Joktan's list continues: Obal, Abimael, and Sheba. Sheba appears again — this time from Joktan's line rather than from Cush's line (verse 7) — reflecting the complexity of the ancient world's ethnic and geographic categories, where multiple peoples share names, and the table's representative rather than exhaustive character. The Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10) may draw her ancestry from either or both of these lines. What matters theologically is that wherever the Sheba line is traced, it ends at the same place: a people who are invited to come and hear the wisdom of God, whether that is Solomon's wisdom or the greater wisdom Jesus claims in Matthew 12:42. The repeated appearance of Sheba across the table is a portrait of a people whose destiny is to seek and find.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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