The Testament of Solomon: the king, the ring and the demons

Among the texts that built the image of Solomon as master of spirits, the most influential is a Greek work known as the Testament of Solomon. It is a pseudepigraphon, that is, attributed to the biblical king but composed many centuries after him. It tells in the first person how Solomon, thanks to a ring given from heaven, managed to subdue the demons and force them to work on building the Temple in Jerusalem.

A text hard to date

The dating is debated. Many scholars place the surviving form between the third and fifth centuries AD, in a Greek-speaking Christian milieu, but allow that it may contain older material of Jewish origin. The complete manuscripts are medieval, and the various recensions differ considerably from one another. The standard critical edition was published in 1922 by Chester Charlton McCown.

The idea of a Solomon skilled in dealing with demons was already widespread in the first century AD. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in the Jewish Antiquities, writes that God granted Solomon the art against demons and that the king composed incantations for healing. He also tells of a certain Eleazar who, before Vespasian, is said to have freed a possessed man using a ring and the name of Solomon.

The plot: the ring and the parade of demons

According to the story, a demon named Ornias torments a young worker on the Temple. Solomon prays and receives from the archangel Michael a ring bearing an engraved seal. With it the king captures Ornias and, through him, the prince of demons Beelzebul. From then on the demons appear one after another before the king, revealing their names, their activities and the angel who has the power to stop them.

Among the best-known figures are Asmodeus, already present in the biblical book of Tobit, and a series of thirty-six spirits linked to the decans, the divisions of the zodiac of Egyptian origin. Each declares which ill it causes and which name puts it to flight. This catalogue structure turns the narrative into a kind of demonological encyclopaedia.

The king's fall and the legacy

The Testament is not simply a eulogy of Solomon. In the final part the king, in love with a foreign woman, agrees to sacrifice to alien gods and loses his glory. The text thus presents itself as a warning left to its readers, and this is the meaning of the title: a testament, that is, a final teaching before death.

The work enjoyed great success in the Byzantine world and helped fix themes that would return in medieval and modern grimoires: the seal of Solomon, the names of demons, the idea that every spirit has an angelic adversary. Many later traditions about Solomon's ring, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share this same narrative core, even where they do not depend directly on the Testament.

To read the Testament of Solomon is to watch the moment when a biblical figure becomes the archetype of the wise magician. The text does not describe practices but builds an imaginative world: one populated by spirits ordered in hierarchies, mastered by wisdom and prayer. Onto that imaginative world, many centuries later, the literature of the Solomonic keys would be grafted.