ethiopia or Eritrea. That's basically at Bab-el-Mandeb (sometimes referred to as the Mandeb Strait in English). It's the waterway connection between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. With the help of the Pharaohs of Egypt creating canals from the Nile to the Red Sea, Bab-el-Mandeb was a major checkpoint on the route from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. So Sheba was kind of a big deal. Approximating the Queen of Sheba's trip, the distance from Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, to Jerusalem is in the 1250 mile range as the crow flies. That's roughly the distance from Boston to Miami.
If you knew that, contrary to the idiom, crows fly in large wheeling arcs to search for food:
No comments:
Post a Comment