Seal of Solomon

The Seal of Solomon is a six-pointed star formed by two triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down, interlocked. It is the shape most people today recognize as the Star of David. Before it was a national emblem, it was a demon trap.

The ring and the demons

The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text compiled between the 1st and 4th centuries CE, tells the story in detail. Solomon receives a ring from the archangel Michael. The ring bears a seal, and the seal gives Solomon the power to summon, interrogate, and bind demons. One by one, each demon is dragged before the king, forced to reveal its name, its nature, the diseases or misfortunes it causes, and the name of the angel that can neutralize it. After interrogation, Solomon puts the demons to work building the Temple in Jerusalem.

The text names over thirty demons. Ornias, the first one caught, was tormenting a young boy working on the Temple construction. Beelzeboul, the prince of demons, is brought in and compelled to reveal the hierarchy of his kind. Asmodeus, who killed the seven husbands of Sarah in the Book of Tobit, confesses his vulnerability to the angel Raphael and the smell of burning fish liver.

The earliest manuscripts describe Solomon’s seal as a pentalpha, a pentagram. The hexagram version became standard later, possibly through conflation with other magical diagrams in late antique and medieval grimoire traditions. By the time the Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis) circulated in the 14th and 15th centuries, the hexagram was firmly established as the Solomonic seal.

Jinn, winds, and Sulaymān

The Quran gives Solomon (Sulaymān) authority over jinn, animals, and the winds. Surah 27 describes jinn working for him, and Surah 38 describes the wind placed at his command. Islamic magical tradition, beginning in the 9th century with texts like the Shams al-Ma’arif attributed to al-Buni, expanded Solomon’s seal into an elaborate system of protective diagrams.

The hexagram appears on Islamic amulets, bowls, and architectural ornament across the medieval Muslim world. Ottoman mosques display it without any Jewish association. In this tradition, the two interlocked triangles represent the union of opposites: fire and water, heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible. Solomon’s seal was a way of holding both together inside a single line.

From magic to nation

The hexagram’s association with Judaism came late. Individual Jewish use of the symbol dates back to antiquity (a hexagram appears on a seal from 7th-century-BCE Sidon), but it had no exclusive or consistent Jewish meaning for most of its history. Christians, Muslims, and alchemists all used it freely.

The turning point was Prague. In 1354, Emperor Charles IV granted the Jewish community of Prague the right to carry a flag, and the flag bore a hexagram. Over the following centuries, Prague’s Jews made the six-pointed star their communal emblem. The Kabbalistic text Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, compiled in the 13th century, included the hexagram among its angelic and protective symbols. The hexagram now had a specifically Jewish mystical framework.

By the 17th century, the hexagram was spreading to Jewish communities across Europe as a marker of synagogues, gravestones, and communal buildings. In 1897, the First Zionist Congress met in Basel, and the hexagram appeared on the Zionist flag. In 1948, it became the central element of the flag of the State of Israel.

The same shape that caught demons in a Greek pseudepigraphon, protected Ottoman mosques from the evil eye, and decorated alchemical diagrams in Renaissance Europe now flies over a modern nation-state. The geometry stayed the same. The cargo it carries changed at every stop.

Related reading

• The Testament of Solomon. The full article on Solomon’s demon-binding and its cross-cultural afterlife.
• Pentagram. The five-pointed star that shares the Seal of Solomon’s career as a protective and binding symbol.
• The Freemason Origin Myth. The Masonic tradition that claims Solomon’s Temple as its origin point.

Sources

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

• Testament of Solomon (Greek, 1st–4th century CE) — the foundational text describing Solomon’s ring and his command over demons
• Sefer Raziel HaMalakh (13th century, Kabbalistic) — includes the hexagram among angelic and protective symbols
• Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis, 14th–15th century) — medieval grimoire attributing magical seals to Solomon
• Quran, Surah 38:35–38 (Ṣāḍ) and 27:17 (al-Naml) — Solomon’s dominion over jinn and winds
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia (1533) — hexagram as an alchemical and magical sign