Asmodeus, the Demon King Who Answered to Solomon

The king of demons did not want to be caught. He came down from heaven every day to drink from a particular well in the wilderness, and he was careful, and he knew what traps looked like. But Solomon, who had been given a ring inscribed with the Name of God and a chain to match, knew something that Asmodeus could not defend against: thirst.

Benaiah son of Jehoiada, Solomon's chief man and military commander, was sent into the wilderness with a bundle of wool, a skin of wine, and instructions. He bored a hole in the bottom of the well and drained all the water out through it. He plugged the hole with wool. Then he poured wine in from above. When Asmodeus descended from his daily circuit of heaven, where the tradition says he studied in the celestial academy each morning, he found the well unchanged in appearance and completely wrong in smell. At first he refused. The Ginzberg account records him citing scripture to himself, those passages that warn against wine, trying to inspire his own willpower. The demon king preached to himself in the wilderness. He held out for a while. Then thirst won. He drank until he collapsed into sleep.

Benaiah came down from the tree where he had been watching and drew the chain around Asmodeus's neck. When the demon woke, he found himself bound by the Name of God, which meant no amount of power or cunning would free him. He permitted himself to be led. But what he did on the walk to Jerusalem became, in the tradition, a text unto itself.

Asmodeus uprooted a palm tree by brushing against it. He knocked against a house and it fell. He wept when a wedding procession passed them, and laughed at a man who was ordering shoes made to last seven years. He pushed a blind man into the road and then, a moment later, carefully set a drunk man straight on the right path. He asked, when they rerouted him around a poor widow's hut to keep him from demolishing it, what it was written that a soft tongue breaks the bone. He meant: he had been politely asked to step aside, and the politeness had broken something in him. His bone. He had gone around the hut, and it had cost him.

The rabbis who preserved this account in the sources that fed the Legends of the Jews understood Asmodeus's walk as a series of revelations. He wept at the wedding because he could see the bridegroom would be dead within thirty days, and a widow was already waiting. He laughed at the man ordering seven-year shoes because the man would be dead in seven days. He pushed the blind man because the man was righteous and Asmodeus wanted to throw him off his path to heaven, then relented and corrected himself. He helped the drunk because the drunk had no merit and would never be helped by divine providence, and so only a demon would think to assist him. Each action was legible if you knew how to read it. Asmodeus was not being erratic. He was being honest about what he saw.

Once at Solomon's court, the demon king tested the king's wisdom with a peculiar case. He drove his finger into the earth, and up from the ground came a man with two heads. This was a Cainite, one of those subterranean descendants of Cain who live beneath the earth's surface, whose nature and habits differ entirely from those who live above it. The man could not go back. He had been summoned and now belonged to the upper world. He took a wife there, had seven sons, and when he died, one of the sons who resembled him, also having two heads, claimed two portions of the inheritance. Both Solomon and the full Sanhedrin were stumped. There was no precedent. No law in Israel addressed the inheritance rights of a man who was, in some meaningful sense, two people sharing one body.

Solomon prayed. The text records his exact words, drawn from the same prayer preserved in (1 Kings 3:6-9): God, when you appeared to me at Gibeon and told me to ask for a gift, I asked not for silver or gold but for wisdom, so that I could judge men in justice. The Ginzberg compilation treats this prayer as the key to everything that follows in Solomon's reign: the question was always whether the wisdom asked for at Gibeon would prove sufficient for the cases that Asmodeus and the demonic world kept bringing to the throne. He was reminding God, almost formally, of the terms of their arrangement. The answer came. Solomon held a torch to both the Cainite's necks simultaneously. If the man was truly two people, the flame would produce two distinct reactions: each head would feel only its own pain, and the heads would flinch independently. If he was one person with an unusual body, both heads would wince together at the same moment. Both heads flinched together. One man, one inheritance share.

This is the kind of wisdom that Asmodeus's capture made available to Solomon: not just a demon in chains, but a bridge to knowledge that no human tribunal had yet needed, because no human situation had yet required it. Asmodeus brought from underground a problem the courts of Israel were not equipped to handle, and Solomon's wisdom, the same wisdom he had prayed for at Gibeon, found the answer at the end of a torch flame.