The Bible and the Psyche : Individuation Symbolism in
the Old Testament
The Queen of Sheba
A major symbolic event in the Solomon saga is his meeting with the Queen of Sheba. The canonical account is as follows. The fame of Solomon having reached the queen of Sheba, she came to test him with difficult questions. She brought immense riches to Jerusalem with her, camels laden with spices, great quantities of gold, and precious stones.
On coming to Solomon, she opened her mind freely to him; and Solomon had an answer for all her questions, not one of them was too obscure for the king to expound. When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom of Solomon, the palace he had built, the food at his table, the accommodation for his officials, the organisation of his staff and the way they were dressed, his cup-bearers, and the holocausts he offered in the Temple of Yahweh, it left her breathless.
She said to the king, “What I heard in my own country about you and your wisdom was true, then!” “Until I came and saw it with my own eyes I could not believe what they told me, but clearly they told me less than half: for wisdom and prosperity you surpass the report I heard.” “How happy your wives are!” “How happy are these servants of yours who wait on you always and hear your wisdom!” “Blessed be Yahweh your God who has granted you his favour, setting you on the throne of Israel!”
“Because of Yahweh’s everlasting love for Israel, he has made you king to deal out law and justice.” And she presented the king with a hundred and twenty talents of gold and great quantities of spices and precious stones. No such wealth of spices ever came again as those given to King Solomon by the queen of Sheba. And King Solomon in his turn presented the queen of Sheba with all she expressed a wish for, besides those presents he made her out of his royal bounty.
Then she went home, she and her servants, to her own country. (1 Kings 10:1–13)
The biblical account has been richly amplified through the centuries by legend. For example, Ginzberg gives the following account.
The hoopoe had informed Solomon that he had found an unknown country which is not subject to my lord the king. Its trees are from the beginning of all time, and they suck up water that flows from the Garden of Eden. The city is crowded with men. On their heads they wear garlands wreathed in Paradise. They know not how to fight, nor how to shoot with bow and arrow. Their ruler is a woman, she is called the Queen of Sheba. Solomon sends a letter to Sheba by the hoopoe requesting her to visit him and pay him homage, and in due time she arrives.
Benaiah conducted the queen to Solomon, who had gone to sit in a house of glass to receive her. The queen was deceived by an illusion. She thought the king was sitting in water, and as she stepped across to him she raised her garment to keep it dry. On her bared feet the king noticed hair, and he said to her: “Thy beauty is the beauty of a woman, but thy hair is masculine; hair is an ornament to a man, but it disfigures a woman.”
Then the queen began and said: “I have heard of thee and thy wisdom; if now I inquire of thee concerning a matter, wilt thou answer me?” He replied: “The Lord giveth wisdom, out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.” She then said to him: “Is my father, and thy grandfather my husband; thou art my son, and I am thy sister.” “Assuredly,” said he, “it was the daughter of Lot who spake thus to her son.” She placed a number of males and females of the same stature and garb before him and said: “Distinguish between them.”
Forthwith he made a sign to the eunuchs, who brought him a quantity of nuts and roasted ears of corn. The males, who were not bashful, seized them with bare hands. The females took them, putting forth their gloved hands from beneath their garments. Whereupon he exclaimed: “Those are the males, these the females.” The riddles continued to a total of twenty-two.
We learn from the legend that the Queen of Sheba’s realm is a part of original paradise. That is, the anima resides in the original state of unconscious wholeness, the state of nature. Other legends describe the same fact negatively when they say that the Queen of Sheba inhabits a realm of demons. When the ego is identified with spirit, nature becomes demonic—witness the fact that Pan and Dionysus were recast as versions of the devil by Christian mentality. In the biblical account the Queen of Sheba comes to Solomon on her own initiative, indicating that the anima desires a connection with consciousness.
Nature wants to be illumined by spirit. In the legend Solomon takes the initiative. He has an intuition (the hoopoe bird) that his dominion is not complete and his power motive is aroused. The legend’s account of the meeting is very interesting psychologically. Solomon received Sheba in a “house of glass.” As the queen stepped on the glass floor, thinking it water, she lifted her skirt and revealed a hairy foot. According to some versions it was a goat’s foot.
Solomon’s house of glass is connected symbolically with his traditional wisdom. Glass symbolizes consciousness. Its transparency and its mirror function represent the reflective capacity of self-knowledge as promoted by the transparent vision of the objective, abstract spirit. Sheba, subjected to the scrutiny of the spirit, reveals her unhumanized residue of nature which indicates she is both part animal and part masculine. Nature’s original state of the undifferentiated opposites still exists in her.
In some versions Sheba’s encounter with Solomon transforms and humanizes her foot. Encounter with Solomon as the personification of spirit releases her from her androgynous and demonic residue. Sheba in turn exerts an effect on Solomon. In the biblical account, “she came to test him with difficult questions.” In the legend this becomes a series of twenty-two riddles. The archetypal theme of trial by riddle is widespread.
We have already noted this image in the story of Samson. James A. Kelso mentions other examples. There are modern Greek legends in which the failure to solve a riddle costs a man his life. A monster living in a castle propounds a riddle and gives forty days for its solution. Unfortunate is the person who fails, for the monster devours him. The resemblance to the story of the Sphinx is evident.
In the Mahabharata the legend takes another form: the hero Yudhishthira frees two brothers from the fetters of a monster by the solution of a riddle. Teutonic legends are of a similar import. In the so-called Wartburg-Krieg there is a deadly riddle contest between Odin and the giant Wafthrudhnir. Another instance has been immortalized by Schiller (Turandot). The outstanding example is the riddle of the Sphinx which Oedipus was required to answer at the risk of his life. Oedipus’s victory over Mother Nature was only apparent.
She caught him from behind via his unconscious incest tendency. Jung writes:
Oedipus, thinking he had overcome the Sphinx sent by the mother-goddess merely because he had solved her childishly simple riddle, fell a victim to matriarchal incest.
This had all those tragic consequences which could easily have been avoided if only Oedipus had been sufficiently intimidated by the Queen of Sheba. ~Edward F. Edinger, The Psyche and the Bible, Page 95-98
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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