The Testament of Solomon: The King Who Enslaved Demons to Build God's House

A boy loses half his wages and his life force to a demon. A king prays. An archangel delivers a ring. What follows is the strangest construction project in sacred history.

Somewhere between the first and fifth centuries of our era, someone sat down and wrote Solomon’s confession. Not the wise king of Proverbs, not the poet of the Song of Songs — but Solomon the demon-master. A man who received a ring engraved with a five-pointed star, who used it to drag every foul spirit in creation before his throne, who interrogated each one about the architecture of evil, and who then chained them to quarry stones, spin ropes, and haul timber for the Temple of God.

And then lost everything because he fell in love.

This text — the Testament of Solomon — is not in your Bible. It never was. But the story it tells echoed so deeply through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that all three religions carry their own version, each one revealing something different about power, pride, and the price of commanding forces that were never meant to obey a human voice.

The Boy and the Demon

The story opens with a problem on the construction site.

Solomon is building the Temple in Jerusalem. Among his workers is a boy — his favorite, the most skilled of the young laborers. Every evening at sunset, a demon named Ornias appears to the boy, sucks the life force through his right thumb, and steals half his daily wages. The boy grows gaunt. His cheeks hollow. Solomon notices and asks what’s wrong.

The boy confesses. Solomon doesn’t send soldiers. He doesn’t consult his advisors. He prays.

God answers through the Archangel Michael, who descends and places in Solomon’s hand a ring — small, gold or bronze depending on the manuscript, engraved with a seal the text calls the pentalpha. Five alphas interlocked. A five-pointed star. Michael tells Solomon: with this ring, you will lock up all the demons, male and female, and with their help you will build Jerusalem.

Solomon gives the ring to the boy. That evening, when Ornias appears, the boy stamps the seal against the demon’s chest. Ornias screams, begs, promises gold — but the seal holds. The boy drags the bound demon before the king.

This is where the interrogation begins.

The Parade of Demons

What makes the Testament extraordinary — what separates it from every other ancient text about magic — is what Solomon does next. He doesn’t simply banish the demons. He doesn’t execute them. He interviews them. One by one, each demon is brought before the throne and forced to answer the same questions:

What is your name? What constellation rules you? What harm do you do to human beings? And what angel defeats you?

The answers build a map of the cosmos — a shadow atlas where every disease, every misfortune, every form of madness has a demonic author, a celestial address, and a divine counter-agent.

Ornias, the first, confesses that he strangles men born under Aquarius, drives them to unnatural passions, and is thwarted by the angel Ouriel. Solomon stamps the ring on him and commands: you will cut stones for the Temple. Ornias obeys. But Solomon has an idea. He gives Ornias the ring and tells him to bring the prince of demons.

Ornias flies to Beelzeboul — the lord of the demons — and presses the ring against him. Beelzeboul arrives before Solomon in chains, furious and magnificent. He reveals that he was once the highest-ranking angel in heaven, that he fell, and that he now rules over all bound spirits. Solomon forces him to cut blocks of Theban marble.

Then come the others.

The Cosmic Interrogation

Onoskelis — a beautiful woman with the legs of a mule. She lives in caves and ravines, perverts men through lust, and strangles them afterward. She is thwarted by the angel Joel. Solomon assigns her to spin hemp for the Temple ropes.

Asmodeus — the demon who destroys newlyweds, who inflames marriages with jealousy and madness. He is linked to the constellation Ursa Major and confesses a weakness: the smoke of burning fish liver and gall drives him away. This is a direct reference to the Book of Tobit (Tobit 6:7, 8:2-3), where the young Tobias uses exactly this remedy on his wedding night to banish the same demon. Solomon chains him to make bricks.

The Seven Cosmic Spirits — a group of seven beautiful demons linked to the decans of the heavens. They stand in a line and each speaks: “We are the stoicheia, the cosmic rulers. We deceive by disguising ourselves as angels of light.” They reveal their celestial assignments and their thwarting angels, one by one. Solomon yokes them all to digging the Temple foundations.

Lix Tetrax — the demon of wind and whirlwinds. He sets fields on fire and renders homes desolate. He is thwarted by “the angel who will rule over the wind at the end of days.” Solomon makes him throw stones up to the Temple heights — a supernatural crane operator.

Enepsigos — a shape-shifting female demon who appears as a woman, as a goddess of three forms, and as a creature with countless limbs. She dwells in the moon and foretells the future. Solomon locks her in a vessel.

