2 of 3

In the middle ages, to support a particular dynasty that seemed to have decended from Solomon, the Kebra Negast, the national epic, was created. Ostensibly, it's the first to be a translation into Ge'ez the ancient Ethiopic language.

David Hubbard, the late president of Fuller Seminary, who did a wonderful dissertation on this, which was never published, does not think that the story is correct. But that story said the Queen of Sheba came from Ethiopia, modern Ethiopia, and she then had a son Menelik. Menelik then stole the Ark of the Covenant, which the Ethiopian Christians claim is still in their cathedral in the Church of Mary Zion in Aksum.

As far as Rastafarianism is concerned, one of the titles of Haile Selassie, the 20th century emperor of Ethiopia, was Ras Tafari, the head of the Tafari. Ras is the same as the Hebrew word Rosh meaning head. Black nationalists in Jamaica especially hailed him because this is the one area of Africa that had not been colonized until the Italians invaded in the 1930s.

Haile Selassie fled for much of the time of the Italian occupation. He was in England, and then he returned to Ethiopia with the British who liberated the country from the Italians. He was hailed as a black Christ or even as God come to earth. Although he himself rejected those claims when he came on a visit to Jamaica. Nonetheless, Rastafarians have exalted him. They've become a major religious movement, not only in the Caribbean but also in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

How is the Cushite pharaoh of Egypt, Tirhakah, related to the kingdom of Judah before its fall?

The only place he's mentioned is in II Kings 19:9 and a parallel passage in Isaiah 37:9. You would not know from the Scripture the significance of Tirhakah, but he was the most important pharaoh of the 25th dynasty. We have numerous statues of him with inscriptions both from Egypt and from Assyria that describe his role. He attempted to distract the Assyrian King who invaded Judah in 701, but he was defeated. The interesting thing about Judah—and we get this from Jeremiah and other biblical prophets in Isaiah—is that Judah always looked to Egypt for aid whenever they were attacked by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But Egypt, in the prophet's words, proved to be a broken reed. It was not a dependable or powerful enough ally to rescue him.

Who was the Ethiopian eunuch, and why was he not from Ethiopia?

He was from Meroe, which is about the sixth cataract [on the Nile] in the Sudan. The New Testament quite clearly indicates that he was an official of Candace. Candace is the title of the queen mother of the kingdom of Meroe, which flourished for about a thousand years [650 B.C. to A.D. 350].

The Eunuch appears in chapter 8 of the Book of Acts. He's gone to Jerusalem, and Philip, one of the deacons, is told by the Holy Spirit to attach himself to his chariot as he goes down by Gaza. He's reading Isaiah 53 in the Septuagint. It was quite an ordeal to travel from Meroe north to Egypt but nonetheless, we have inscriptions that show that there were ambassadors between Alexandria and Meroe. I conjecture that one of the unstated reasons for this official of this queen to visit Jerusalem was that about this time, there may have been the installation of Herod Agrippa the First as the independent king of Judea. He is mentioned briefly in Acts 12 as someone who persecuted the church and killed James.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48