Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim
Klein
On the Holiday of Sukkot, Jews
around the world read Kohelet — Ecclesiastes — and encounter one of its
opening verses: “I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem” (1:12). The
past tense was has long troubled readers. Why does King Solomon, the
wisest and most powerful king Israel ever knew, speak of his kingship in the
past tense?
The Talmud provides a startling
answer. In Gittin 68a–b, we learn that Solomon’s dominion over the
spirit world — his ability to command demons with a ring bearing God’s name —
ultimately led to his undoing. The demon-king Ashmedai, whom Solomon had
captured and forced to help build the Temple, tricked the king into removing
his protective ring. Ashmedai swallowed it, hurled Solomon 400 parasangs from
Jerusalem, and took his throne. Solomon wandered as a beggar, repeating to
anyone who would listen: “I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem”. No
one believed him.
This extraordinary tale is part
of a rich ancient tradition in which Solomon is not merely a wise king, but a
master of demons. Josephus (writing in the first century ce), already knew Solomon as the author
of exorcistic incantations and described a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar who
expelled demons “in Solomon’s name” before the Roman emperor Vespasian.
Likewise, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls (11Q11 also known as "11QApocryphal
Psalms") associates Solomon with exorcistic psalms. And, most importantly
for this book review, the book Testament of Solomon, a fascinating and
deeply strange pseudepigraphical work, portrays Solomon as the supreme
demon-controller, using a divine ring to command an entire hierarchy of
spirits.
The book under review is a
scholarly study of the Testament of Solomon (abbreviated as TSol). For
generations, scholars have debated the origins of this work. Is it Jewish,
Christian, or something in between? When was it written? And what does it tell
us about the ancient world’s fascination with Solomon’s supernatural powers?
Ittai Gradel and Nils Arne Pedersen’s study offers learned answers to some of
those questions and essentially promises to rewrite the history of one of
antiquity’s most mysterious texts.
The Testament of Solomon
is preserved in about 26 Greek manuscripts, the earliest dating to the Middle
Ages. First published in 1837, this work tells the story of Solomon building
the Temple when a demon named Ornias begins tormenting one of his workmen.
Solomon prays for help, and the archangel Michael brings him a ring with a
magical seal. With this ring, Solomon commands demons — Beelzeboul, Asmodeus
(Ashmedai), Onoskelis, and dozens more — to appear before him, confess their
names and powers, and labor on the Temple. The work is part narrative, part
demonological encyclopedia (in this way, much of the book is a catalog of names
of demons and the ways their malevolent effects can be avoided).
But the Testament of Solomon
is deeply puzzling. It shifts between first-person and third-person narration. And
it contains material that feels Jewish, alongside material that are decidedly
Christian (references to “the Son of God,” "Emmanuel," and
Christological exorcism) and pagan (astrological decans and Greek-style
demons). Scholars have long debated whether it is a Jewish work with Christian
interpolations, a Christian recension of a Jewish original, or a fundamentally
Christian composition.
Gradel and Pedersen’s
contribution begins not with manuscripts, but with archaeology. The starting
point of their investigation is a group of ten bronze rings from the third
century ce, each inscribed in
Greek with the same phrase: "Solomon says: ‘Watch out!’”
The phrase is puzzling. Why would
an amuletic ring bear a command to “watch out”? The authors argue that this
ring-inscription makes sense only in light of the Testament of Solomon.
In a climactic episode in that work, Solomon orders two demons to support a
massive pillar — and he commands them with precisely these words: “Watch out!”
(TSol 24:2). The rings, then, are apotropaic amulets: their wearers were
invoking Solomon’s power to bind demons, quoting a scene from the story told in
the Testament of Solomon.
Six of the rings are nearly
identical, suggesting they came from a single workshop. Two bear Christian
symbols — one with two fish, another with a fish-and-anchor motif — pointing to
a Christian milieu. One ring has been linked to the Christian pilgrimage site
of Abu Mena in Egypt.
From this archaeological
evidence, Gradel and Pedersen develop a bold thesis: They argue that the rings
establish that the original version of the Solomon-demon narrative predates the
third century — possibly by a considerable margin. Moreover, the rings refer to
Solomon in the third person (“Solomon says”), not the first person
("I say"). This suggests that the earliest form of the Testament
of Solomon was not a first-person “testament” at all, but rather a third-person
narrative — a novel, in effect.
Further evidence in this
direction is harnessed by what the authors consider TSol's abrupt, hurried
ending, which points to the hand of an editor who changed the book around to
make it fit the testament genre. That awkward conclusion relates that King
Solomon crushed grasshoppers as an act of idolatry to please a Jebusite woman
whom he wanted to wed, and with that sinful act, he quickly loses all his
powers.
Building on this, the authors posit
and attempt to reconstruct what they refer to as the lost Proto-TSol: a longer,
more coherent third-person account of King Solomon and the demons. They argue
that a later editor (whom they call the “testamentary redactor”) abridged this
novel and reframed it as Solomon’s own first-person testament, the version
preserved in the Greek manuscripts. This explains the work’s awkward shifts in
person and tense: the editor was sloppily imposing the testament genre onto a
pre-existing narrative.