Obyzouth — a demon with no limbs and disheveled hair, who kills newborn infants by strangling them at night. She is thwarted by the angel Raphael, and when the name of Raphael is written on papyrus and placed near a woman in labor, Obyzouth flees. Solomon hangs her by her own hair in front of the Temple as a warning.

Abezethibou — a demon who claims to have fought alongside Pharaoh’s army against Moses, who supported the pillar of the Red Sea until it collapsed on the Egyptians. He has one wing. Solomon chains him to a pillar and forces him to hold a massive stone aloft, unmoving, for the entire construction.

The Thirty-Six Decans

Then comes the strangest section of all.

Thirty-six demons arrive in a procession, each one ruling a ten-degree segment of the zodiac — the decans, an astrological system inherited from Egypt. Each decan-demon governs a specific part of the human body and causes specific diseases:

One causes headaches. Another causes ear infections. Another throat pain. Another stomach cramps. Another shivering fever. Another kidney stones. Down through the body, organ by organ, thirty-six demons for thirty-six afflictions.

And for each one, Solomon extracts the name of the thwarting angel — creating what amounts to an astrological-medical encyclopedia of exorcism. If you know which decan rules the hour, you know which demon is active. If you know the demon, you know the angel. If you know the angel, you speak the name and the affliction lifts.

The Testament is building a machine. A system. A technology of divine authority that anyone — not just Solomon — could theoretically operate.

This is the seed that, a thousand years later, would grow into the grimoires.

The Ring

What exactly is this seal?

The text calls it a pentalpha — literally “five alphas,” from the way five Greek letter As can be arranged to form a five-pointed star. This is the earliest known text that explicitly connects a pentagram to Solomon. Later traditions would shift the seal to a hexagram — the six-pointed Star of David — primarily through medieval Arabic and Kabbalistic sources. But in the Testament, it is five points.

The ring works by contact. Press it against a demon’s chest or neck and the demon is bound. The seal carries the authority of God, channeled through Michael. It is, in the most literal sense, a power of attorney — divine power delegated to a physical object, which can itself be delegated further (Solomon gives it to the boy, the boy stamps Ornias, Ornias stamps Beelzeboul).

This is a radical theological idea. It means divine authority is transferable. Portable. Operational. It doesn’t require a prophet’s charisma or a priest’s ordination. It requires a ring. And the right name.

The implications were not lost on later centuries.

What Josephus Saw

Almost a millennium before the oldest surviving manuscript of the Testament, the historian Josephus — writing around 93 CE — described something remarkable in his Antiquities of the Jews (8.42-49).

He reports that Solomon composed incantations for healing the sick and forms of exorcism for driving out demons, and that these techniques were still practiced in his own time. Then he adds an eyewitness account: a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar, performing in front of the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his court, drew a demon out through a man’s nostrils using a ring containing a root prescribed by Solomon, while reciting Solomonic incantations. As proof that the demon had truly departed, Eleazar commanded it to overturn a basin of water on its way out. The basin overturned. The Romans were astonished.

This is not legend. This is a court historian recording an event from his own time, performed in front of an emperor and soldiers. Whether the exorcism “worked” in a supernatural sense is a question of belief. That Eleazar performed it, and that the audience accepted it as real — that is documented history. A living Solomonic exorcism tradition existed in the first century.

The Testament didn’t invent Solomon the demon-master. It wrote down a tradition that was already centuries old.

The Talmud’s Version: Ashmedai on the Throne

Judaism tells the same story with different demons and a much darker ending.

In Tractate Gittin 68a-68b of the Babylonian Talmud, Solomon needs a creature called the shamir — a supernatural worm (or insect, or stone — the accounts vary) that can cut stone without iron, because the Torah forbids iron tools on the altar stones (Deuteronomy 27:5, Exodus 20:25). The shamir is in the possession of Ashmedai, the prince of demons.

Solomon sends his general Benaiahu ben Yehoyada — a historical figure from 2 Samuel — with a chain inscribed with the Shem ha-Meforash, the ineffable Name of God. Benaiahu drains Ashmedai’s water cistern and refills it with wine. Ashmedai returns, suspects a trap, recites Scripture about the dangers of wine — then drinks anyway. He falls asleep drunk. Benaiahu chains him with the holy chain.

On the march back to Jerusalem, Ashmedai does strange things. He weeps passing a wedding — because he can see that the groom will die within thirty days. He laughs at a man ordering shoes to last seven years — because the man will die within seven days. He straightens the path of a blind man who has wandered off the road. He weeps at a celebration because he knows the hidden grief no one can see.

