The Queen of Sheba

A sun-bleached caravan of desire cuts across crimson dunes, its silken banners whispering of a monarch who trades wisdom for ardor; inside Jerusalem’s alabaster porticoes Solomon, youthful autocrat of psalms, listens to courtly flatteries while his gaze already trespasses beyond the cedar beams, hungry for rumor made flesh. Enter Balkis—Queen of Sheba, sovereign of myrrh, prophetess of the wind—her gold anklets chiming counter-melodies to Hebrew trumpets, her eyelids painted with the indigo secrets of Saba. Their first parley is a chessboard of riddles: he asks the meaning of distance, she answers with the fragrance of unopened lotus; she wonders at permanence, he snaps a clay tablet in twain yet the words upon it remain intact. Between them a chalice of saffron water turns scarlet, a meteor scratches the night, and priests mutter that the earth has tilted. Love ignites—fierce, scripture-defying—yet each kiss is shadowed by politics: Solomon’s fractious elders dread a foreign crown beside the throne of David, while Sheba’s generals fear their queen will dissolve into harem gossip. Mid-film, a sandstorm of assassins—daggers masked as diplomatic gifts—nearly severs their covenant; Solomon’s favorite architect bleeds onto unfinished marble, a cherub’s face forever frozen with marble tears. Reprisals follow in the form of riddling contests, sabotaged incense, and a midnight duel beneath the copper sea where Balkis fights disguised as a Nubian boy, her braids tucked beneath a bronze helm. Covenant dissolves into exile: Balkis, heavy with child yet unwilling to bind her realm to Judean expansion, slips out of the palace on a moonless tide, her farewell a single rose of Jericho that unfurls only when forsaken. Years compress into montage: Solomon’s temples rise, his hair grays, the ring he forged for her becomes a seal pressed onto foreign treaties. In the coda a caravan returns—led by a boy bearing his father’s eyes and his mother’s bearing—bearing gifts of spice, apes, and a parchment that reads simply “Peace is the wisdom we chose not to wield.” Father and son lock gazes beneath a sky bruised purple, while Balkis watches from a dune’s ridge, her silhouette a scar against sunset. The film closes on the rose of Jericho, now blooming in Solomon’s garden, trembling between memory and prophecy as the screen fades to ochre.