A01=Jacob Lassner
Author_Jacob Lassner
Category=JBSF1
Category=QRJ
Category=QRP
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226469133
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 14 Dec 1993
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Over the centuries, Jewish and Muslim writers transformed the biblical Queen of Sheba from a clever, politically astute sovereign to a demonic force threatening the boundaries of gender. In this book, Jacob Lassner shows how successive retellings of the biblical story reveal anxieties about gender and illuminate the processes of cultural transmission. The Bible presents the Queen of Sheba's encounter with King Solomon as a diplomatic mission: the queen comes "to test him with hard questions," all of which he answers to her satisfaction; she then praises him and, after an exchange of gifts, returns to her own land. By the Middle Ages, Lassner demonstrates, the focus of the queen's visit had shifted from international to sexual politics. The queen was now portrayed as defying nature's equilibrium and God's design. In these retellings, the authors humbled the queen and thereby restored the world to its proper condition. Lassner also examines the Islamization of Jewish themes, using the dramatic accounts of the Queen of Sheba as a test case of how Jewish lore penetrated the literary imagination of Muslims.