The demons, in the Talmud, are not merely malevolent. They see the gears turning behind the world. They know what is coming and cannot prevent it. Their knowledge is terrible precisely because it is real.

Solomon uses the shamir to cut the Temple stones. But then he makes a mistake.

He asks Ashmedai: What makes demons superior to humans?

Ashmedai says: Remove the chain. Give me the ring. I will show you.

Solomon complies.

Ashmedai swallows the ring, grows to cosmic size — one wing touching heaven, one touching earth — and flings Solomon 400 parasangs (over 2,000 kilometers). Then Ashmedai sits on Solomon’s throne and rules in his form.

Solomon wanders as a beggar, going door to door. He tells people: I am Qohelet. I was king over Israel in Jerusalem. Nobody believes him. The wisest man alive, reduced to a vagrant repeating a claim that sounds like madness.

Eventually the Sanhedrin notices that the king on the throne never removes his shoes — because demons have rooster feet, which they hide. They investigate and discover the impostor. Solomon’s ring is found in the belly of a fish. He is restored.

But the Talmud adds a devastating footnote: Solomon’s reign was thereafter diminished. He ruled first over the whole world, then only over Israel, then only over Jerusalem, then only over his bed, then only over his walking stick.

The past tense in Ecclesiastes 1:12 — “I was king” — is taken as proof. Something was permanently lost.

The Quran’s Version: The Staff and the Termite

Islam tells the story with the most haunting ending.

The Quran presents Sulayman (Solomon) across multiple surahs — 21, 27, 34, and 38. In the Quranic version, Solomon’s power is explicitly a prophetic gift from God, granted as it was to no other prophet. God subjects to Solomon the wind (its morning journey equals a month of travel, its afternoon the same), a fountain of molten copper, and armies of jinn, humans, and birds marching in formation.

The jinn serve as builders, architects, and divers. Surah 34:13 describes what they make: “elevated chambers, statues, basins as large as reservoirs, and firmly set kettles.” They build Tadmur (Palmyra) and Baalbek, according to post-Quranic tradition — two of the most magnificent ruin sites in the ancient world, whose massive stone blocks have puzzled archaeologists for centuries.

But it is Solomon’s death, in Surah 34:14, that delivers the Quran’s theological strike:

“And when We decreed for Solomon death, nothing indicated to the jinn his death except a creature of the earth eating his staff. And when he fell, it became clear to the jinn that if they had known the unseen, they would not have remained in humiliating punishment.”

Solomon dies leaning on his staff. His body stays upright. The jinn — thinking he is still watching them — continue their forced labor. Days pass. Perhaps weeks. Perhaps longer. A termite eats through the wooden staff from the inside. The staff gives way. Solomon’s body collapses.

Only then do the jinn realize: he has been dead all along. They were obeying a corpse.

The theological lesson is explicit: the jinn do not know the unseen (al-ghayb). Their supposed supernatural knowledge is an illusion. They feared a dead man’s gaze more than God’s truth.

In the tafsir (exegetical) tradition, the parallels to the Talmudic Ashmedai story become even sharper. Al-Tabari (d. 923 CE) records that a demon named Sakhr stole Solomon’s ring and ruled from his throne for forty days while Solomon wandered in exile — a near-identical structure to Gittin 68b. The ring is eventually recovered from the belly of a fish.

The same fish. The same ring. The same exile. Two traditions, separated by centuries and theology, preserving the same architecture of humiliation.

The Incantation Bowls: Solomon in the Dirt

Now leave the texts. Go to the ground.

Between the 4th and 7th centuries CE, across Mesopotamia — in the ruins of Nippur, Babylon, and Susa — thousands of ceramic bowls were buried upside-down beneath the floors of houses. Written in spiraling Aramaic script on their inner surfaces, these bowls contain incantations to trap and bind demons.

And many of them invoke Solomon.

“By the seal-ring of Solomon son of David, who bound the demons and the devs and the liliths…” — the formula repeats across hundreds of bowls. The bowl is placed upside-down to function as a trap: the demon enters, reads the spiraling text, follows it inward to the center, and finds itself bound by Solomon’s authority. A prison made of clay and Scripture.

These are not elite literary artifacts. They were made by ordinary people — Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Zoroastrian families living side by side in Sasanian Mesopotamia — all borrowing the same Solomonic authority to protect their homes from the same demons. Solomon’s name had become a technology that crossed every religious boundary.

