How Solomon Lost the Ring and Won the Shamir

The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924) preserves two stories about King Solomon that the later collectors arranged as a single arc. The first follows Solomon at the height of his power as he sends a general to capture Ashmedai and obtain the shamir worm that will allow the Temple to be built from unhewn stone. The second follows the same king after that work is finished, when Ashmedai turns the royal ring against him and casts him four hundred miles from Jerusalem to wander as a cook in the land of Ammon. Read together, the two stories form a frame around the building of the House, with the demon serving first as captive and then as instrument of correction.

How the shamir came into Solomon's hands

The second story opens with a problem of building law. Iron may not touch the stones of the Temple, so Solomon needs the shamir, a small creature able to split rock without metal. The shamir, he is told, belongs to Ashmedai, king of the demons. Solomon sends his general Ben Aya armed with a chain engraved with the Name, his own seal, wool, and skins of wine. Ben Aya digs a lower well to drain Ashmedai's drinking pool and a higher well that he fills with wine. The demon, finding only wine, drinks until he is overcome, and Ben Aya binds him with the chain and leads him toward Jerusalem.

The march to Jerusalem reads almost as a parable in its own right. Ashmedai uproots a tree, knocks down a house, and hurts himself sooner than disturb the hut of a widow. He helps a blind man and a child along the road. He weeps at a wedding feast and laughs at a man ordering boots meant to last seven years and at a conjuror plying his trade in the street. When at last he stands before Solomon after three days of waiting, he throws a cane four cubits long at the king's feet and says that this is the whole space a man will occupy in death, though now he is not satisfied with the world.

The strange behavior on the road explained

Only after Solomon has the shamir does Ashmedai unravel each gesture. He helped the blind man because the man was pious and would be rewarded for the kindness. He helped the child because the child would grow into a great sinner, and it was better that the boy receive his reward in this life rather than the next. He wept at the feast because the bridegroom would be dead within three days, leaving the bride to wait thirteen years for a young brother-in-law to grow up and fulfill the levirate marriage. He laughed at the boot-maker because the man would not live seven days, let alone seven years, and he laughed at the conjuror who told fortunes for others without knowing that he himself was sitting above a buried treasure.

The shamir itself is obtained by a small piece of trickery. Ashmedai explains that the worm has been entrusted to a particular wild bird. Solomon's messengers cover the bird's nest with a glass bell. The bird brings the shamir and sets it on the glass to split it open, and at the noise of the messengers it drops the worm, which is gathered up and carried to Jerusalem. The Temple rises from stones the worm has shaped, and the chain with the Name remains on Ashmedai's neck while the building goes up.

How the king lost his ring and his throne

The first story, in the order The Exempla sets out, comes after the building is complete. It opens with a flat statement that Solomon is to be punished for transgressing three laws. Ashmedai offers to show him wonderful things and asks for his ring. The king hands it over. The demon throws the ring into the sea, where a fish swallows it, and casts Solomon four hundred miles away. Ashmedai then takes the king's form and sits on the throne in Jerusalem, while Solomon wanders without name or office.

Solomon reaches the city of the king of Ammon and is pressed into service by the head cook, made to carry goods home from the market. One day he prepares a dish so well that the king of Ammon appoints him head cook of the palace. Naamah, the king's daughter, falls in love with him. Her mother rebukes her without effect. Her father, in fury, intends to kill them both but sends them instead into the desert. They reach a town by the sea, where Solomon buys a freshly caught fish. Naamah opens it and finds the ring inside. Solomon recognizes it, returns to Jerusalem, and resumes his throne. He summons the king of Ammon, asks why he killed two innocent people, hears the whole story, and reveals himself. The king and queen of Ammon bless God.

How the tradition has been preserved

The Exempla version belongs to a long line of Solomon-and-Ashmedai material that begins in the Talmud at Gittin 68 and grows through the medieval anthologies. Gaster's 1924 collection draws together exemplum-form retellings that circulated in homiletic Hebrew manuscripts, where each anecdote was kept short, plotted, and ready to be cited from the pulpit. The two stories were paired because the same ring and the same demon appear in both, and because the second story reads as the unwinding of the first. The chain that bound Ashmedai during the building of the Temple is the same chain the sages place on the throne when Solomon returns, and the ring that summoned the shamir is the ring the demon throws into the sea.

What the paired stories carry

The frame puts a sharp boundary around what a king may do with the divine Name. Solomon uses the ring and chain to build the House, and the same instruments fail him when he hands them over without cause. Ashmedai in the first story is a bound prisoner who still sees more than his captor, and in the second he is the king's double who occupies the throne until the sages test his feet and his shoes and force him out. Naamah, the daughter of Ammon, becomes the unlikely hand that opens the fish and restores the ring, and the wandering king takes back his seat only after he has been recognized by a foreign queen. The Exempla keeps both stories close together so that the building of the Temple and the loss of the throne are read in a single breath.