In the holy Qur'an, there is only one country that qualified to a very special description as the prosperous land with a forgiving God (Baldatun ṭayyibatun wa rabbun ghafūr). This country named Saba’, or in English called Sheba. Saba’, based on the explanation of al-Qur'ān, blessed with abundant grace; a very fertile land, two gardens on the right and left side. Indeed, al-Qur'ān did not tell widely about this story, it is only mentioned twice and narrated in a simple story. In interpreting this story, the previous commentators are stuck in the elaboration of a long-winded and sometimes excessively on domestic phenomenon of Sabā.
Muhammad Ahmad Khalafullāh, an Egyptian Muslim scholar, has an innovation in the model of Qur'anic narrative (Qaṣaṣ al-Qur'ān) study. He tends to find the meaning of al-Qur'ān by conducting a literary theory. It firstly start from the tracking toward the source of the story. This step intended to observe the phenomena around the story. And the second is finding the literary dimension of a story. These two steps will lead us to gain the aim of the story, that is the task of social responsibility.
By applying this theory to read the narrattion of Saba’, there were some interesting conclusions found about Saba’. Such us the fact that this story is a historical narrative that can be detected from the bloody relation of Quraysh tribe with the descent of Saba’ through the marriage of Hāshim ibn ‘abdi Manaf (Father’s Grandfather of Prophet Muhammad PBUH) with Salma and Hindun, the daughters of ‘Umar bin Zayd, a head of the Khazraj tribe.
In the term of task of social responsibility, there are some social or humanity messages of this story such as; the teaching of being not greedy or cheat to others, the importance of environmental maintenance and development result, and the management of welfare state.