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Saba (Heb. šĕḇā˒), SABEANS (šĕḇā˒yɩ̂m)
A tribe and a kingdom in Arabia variously designated in three OT genealogies as a son of Cush (Gen. 10:7; 1 Chr. 1:9; NRSV “Seba”), a son of Joktan (Gen. 10:28; 1 Chr. 1:22; NRSV “Sheba”), and a son of Keturah (Gen. 25:3; 1 Chr. 1:32). The association of Saba and Dedan among the sons of Keturah and the account of a raid on the oxen and asses of Job by a group of Sabeans (Job 1:15) have led some scholars to posit the presence of Sabeans in north Arabia. Conversely, the association of Saba (cf. Epigraphic South Arabian Slb˒) with Hazarmaveth (Wadi Ḥadramaut in Yemen) among the sons of Joktan points certainly to south Arabia. The LXX of Ps. 72:10, 15 reads Arábōn, Arabɩ́a for Heb. šĕḇā˒, perhaps following a Greek convention attested from the time of Herodotus (Hist. 3.107) whereby “Arabia” designated the frankincense-producing region of south Arabia.
The earliest biblical attestation of Saba is, however, the account of the visit of the queen of Saba to Solomon (1 Kgs. 10:1–13; NRSV “Sheba”) in the 10th century b.c.e. Although the wealth attributed to the queen scarcely suggests that she came out of a north Arabian milieu in the early 1st millennium, and is much more consistent with the early Sabean kingdom of south Arabia, it is nevertheless true that frankincense, the quintessential south Arabian product, was not among her gifts to the Israelite king. The earliest biblical references to explicitly Sabean incense occur at Jer. 6:20; Isa. 60:6 (cf. Herodotus 3.97, 107). Whereas argument once raged over the unacceptably early date of a Sabean kingdom in south Arabia at 1000 to which the queen mentioned in 1 Kings could be assigned, recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the date of sedentary settlement in the highlands of northern Yemen well into the 2nd millennium. By the 8th century Sabeans (lúsaba˓ayya) are mentioned in the annals of Tiglath-pileser III (744–727), and slightly earlier they appear in a text from Sur Jur˓eh on the Middle Euphrates (near Ana, Iraq) which describes the attack on one of their caravans by Ninurta-kudurri-uṣur, governor of Suḫu. Ita˓mara “the Sabean” sent tribute to Sargon II (722–705) just as Karib˒il, designated “king of Saba,” did to Sennacherib (705–681). On analogy with the later south Arabian (Minean) trading colony at Dedan, it has sometimes been suggested that the growth of the Sabean state in south Arabia led to Sabean expansion into north Arabia, accounting for the appearance of both a northern and a southern Saba.
Bibliography. I. Eph˓al, The Ancient Arabs (Leiden, 1982).
D. T. Potts
Freedman, D. N., Myers, A. C., & Beck, A. B. (2000). Eerdmans dictionary of the Bible (1145). Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
