SONG OF SONGS

A historical novel reimagines the story of the Queen of Sheba as well as the construction of the First Temple of Jerusalem.

Makeda, later known as the Queen of Sheba, is born of a union both lowly and regal: Her mother is a slave and her father, Karibil, is chieftain of Maryaba and mukarrib of all Saba. An illegitimate child, she sees her half sister, Bilkis, overtaken by a fierce flood. Karibil then marries Makeda’s mother, leaving the girl as his only child and the sole heir of her father’s authority. Years later, ruling over a peaceful Saba, Makeda learns of a project underway in Yisrael to construct a temple out of stone, an engineering feat that could be replicated in her realm to build a much-needed dam. She travels to Yisrael in order to learn more and discovers that Bilkis, presumed dead, is the queen there, and her son, Yahtadua, is the king, an accomplishment won through a series of machinations as cruel as they were strategically brilliant, chillingly depicted by Graham (Of Ashes and Dust, 2017). Bilkis sees an opportunity in her sibling’s fortuitous arrival. If Makeda would marry Yahtadua and bear him a son, Bilkis could arrange to hoard all the power for herself and her descendants: “You will not be queen here. Once you give Yahtadua a son, you may go back to that sand pit you love so much. The boy will remain here, and when he comes of age he shall rule over Yisrael and Saba and all the lands between.” But Makeda has no interest in Yahtadua and has developed feelings for Yetzer, the mason chiefly responsible for the building of the temple and a man loathed by Bilkis. Graham acknowledges in an authorial note that he’s “taken generous liberties with the source material.” But that artistic license never undermines the novel’s impressive historical authenticity—readers are furnished with a remarkable look at the political and cultural milieu of the ancient time. And even some of the more conspicuous historical departures—the author imagines a polytheistic Yisrael—are both captivating and defensible on scholarly grounds. The story itself is brimming with intrigue and ingeniously conjured, although its soap-operatic entanglements can become densely complex and tedious to follow. In addition, Graham’s prose can reach powerfully poetic heights, but it can also be ponderously melodramatic and would have benefited from a measure of lighthearted leavening. Sometimes the dialogue reads like it should be sonorously bellowed from a mountaintop or engraved in stone: “ ‘We may be forgotten,’ Yetzer said, ‘forsaken by men, unnamed before the gods. But if only we know, if only we remember we are more than beasts, we will truly have been men and our ka will speak for us before the scales of Mayat.’ ” Nevertheless, the author’s revisionist interpretation of both the fable and the details of the temple’s construction is as historically creative as it is fictionally sweeping, a true saga however flawed.

A notably original reinterpretation of an ancient legend ensconced within an epic tale of political power and romantic longing.