Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Kings 10:1

"And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of Jehovah, she came to prove him with hard questions." — 1 Kings 10:1 (ASV)

The queen of Sheba. —The name “Sheba” must be distinguished from Seba, or Saba (which begins with a different Hebrew letter). (a) The name Seba denotes a Cushite race (Genesis 10:7), connected, in Isaiah 43:3 and Isaiah 45:14, with Egypt and Cush, and named with Sheba (the kings of Sheba and Seba) in the Psalm of Solomon (Psalms 72:10). Seba is, indeed, with great probability identified (see Josephus, Antiquities 2.10.2) with the Ethiopian city and island of Meroë.

It is probably from confusion between Sheba and Saba that Josephus (Antiquities 8.6.5) represents the queen of Sheba as a “queen of Egypt and Ethiopia.” (b) The name “Sheba” is found in the ethnological lists of Genesis 10:7, among the descendants of Cush of the Hamite race; in Genesis 10:28, among the Semitic Joktanites; and in Genesis 25:3, among the Abrahamic children of Keturah. The kingdom of Sheba referred to in this passage must certainly be placed in Arabia Felix, the dwelling place of the Joktanite race (in which the Keturahites appear to have been merged), for the Cushite Sheba is probably to be found elsewhere on the Persian Gulf. The queen of Sheba would therefore be of Semitic race, not wholly an alien from the stock of Abraham.

The fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord. —If the reading of the text is correct, the phrase “concerning the name of the Lord” (to which there is nothing to correspond in 2 Chronicles 9:1) must refer to the constant connection of the fame of Solomon—especially in relation to his wisdom, which is here mainly referred to—with the name of Jehovah, as the God to whom, in the building of the Temple, he devoted both his treasure and himself.

Hard questions —or, riddles. The Arabian legends preserved in the Koran enumerate a list of questions and puzzles, posed by the queen and answered by Solomon, too puerile to be worthy of mention. The “hard questions” (in which Solomon is said by Josephus to have had a contest with Hiram also) must surely have been rather those enigmatic and metaphorical sayings, so familiar to Eastern philosophy, in which the results of speculation, metaphysical or religious, are tersely embodied. The writings representing the age of Solomon—Job, Proverbs, and (whatever be its actual date) Ecclesiastes—are all concerned with these great problems, moral and speculative, which belong to humanity as such, especially in its relation to God. In solving these problems, rather than the merely fantastic ingenuity of what we call riddles, the wisdom of Solomon would be worthily employed.