Sakhr

Sakhr stole Solomon’s ring and sat on his throne. For forty days, according to al-Tabari, a jinn ruled in the king’s place while Solomon wandered the streets unrecognized, stripped of the divine authority the ring had carried.

The story appears in the tafsir tradition, the body of Quranic commentary that expanded the Quran’s allusive references into full narratives. The Quran itself offers one cryptic verse. The commentators built the rest.

The verse

Surah 38:34 reads: “We placed on his throne a body.” The verse sits within a passage about Solomon and the trials God imposed on him. It explains nothing. It names no demon. It describes no theft. The word “body” (jasad) could mean a corpse, an idol, or a living figure placed where Solomon should have been.

The commentators filled the gap. Al-Tabari (d. 923 CE), in his History of Prophets and Kings, identified the body on the throne as a jinn named Sakhr. Al-Tha’labi, writing in the eleventh century, expanded the account in his Stories of the Prophets. Between them, they assembled a narrative from fragments scattered across Quranic exegesis, hadith, and older Israelite traditions.

The theft

The accounts vary in detail but share a single structure. Solomon, for reasons that differ across versions, removes his ring. In some tellings, he entrusts it to a wife while he enters the privy. In others, a concubine holds it while he bathes. Sakhr takes the ring from her hands, assumes Solomon’s form, and seats himself on the throne. The ring is the source of Solomon’s authority over the jinn. Without it, he is an ordinary man.

Solomon returns to find his throne occupied and no one willing to believe his claim. He wanders for forty days, working as a laborer at the shore, reduced to begging and eating scraps. The number forty carries weight in Islamic and Jewish tradition alike: forty days of flood, forty years in the desert, forty days of fasting.

The ring ends up in the sea, swallowed by a fish that a fisherman later catches. Solomon, working at the fish market or on the shore, finds the ring when the fish is gutted. He puts it on, the jinn’s impersonation collapses, and Solomon returns to his throne. He imprisons Sakhr.

The parallel

The Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 68b, compiled centuries before al-Tabari wrote, tells the same story with different names. Solomon captures the demon Ashmedai (Asmodeus) to learn the location of the shamir, a worm or substance that can cut stone without iron. Ashmedai asks to hold the ring. Solomon gives it to him. Ashmedai hurls Solomon four hundred parasangs across the landscape and seats himself on the throne.

In the Talmudic version, the exile lasts years. The Sanhedrin grows suspicious because the impostor’s behavior deviates from Solomon’s established patterns. The ring is recovered from a fish. Solomon returns.

Same ring. Same theft. Same fish. Two traditions, Jewish and Islamic, separated by centuries and theology, preserving the same architecture of divine authority lost and recovered. The Islamic Sakhr and the Talmudic Ashmedai perform the same role: the spirit who proves that Solomon’s power depended entirely on a single object, and that without it, the wisest king in history was indistinguishable from a beggar.

Related reading

• The Testament of Solomon. The Greek text that codified Solomon as demon-master, including the Islamic parallel traditions.
• Asmodeus. The Talmudic demon who plays Sakhr’s role in the Jewish version of the story.
• Seal of Solomon. The ring that carried Solomon’s authority over spirits.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Al-Tabari, Ta’rikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (History of Prophets and Kings, early 10th century CE)
• Al-Tha’labi, Qisas al-Anbiya (Stories of the Prophets, 11th century CE)
• Quran, Surah 38:34 — ‘We placed on his throne a body’ (the verse commentators connect to Sakhr)
• Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 68b — the parallel Ashmedai account