The bowls are held today at the Penn Museum (from the Nippur excavations), the British Museum, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, and dozens of smaller collections. Scholars like James Montgomery (1913), Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked (1985), and Dan Levene (2003) have catalogued and translated hundreds of them.

Alongside the bowls, “Solomon Rider” amulets — carved gems showing Solomon on horseback spearing a female demon (often identified as Lilith or the evil eye) — circulated throughout the late Roman and Byzantine world from the 3rd through the 7th centuries. These are held at the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington.

The Testament of Solomon wasn’t an isolated literary fantasy. It was the literary crystallization of a tradition that millions of people, for centuries, literally buried in the earth beneath their feet.

Before the Testament: The Dead Sea Scrolls

How far back does the tradition go?

At Qumran, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments dating to the 2nd-1st centuries BCE contain exorcistic texts:

11Q11 — a scroll of apocryphal psalms that attributes exorcistic power to David (Solomon’s father), including a psalm to be recited “over the stricken.” 4Q510-511 — the Songs of the Maskil, hymns for a wise leader who uses divine names to terrify and repel demons. 4Q560 — an Aramaic exorcism text with formulae for binding spirits.

None of these mention Solomon by name. But they demonstrate that the conceptual framework — a divinely authorized figure using sacred names to bind demons — existed in Jewish practice at least two centuries before the Testament was composed. Solomon’s name was attached to the tradition later, perhaps because 1 Kings 4:33 says his wisdom encompassed “trees, animals, birds, reptiles, and fish” — hinting at a knowledge that extended beyond the human world.

By the time Josephus wrote in 93 CE, the attachment was complete. Solomon was the exorcist-king.

The Grimoire Inheritance

A thousand years after the Testament, its structure re-emerged — transformed.

The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis), surviving in 14th-15th century manuscripts, takes the Testament’s framework and strips away the narrative. The story of a king interrogating demons becomes a manual for a practitioner conducting rituals. The pentacles are multiplied, organized by planetary correspondences — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. The prayers become elaborate. The ritual tools — virgin parchment, consecrated ink, specific incenses — become enormously detailed.

What was lost in the translation from Testament to grimoire was the theology. The Testament asks: What does each demon reveal about the architecture of divine order? The grimoires ask: How do I get the demon to do what I want?

The Lemegeton (Lesser Key of Solomon), compiled in the 17th century, takes the final step: its first book, the Ars Goetia, catalogs 72 demons, each with a name, rank, seal, and specific powers. The 72 may derive from doubling the Testament’s 36 decans — or from the Kabbalistic 72-letter Name of God (derived from Exodus 14:19-21), whose 72 angels may have been given 72 demonic counterparts. The system had become a bureaucracy of the unseen, complete with ranks (kings, dukes, princes, marquises) and legions (each demon commanding thousands of lesser spirits).

Solomon the king — who prayed and received a gift — had become Solomon the brand name on a manual anyone could buy.

This is the trajectory that eventually leads to Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic tradition, where divine knowledge descends through texts rather than through kings, and to the Philosopher’s Stone, where the alchemist seeks to replicate a transformation that was once reserved for God alone.

The Two Views

Here is where we lay the cards on the table.

The skeptical reading: The Testament of Solomon is a late-antique literary creation — a fictional autobiography mixing Jewish demonology, Hellenistic astrology, and early Christian theology. The demons are folk-medical personifications of diseases. The ring is a narrative device borrowed from Jewish folklore about Eleazar’s exorcisms. The astrological framework reflects Egyptian-Greek science repurposed for a religious audience. The text’s real significance is sociological: it shows how magical traditions crossed religious boundaries in the ancient Mediterranean. The incantation bowls prove that ordinary people believed in Solomonic magic, not that Solomonic magic worked.

The other reading: The tradition precedes the text. Josephus witnessed an exorcism using a Solomonic ring in the first century — he wrote about it as fact, not fiction. The Dead Sea Scrolls push the exorcistic framework back to the second century BCE. The incantation bowls demonstrate continuous practice across five centuries and four religions. The same story — king receives divine authority, binds demons, builds a holy structure, loses power through human weakness — appears independently in Persian tradition (Jamshid and the divs, who loses divine glory through pride), Indian tradition (Vikramaditya and the vetala, where a king contends with a supernatural being who tests his wisdom), and possibly Mesopotamian royal ideology. Either all these cultures independently invented the same fiction, or they all remembered the same kind of event — a primordial encounter between human authority and non-human intelligence, whatever you understand those terms to mean.

