Textual Mirrors. Dina Stein
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he ruled even over male and female demons” (Pesikta deRav Kahana 5). A well-known story tells of Ashmedai, king of the demons, who took Solomon’s place after the king had captured him in quest of a magical worm needed for the building of the Temple.46
Solomon’s contact with a demon or demons (which is implied in the Ashmedai story) is a dominant theme in Arabic traditions. These traditions that choose to emphasize the demonic aspects of the Queen of Sheba hold forth at length about Solomon’s dealings with the djinns. Thus we find in the Quran: “And unto Solomon [we gave] the wind, whereof the morning course was a month’s journey and the evening course a month’s journey, and [we gave him] certain of the djinn who worked before him by permission of his Lord” (Sura 34:12).47
The redactor(s) of Midrash Mishle was thus familiar with traditions that associated Solomon with a few central themes: wisdom (including esoteric wisdom), wealth, contact with the demonic world, and, especially important for our discussion, love of women, particularly an excessive love of foreign women, which, at least according to the Jewish tradition, caused a personal and national calamity.
The riddling tale in Midrash Mishle is devoid of witchcraft or overt demonological contacts. It introduces Solomon’s wealth and wisdom. As stated, it seems at first to bail Solomon out, without his having been convicted of yielding to temptation or even revealing an erotic weakness; the Queen of Sheba returns to her country convinced of his greatness. Still, a close reading of the narrative will shed a different light on this course of events.
Riddling Tales
The riddling tale was a familiar type of narrative in Babylonia and Persia at the time of Midrash Mishle’s composition. That is not to say that it was not known and practiced elsewhere—most likely, it was. Our midrash resembles two types of riddling tales: one is the story of the princess who is unable to solve her suitor’s riddle and is therefore obliged to marry him; the other is the tale of Princess Turandot, who poses riddles to her suitors. The young man who succeeds in solving the riddles will win her hand; if he fails, he is put to death. After a succession of severed heads, the hero appears who meets the challenge.48 The midrash clearly differs from this prototype in some respects. Nevertheless, since variants of the Turandot tale appear in Arabic story collections,49 we should consider them as possible references. In both types, the princess marries her suitor; in the Turandot model, the erotic consummation is opposed to death.
As we have seen with other co-texts, the Queen of Sheba possesses an erotic force that is threatening, potentially destructive, and even lethal. Solomon solves the riddles and, in keeping with the prototypes, escapes the princess’s devastating power. According to the classic form, he should marry her—yet he does not. In this, the midrash adheres to the biblical text. While hardly devoid of erotic suggestions, and while hinting at a possible marriage, the Bible does not express this theme explicitly.50 The riddling tale co-texts thus serve as a frame of meaning in one of two ways: they may cause the reader or auditor to sense the euphemistic nature of the midrashic story (and the biblical version, too); or, on the contrary, they may underline the uniqueness and greatness of Solomon, who, unlike the heroes of the model tales, does not require (sexual) consummation.
Our tale differs from these traditions in yet another crucial aspect: at the center of our narrative stands a mature queen—not a young princess—and she, rather than the male suitor, sets out on a voyage. This role reversal underlines the queen’s assertiveness—or rather, her male, princelike aspect is emphasized, an aspect suggested already by her hairy legs (as Solomon expresses it in the Targum sheni). This hairiness also signals her demonic nature. As mentioned earlier, the two references—hairiness and demonic qualities—are both expressions of the Queen of Sheba’s refusal to fulfill normative feminine requirements established in the Book of Proverbs and in Midrash Mishle:51 she breaks through the normative categories in a manner similar to the riddles she poses.
THE RIDDLING TALE—MIDRASH MISHLE 1:1
Let us turn now to the riddles themselves, to each individual riddle and to its place in the sequence of riddles that constitutes the narrative. The first riddle—“Seven exit and nine enter, two pour and one drinks”—expresses transformations between distinct categories, on two levels:
1. On the verbal level, it portrays a transition from the nonhuman (time) to the human (baby). The transition between the categories is carried out by the use of verbs, all of which are borrowed from the human (or animate) realm: exit, enter, pour, drink.52 The verbs, and the repetition of numbers, create initial confusion because they imply that the missing referents belong to the same semantic field of animate creatures. But the solution lies in the fact that they belong to different semantic areas—days, months, breasts, a baby.
2. On the level of content, the human being is described as a product of a process, the unfolding of an explicitly halakhically (legally) designated period, niddah, followed by pregnancy.
The Queen of Sheba presents Solomon with riddles whose discursive structure undermines cultural paradigms by suggesting alternative categorizations (animate/inanimate). She thus symbolizes an alternative order, which the co-texts highlight as anti-order, a threatening chaos. Furthermore, the first riddle, given the context in which it is uttered here, possibly alludes to the sexual act, just as the riddles customarily told at weddings do.53 Yet those usually contain erotic hints and innocent solutions, a strategy that functions to ease erotic tensions. Here, in contrast, the solution of the first riddle, although not explicitly erotic, is nevertheless charged. The situation is seductive—the queen alludes to the opaque, chaotic, and dynamic sexual act. She speaks to Solomon in metaphoric language that, given the context in which it is uttered, bears sexual connotations (enter/exit; pour/drink). In the riddle, there are no subjects, only verbs, but the solution provides a subject for each action, thus segmenting, clarifying, and distinguishing them. Solomon’s solution is also an account of the physical processes that a woman undergoes from conception through breast-feeding. By being excluded (as a mature male) from the interaction to which the riddle alludes, Solomon is spared the direct threatening sexual power that it implies. His solution rejects the fluid, unbounded option offered by his royal visitor. She is a foreign woman and thus, given Solomon’s proclivities, a potential lover. But instead of responding to her overture, he is afforded the opportunity to translate lover into mother. The maternal aspect is seeded in the riddle itself, where it, too, signals trouble, for the infant depends on his mother’s nourishment to survive. This paradigmatic reliance of men on women alludes to the specific characters at hand. Solomon solves the riddle from the point of view allotted to him by the riddle itself: the nine months of pregnancy (in Hebrew, this period is literally called here “the months of the newly born”). Furthermore, in the first riddle, the Queen of Sheba describes a process of inclusion, the channeling of the multiple (seven, nine, two) into one, a human infant. The queen thus implicitly conveys to Solomon that the human being as a subject, conceived as a unified entity, is, in fact, a collection of fragments. The presentation of the process exposes the inadequacy and the illusion that lie in the concept of man as unified and coherent. The Queen of Sheba acts as a deconstructive force against the assumption—a patriarchic one at its base—that regards man (male) as a sovereign entity. At the onset of her confrontation with the man who is considered the wisest of all, she suggests that the subject is not as coherent as it may seem. Pregnancy and nursing break down the distinctions between self and other, subject and object.54 Solomon, who answers her from the infant’s point of view, seems to silence the seductive tone initiated by the queen. He succeeds in solving the first riddle, avoiding a possible erotic trap set for him. However, by indicating the basic assumptions that enable categorization, his ostensible success is not sufficient to conceal the traces of doubt and disorder left by the queen, on what seemed to be the solid ground of cultural organization. These doubts stem precisely from the putative security into which Solomon is allowed to escape: the mother. The Queen of Sheba accepts his challenge and proceeds to deconstruct the maternal illusion: “She said to him: What is [the case of] a woman who says to her son: Your father is my father, your grandfather is my husband, you are my son and I am your sister?”
In the second riddle, the confusion of normative classifications takes place first and foremost on the