Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/807

Rh and the Queen of Saba on beholding it, exclaimed "happy are those who behold Solomon every day, and who live under his laws!"

The Queen of Saba having made laws irrevocable to all her posterity, died, after a long reign of forty years, in 986 before Christ, placing her son Menilek upon the throne, whose posterity, the annals of Abyssinia would teach us to believe, have ever since reigned. So far we must indeed bear witness with them, that this is no new doctrine, but has been steadily and uniformly maintained from their earliest account of time; first, when Jews, and in latter days after they had embraced Christianity.

The tradition amongst a sect called the Falasha, who believe themselves descendants of those Jews who came from Jerusalem with Menilek is, that the Queen of Saba was a Jewess, and her nation Jews before the time of Solomon; that she lived at Saba or Azaba, the myrrh and frankincense country, upon the Arabian gulf. They say further, that she went to Jerusalem, under protection of Hiram, King of Tyre, whose daughter is said, in the forty-fifth Psalm, to have attended her thither; that she went not in ships, nor through Arabia, for fear of the Ishmaelites, but from Azab round Masuah and Suakem, and was escorted by the shepherds, her own subjects, to Jerusalem, and back again, making use of her own country vehicle, the camel, and that hers was a white one, of prodigious size and exquisite beauty. They agree also in every particular, with the Abyssinians, in the remaining part of the story. .