The Kebra Negast

April 26, 2007

The Kebra Negast relates the sacred history of Ethiopia. It begins with Adam and moves through Old Testament history. The central story concerns the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. Their meeting turns out to have involved not just an exchange of wisdom! The Queen leaves, but she is pregnant with a son.. and this son eventually returns to Israel to meet his father. Solomon tries to persuade him to stay but he insists on returning to his home Ethiopia. Solomon offers to send with him the firstborn sons of his nobles.. which turns out to be a mistake when they abscond with the Ark of the Covenant, taking it with them to Ethiopia.

This story is not just a fantasy fiction, but an example of an identity-forming narrative. Looked at in this way the Kebra Negast represents an intense act of the religious imagination. It draws together a number of biblical stories and molds them into a story that makes Ethiopia into the chosen people of God and the inheritor of Israel's promises. The dream of Solomon is an example:

...there appeared unto King Solomon a brilliant sun, and it came down form heaven and shed exceedingly great splendour over Israel. And when it had tarried there for a time it suddenly withdrew itself, and it flew away to the country of Ethiopia, and it shown there with exceedingly great brightness for ever, for it willed to dwell there. [35]

That is a borrowing of Ezekiel's vision in which he sees the glory of God departing from the temple.. only now that departing glory is transferable to a new place. Likewise the departure of Solomon's Ethiopian son with the firstborn from the nobles of Israel is likened to the Exodus from Egypt. The Kebra Negast may not be well written, but the complex religious imagination on display in it is marvelous.

I could at times detect a Quranic influence. The author lets Sheba explain her false worship:

We worship the sun according as our fathers have taught us to do, because we say that the sun is the king of the gods. [28]

Then we can turn to the Quran's version of the story of Solomon and Sheba. A Hoopoe tells Solomon about Sheba:

I come to you from Sheba with firm news. I found a woman ruling over the people... but I found that she and her people worshipped the sun instead of God. [27.22-24]

The Kebra Negast likewise confirms the Quranic legends about Solomon knowing the language of the birds.

It is interesting to try to imagine the process by which an imaginative work like this would come about. One crucial step is the identification of vague passages within a canonical text. These vague passages are available for narrative amplification. The queen of Sheba was from an unknown location.. and so she could be from almost anywhere. In the Kebra Negast she becomes the ancient Queen of Ethiopia. Some of the richest passages in sacred texts are those ones that leave the door open for such narrative amplification (consider the long interpretive history of Melchizedek!).

A second step is the identification of a guiding basic-narrrative. In this case the image of the glory of God departing from the temple in Jerusalem.. and the parallel notion that the glory of God could migrate to another nation.. is the basic-narrative. My notion is that this transfer of the glory of God was first identified as a basic-narrative.. and then the facts of the story of Solomon and Sheba were fancifully elaborated to fill in that basic-narrative with a faux history. The gravitational pull of basic-narratives thus emerges as a central factor in the creation of sacred texts.