Several pieces of evidence are
adduced to support this reconstruction. Later manuscripts have the verb in
the plural in Solomon’s command to the demons, “Watch out!”— after all, there
are two demons. The oldest manuscript, designated G (dated to 1332 CE), has the
verb in the singular, exactly as on the rings. The authors also identify
certain passages — the list of thirty-six spirits (TSol 18) and the Enepsigos
episode (TSol 15:8–12) — as later interpolations, likely added in the fourth or
fifth century. There are other technical complicated philological/linguistic
arguments to support the authors' novel theory.
But perhaps most intriguingly, a
Syriac Christian text, the Obsequies of the Virgin (6th century),
contains a story essentially identical to TSol 20, but told entirely in the
third person. This, Gradel and Pedersen argue, preserves Proto-TSol’s original
phrasing and demonstrates that the original third-person Solomonic narrative still
circulated in Christian circles as late as the sixth century.
The book’s most controversial
claim concerns the religious identity of Proto-TSol. Gradel and Pedersen argue
that it was an originally Christian work, not a Jewish work with
Christian additions. The evidence? The Christian iconography on several rings,
the reference to “the Son of God” in the text, and the Alexandrian context
suggested by the Abu Mena connection. In fact, the authors propose Alexandria
(or its environs) as the birthplace of the tradition.
Indeed, the authors surmise that
Proto-TSol first emerged among Christians in Alexandria, but early Church
fathers were uncomfortable with the popular acceptance of this non-biblical
work and were especially wary of its discussions of demons and the like. This
provides the motive for the redactor to rework Proto-TSol into a
testament-style book, as though it were written by Solomon himself, in order to
make the work more palatable to those who objected.
But is this conclusive? The rings
with Christian symbols represent only two of the ten. Magic culture in late
antiquity was notoriously syncretistic, cutting across religious boundaries.
The Aramaic incantation bowls, for example, show Jewish, Christian, and pagan
magical formulae circulating side by side, often indistinguishable in their
linguistic and ritual forms. A ring quoting “Solomon says: 'Watch out!'” might
have been used by Christians, Jews, or pagans alike — the words themselves
don’t determine the religion of the text they quote. In the ancient world,
"magicians" operated on the fringes of society, and this book's close
association with the world of magic would suggest that it anyways does not
belong not to any specific mainstream religious community, but to the cast-offs
from those communities.
Even after the authors trace Proto-TSol
to second-century Alexandria, this does not rule out a Jewish author. This is
because the Jewish community of Alexandria, though devastated by Trajan’s
repression in the early second century, maintained a presence until the 400s,
when Cyril of Alexandria finally expelled them. So even if we accept that the
book was written in Alexandria, it does not follow that it emerged from the
hand of a Christian writer.
And what of the rabbinic parallels? The Talmudic story of Solomon and Ashmedai shares remarkable motifs with the Testament of Solomon: a divine ring, demonic captivity, and forced participation in constructed the Jerusalem Temple. Yet although Gradel and Pedersen recognize these parallels, they effectively “minimize” them in favor of their Christian-composition thesis. In other words, they never seriously entertained the possibility of a Jewish origin for Proto-TSol. Some scholars might see this as a weakness.
Another possibility: Could
Proto-TSol have emerged from a Judeo-Christian milieu — a world before the
“parting of the ways,” where Jewish and Christian traditions intermingled
freely? That option, which feels increasingly plausible to some scholars of
late antiquity, receives less in attention in this book than it might deserve.
For long-time readers of the Jewish
Press, the legends of King Solomon and the demons may recall the
now-defunct comics section of the newspaper, where these tales once entertained
children like myself. But Gradel and Pedersen remind us that these are not mere
Medieval fantasies. They are part of an ancient, international tradition — a
tradition that crossed from Jewish Palestine to Christian Alexandria to
Sassanian Babylonia, taking new forms in each context.
The Lost Novel of King Solomon
and the Demons may not have the last word on the Testament of Solomon.
But it has revived interest in one of the most mysterious of ancient
pseudepigrapha, and its ring evidence gives us something no amount of
manuscript study could provide: physical proof that real people in the third
century wore King Solomon’s supposed words on their fingers, hoping to ward off
the demons that plagued their world. Those rings were brought into the
discussion by co-author Ittai Gradel (a British-Danish academic and antiquities
dealer who was born in Haifa), who passed away shortly after the book’s
publication. This volume represents the culmination of his scholarly work — a
bold, interdisciplinary synthesis that will surely provoke debate for years to
come.
The reader should know ahead of
time that the full text of some versions of TSol appear in the book's
appendices. This reviewer actually recommends reading the appendices first
before digging into the book's nitty gritty philological discussions. Also,
knowing how to read Greek would be helpful for some of the more technical
arguments in the book (especially the footnotes), but is not absolutely
necessary to understand the main points. In fact, even though this is a
scholarly book published by an academic press, it is still interesting to a broader
lay audience (like myself).
As we read Kohelet over Sukkot — “I
was king over Israel in Jerusalem” — we might remember that Solomon’s story, in
all its strange and wonderful variations, is still being discussed and debated
to this very day.