The Quran cuts through both readings with a third: Surah 2:102 — “Solomon did not disbelieve, but the devils disbelieved, teaching people magic.” In the Islamic view, Solomon’s power was real, prophetic, and divinely authorized. The sorcery was what came afterward — when humans tried to replicate it without the prophetic mandate.

Three religions. Three readings. The same ring at the center of all of them.

Solomon’s Fall

Every version of the story ends in loss.

In the Testament, Solomon falls in love with a Jebusite woman. A priest of the Jebusites tells him: if you want her, you must sacrifice to our gods. Solomon — the wisest man alive, the man who interrogated Beelzeboul and chained Asmodeus — agrees to sacrifice five locusts to Moloch. Five insects. The smallest possible offering to the worst possible god.

Immediately, the Spirit of God departs from him. The ring’s power fades. The demons laugh. Solomon writes his testament as a warning: do not disobey God as I did.

In the Talmud, Solomon hands Ashmedai his ring voluntarily — just to see what the demon can do. Curiosity. The desire to understand power by testing its limits. Ashmedai flings him across the world.

In the Quran, Solomon dies leaning on a stick, and no one notices.

Three versions. Three ways of losing. Through desire. Through curiosity. Through the simple, mortal fact that every body eventually falls.

And in all three, the demons keep working after the king is gone. The Temple gets built. The stones are cut. The walls rise. Whatever Solomon lost, the house of God stands.

Maybe that’s the real point. The power was never Solomon’s. He was holding it for a while. The ring was a loan, and the interest was everything.

By the Author

Further Reading & Related Themes

• Hermes Trismegistus and His Significance for Alchemy — another tradition where divine knowledge descends through a named figure into texts and techniques.
• The Philosopher’s Stone: A Journey Through Time and Culture — the alchemical quest to replicate a divine transformation, carrying the same tension between sacred gift and human ambition.
• Inside the Ouroboros of Cleopatra the Alchemist — another ancient text where symbol and benchwork meet, in the same late-antique Alexandrian world that shaped the Testament.
• Zosimos of Panopolis — a near-contemporary of the Testament’s authors, writing about spiritual transformation through vision and laboratory.
• Lilith: From Demon to Feminist Icon — the female demon who appears on the Solomon Rider amulets, speared by the mounted king.
• The Golem: Clay, Creation, and Caution — another Jewish tradition of bringing the inanimate to life through divine names, with similar warnings about the cost of playing creator.

FAQ

How many manuscripts of the Testament of Solomon survive? Approximately 15-18 Greek manuscripts, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna), the monasteries of Mount Athos, the University of Bologna, the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan). The critical edition was published by Chester Charlton McCown in 1922. The standard English translation is by D.C. Duling in Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983).

Did Solomon really exist? The historicity of King Solomon is debated. The biblical account in 1 Kings describes a wealthy and wise ruler of a united Israel-Judah around the 10th century BCE. Archaeological evidence for a grand Solomonic kingdom is contested — some scholars argue for a large regional power, others for a more modest chieftainship. What is certain is that by the Hellenistic period, “Solomon” functioned as a powerful cultural figure associated with wisdom and supernatural authority, regardless of the historical details.

What is the shamir? A legendary creature or substance in Jewish tradition that could cut stone without iron tools, needed because the Torah explicitly forbids iron on the altar (Deuteronomy 27:5). Described variously as a worm, an insect, a radioactive stone, or a supernatural fluid. In the Talmudic account, the shamir was given to Solomon through the mediation of Ashmedai. It was said to have been created at twilight on the eve of the first Sabbath, alongside other miraculous things.

How does the Book of Tobit connect to the Testament of Solomon? The demon Asmodeus appears in both texts. In Tobit (likely 3rd-2nd century BCE), Asmodeus kills the seven husbands of Sarah before the wedding night. The angel Raphael instructs Tobias to burn fish liver and gall to drive Asmodeus away. The Testament of Solomon repeats this detail exactly, suggesting it drew from the same tradition.

Where can I see incantation bowls in person? Major collections include the Penn Museum (Philadelphia), the British Museum (London), the Iraq Museum (Baghdad), the Louvre (Paris), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem). Many university collections also hold examples from the Nippur and Babylon excavations.

Is the “Solomon Rider” a real artifact type? Yes. Hundreds of carved gems and medallions from the 3rd-7th centuries CE show a mounted figure — identified as Solomon — spearing a prostrate female demon. They were worn as protective amulets across the Roman and Byzantine worlds. The Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database catalogues many of these.