O. Henry is using the wildest hyperbole to describe how Della and Jim valued their family treasures: her beautiful long hair and his gold watch. The references to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon come from the story in the Old Testament about how the fabulously wealthy Queen of Sheba came to visit the even more fabulously wealthy King Solomon in Israel. It is to be found in the Bible in 1 Kings 10.
And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones:
The Queen gave King Solomon 120 talents of gold. But he already had an income of 666 talents of gold per year, as stated in the Bible (King James Version):
Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold.
A talent was an ancient unit of weight and value in Rome, Greece and the Middle East. One talent weighed approximately seventy-five pounds. So the Queen of Sheba was presenting King Solomon with about nine thousand pounds of gold. That is 144,000 ounces. The current value of gold is around $1300 per ounce.
It is, of course, ridiculous to suggest that King Solomon or the Queen of Sheba would have envied Della or Jim, two poor people who were just getting by on twenty dollars a week. But O. Henry seems to have been in a loquacious mood when he was writing "The Gift of the Magi." He also compares Jim and Della to the three kings, or magi, who brought expensive gifts to the baby Jesus where he was lying in a manger in a stable in Jerusalem. It seems appropriate, somehow, that O. Henry should be bringing in allusions to the Bible for this particular story, because it was all about Christmas and the spirit of Christmas. King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba also gave each other fabulous gifts.
It seems likely that O. Henry was writing this famous story in a rush to meet a deadline for the Christmas issue of a newspaper. Since the papers were full of advertisements for Christmas gifts, O. Henry might have been asked to write a story about the joys and blessings of giving gifts in order to encourage readers to do likewise. There are numerous possible morals to be drawn from "The Gift of the Magi," but one of them which may be overlooked is that we ought to be generous in our gift-giving at Christmastime, even if we have to max out our credit cards.
O. Henry was a notoriously heavy drinker. He was reputed to drink two quarts of whiskey a day, and he did some of his writing with a pencil in saloons. "The Gift of the Magi," though brilliant and probably O. Henry's most popular story, sounds as if it had been written hastily and not carefully proofread before he turned it in to his editor. In the early part of his story he repeats Della's problem four times, almost in the same words.
ONE DOLLAR AND eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.
Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim.
This certainly sounds as if O. Henry had already had a little too much Christmas cheer and also as if he was padding his story in order to fill a certain reserved amount of space in his paper. After drawing a far-fetched analogy between Jim and Della, on the one hand, and King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, or the other, he concludes his story with an equally far-fetched analogy between the Youngs and the three kings who brought presents of myrrh, incense and gold to Bethlehem. But there was nobody who could write quite like O. Henry.
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