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 thematic level: the violation of laws of taboo. These rules are considered basic social classifications, shared (with variations) by all cultures. Verbally, the riddle seems to be phrased redundantly. The queen could have asked a shorter question: “What is [the case of] a woman who says to her son: Your father is my father?” The confusing verbal surfeit defines this question as a riddle (had it been formulated simply, it would have been a wisdom question). The lengthy question emphasizes something else as well—the riddle contains a number of possible roles in which women serve in relation to men, such as daughter, sister, mother, and wife. The riddle thus creates analogies between these familiar units. These supposedly natural affinities, as exemplified in the riddle, are not necessarily distinguished from one another, and indeed—as in Lot’s case—they can be unified.55 The riddle also ends in “I am your sister.” The term “sister” carries clear cultural connotations of a lover, derived from Song of Songs, where the phrase “my sister-bride” (aḥoti-kallah) is repeated.56
In continuation of the first riddle, which shows man (the male) to be the product of differentiations, the second riddle shows these differentiations to be arbitrary, even though socially necessary. The first riddle also contains the option—which Solomon chooses—of perceiving the woman as a maternal figure. As we have already seen, this option underlines the infant’s dependence on his mother and undermines his sovereignty. The Queen of Sheba shrewdly hints that every woman can be a maternal figure, intimating the dependence of men on women (qua women). The second riddle suggests to Solomon that maternal status does not necessarily contradict a threatening sexual interaction. Hence, the refuge that Solomon sought to find in the solution to the first riddle is rendered insecure, and not just on account of the weakness that the mother-child relation indicates; the nonerotic relations of parent and child are due to social differentiation and do not guarantee full protection from intimidating erotic power, as in the case of Lot and his daughters.57
The incest taboo inherently transforms the closest and most familiar to the furthest. By the same logic, it familiarizes the stranger (spouse). The strategy implemented by the riddle is similar, where an estrangement of the familiar concept of language and categorization takes place. The riddle offers, in return, a translation of this strangeness into something familiar.58 Throughout the riddling process, Solomon engages in translating the strange and alien into something familiar. Yet the Queen of Sheba remains a foreign woman who returns to her place almost untransformed (except for her newly acquired recognition of Solomon’s wisdom and the greatness of his God). She does not undergo the same process as her own riddles.
The first two riddles are verbal in nature. The last two are practical, and they are also distinguished from the previous ones by being labeled “tests” (dugma; lit., “examples”). The transition from riddles to examples is a transition from hearsay to eyesight, and thus it picks up on the beginning of the riddling tale: the Queen of Sheba came to witness Solomon’s wisdom with her own eyes. In this stage of the tale, Solomon’s position becomes more prominent. Especially in the last riddle, he takes a more active role vis-à-vis the poser.
In the third riddle, the Queen of Sheba places homogeneous human bodies before him, among which he has to distinguish between males and females. This riddle presents confusion on the level of content, the blurring of a natural, biological distinction between males and females by an external erasure of differences. In contrast to the previous riddle, which pointed out a social categorization, the third riddle challenges what may seem to be a natural category: gender. But perhaps not, since Solomon’s solution depends on gendered behavioral differences. Did the “girls [females] who were ashamed” act according to an arbitrary social norm or instinctively? In other words, are gender distinctions restored, thus saving the social order by employing natural or artificial differentiations? Here, we must bear in mind that Midrash Mishle and the Book of Proverbs define clear gendered, behavioral norms and condemn those who violate them. Solomon’s stratagem depends on the normative system, which determines the required measure of feminine modesty. Furthermore, the riddle and its solution reinforce that normative system by presenting it as a natural one. However, the mere presentation of blurred boundaries between males and females (even though these boundaries are reinstated in the solution) suggests the possibility of gender equality and, by implication, an equality between the king and the queen. This may be especially true since the queen does
