Why we think of the Queen of Sheba as Black

New research clarifies the legend behind the Queen of Sheba, and why we tend to think of her as Black.

Halle Berry played her in a 1995 made-for-TV movie. On her album Black Is King, Beyoncé described herself as an heir to her legacy. And a recent article at the online Jewish feminist site Alma declared her the “Black Jewish queen … you probably didn’t learn about in Hebrew school.”

“…in the ‘Kebra Nagast,’ she’s a fully fleshed out, complex hero.”

The Queen of Sheba is a scarcely mentioned figure in the Bible who nonetheless looms large in the public imagination. But was she actually Black or African?

The Bible says nothing about her appearance. The land of Sheba is thought to refer to the port city of Saba in Yemen, though even that is uncertain.

In her dissertation and a paper earlier this year in the journal Religions, Jillian Stinchcomb, a fellow in Hebrew bible and Mediterranean cross-cultural textual traditions at Brandeis University, has tracked how ancient and medieval writers built up the Queen of Sheba’s legend.

Here, Stinchcomb explains how those texts gave rise to the queen we know today:

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