Kebra Negast

When reading the Kebra Negast, I was struck by a couple of things. First off, I was not expecting this to be such a narrative. I expected this reading to be way more like a scripture that was instructing all on what is right and wrong. There were a couple places where the story took a turn from straight narrative into a more preaching and instructional guideline on how to live your life, but there was a lot less than I thought there would be. Maybe this was because we did not read the whole thing. There could very easily be places in the entire book where there are explicit guidelines about the right and wrong thing to do, but in the section we read, it was more telling a story than anything else.

The other thing that struck me in this reading was the fact that Solomon actually tricked Sheba into sleeping with him. Throughout the entire reading, every person was raving about how great Solomon was. The merchant went to visit him and when he came back all he did was rave about Solomon until Sheba finally had enough and had to visit him herself just to see how great he was. But then, he tricked her into sleeping with him. When I was reading this, I got extremely confused. But then he had that dream where he realized the fault in what he did and he apologized and tried to make it up to Sheba. After reading that, I tried to think of reasons why Solomon would have been portrayed as so wonderful, yet he tricked Sheba. The explanation I came up with is that is showed someone making a mistake, owning up to it and making it right. It could be an illustration that everybody messes up, and that there are very extreme consequences if you do not apologize and ask for forgiveness in what you have done.