SOLOMON SEPARATING THE BOYS FROM GIRLS
Queen Sheba Testing the Wisdom of Solomon

Solomon separating the boys from girls

The story of the Queen of Sheba's test of Solomon's wisdom is of a very ancient date. The Bible says (1 Kings, ch. x, v. 3), "And Solomon told her all her questions." The nature of these questions, and the answers given, is left to the fancy of interpreters, who availed themselves fully of that opportunity. Thus we find a series of such riddles and their solutions attributed to the Queen of Sheba and to Solomon in an Aramaic commentary to the Book of Esther, dating from the fifth century. Nothing, however, is therein mentioned of boys dressed as girls, or vice versa. In another Hebrew work of about the same date (fifth century), viz., Midrash to the Book of Proverbs, we already find a closer parallel to our story. In the Midrash it runs as follows: "And another similar puzzle she (the Queen of Sheba) prepared for him (Solomon). She brought boys and girls, all having the same appearance, the same stature, and all in like attire; and she said, 'Separate the boys from the girls.' The boys, not being bashful, put them in their skirts; the girls, being bashful, put them in their kerchief. And Solomon said, 'Those are boys, whilst these are girls.' Whereupon the Queen said, 'My son, thou art a very wise man.'" The Arabic legends far more approach the Western (English) parallel. Sale has the following not to chap. xxvii of his translation of the Koran, which I give here, as it bears directly on our story: "Some add that Balkio (the Arabic name for the Biblical Queen of Sheba), to try whether Solomon was a prophet or not, dressed the boys (of whom there were five hundred) like girls, and the girls (same number) like boys; and sent him in a casket a pearl not drilled, and an onyx with a crooked hole; and that Solomon distinguished the boys from the girls by the different manner of their taking the water, and ordered one worm to bore the pearl and another to pass a thread through the onyx. The source of this note is the Arabic commentary to the Koran by Beidharwi." A detailed account of the different ways of their taking the water is given by Hammer, in his Rosenoel (Stuttgart und Tubingen, 1813, pp. 160-61). Solomon ordered the table to be laid, and after dinner water to be poured out for washing the hands. The custom in the harems at that time was that the girls caught the water in the hollow of their hands whilst the boys let it run over the outside. When the servants poured out the water the boys held their hands under, whilst the girls caught it in the hollow of their hands, as they had been accustomed to do. So far the Eastern parallels. No less numerous are those to be found in Western writers. First, in the Annals of Glycas (iii, 8), reproduced by Fabricius (Cod. vet. Test. Apocryph., i, p. 1031-1032). "Among other tests by which she tried the wisdom of Solomon, was also the following. She showed Solomon some beautiful boys and girls, both dressed alike, and both having the same shape of tonsure, asking him to distinguish between the two sexes. So he ordered them to wash their faces, and by that he recognised their nature, for the boys rubbed their faces in a stronger manner, whilst the girls did so more softly and more delicately. She was filled with wonder, and exclaimed: 'More have I seen than I have heard.'" From the Greek it entered into Slavonian literature. An exact parallel of this version of Glycas, combined with that in the Midrash of Proverbs, is to be found in the old Slavonic Palia from the twelfth or thirteenth century (Al. Wesselofsky, Solomon i Kitovras, St. Petersburg, 1872, p. 248). A Roumanian parallel, tallying exactly with Glycas, is contained in a hitherto unpublished manuscript Chronicle from the seventeenth century. I have confined myself to tracing the story from the East to Europe, thus showing the literary source of the story. It remains still to connect directly the English version with the legends of the Queen of Sheba current in the West of Europe, such as the Sibyllen Weissagung of Gottfried of Uslerbo, etc. I have dealt more amply with this series of legends in my Roumanian Popular Literature (Bucharest, 1885, 326); still less do I wish to follow out in the world's literature the theme of testing the sex of the hero. Suffice it to refer to R. Kohler's learned annotations to Wolf, Jahrbuch f. rom. und engl. Litteratur, iii, 57-58, and 63-67. This is a comment by some M. Gaster written in 1890 with respect to the apocryphal story according to which Queen Sheba tested Solomon's wisdom by having him separate boys from girls. An early traveller in Egypt Babylonian myths Descent of Ishtar Pictures of Caesar Pictures of angels