Michael Gave Solomon a Ring That Could Bind Every Demon on Earth

A demon was feeding on a child. That is how the Testament of Solomon opens. Not with throne rooms or wisdom contests or visits from the queen of Sheba. With a sick boy on a building site.

Every evening, after the laborers who were building the Temple in Jerusalem finished their work for the day, a spirit called Ornias descended on the boy who served the master craftsman. The demon stole half the child's wages. Half his food. And then, and this is the detail that tells you the Testament of Solomon is not interested in writing a children's tale, Ornias seized the boy's right hand and sucked his thumb. Night after night the demon drained the life out of him through the soft pad of a thumb. The child grew thin. He lost weight. He stopped laughing. He was wasting away in plain view on the most sacred construction project in Jewish history, and nobody knew why.

The Testament of Solomon is a Jewish pseudepigraphal text composed most likely in Greek somewhere between the first and third centuries CE, in the twilight of the Second Temple world and the early rabbinic period. It is one of the only surviving ancient Jewish works written in the voice of King Solomon himself, and its opening premise is that Solomon's legendary wisdom and the legendary construction of the Temple were the same project. The Temple got built, the book says, because the king found a way to put demons on the labor crew.

Solomon loved this particular boy more than any of the other artisans. He could not stop noticing that the child was fading. One evening he pulled the boy aside and asked him plainly. Do I not pay you double wages? Do I not give you double portions of food? Why do you grow weaker with each passing hour? The boy fell to his knees and confessed. A demon, he said. A demon comes to me at sunset. He takes half of everything and drinks my life through my thumb.

Solomon went into the unfinished Temple and prayed. He prayed with his whole soul, night and day, begging the Almighty for authority over this specific demon and over every spirit of its kind. The Testament does not give us the length of the prayer. It only says that heaven answered.

The archangel Michael descended. He carried a small ring. On the ring was engraved a single seal, and the seal was the sign of God's dominion over every spirit in the universe. Take this, Solomon son of David, Michael said. The Lord God, the Most High, has sent you this gift. With it you shall bind every demon on earth, male and female, and with their forced labor you shall build Jerusalem.

A ring that binds demons. The Testament of Solomon is the earliest surviving text to give this object a shape, though the tradition of Solomon as a master of spirits is much older. The Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, written in the late first century CE, already mentions that Solomon composed incantations and exorcistic formulas that were being used by Jewish practitioners in Josephus's own day. Josephus describes a contemporary of his, a Jewish healer named Eleazar, performing an exorcism in front of the Roman emperor Vespasian by pulling a demon out of a possessed man's nose through a ring that had a root of Solomon hidden beneath its seal. That was written around 93 CE. The Testament of Solomon pushes the origin of that ring backward, all the way to the archangel Michael handing it directly to the king in the half-built Temple.

Solomon gave the ring to the boy. He said almost nothing to him, only the instructions a commander gives a soldier before a first battle. When the demon comes tonight, throw this ring at his chest and say these words: In the name of God, King Solomon calls you. Then run to me. Do not be afraid of anything you hear behind you.

At the customary hour, at sunset, Ornias arrived like a burning fire to take his nightly meal. The boy threw the ring at the demon's chest and shouted the words. The seal struck Ornias and stuck to him like a brand. Ornias shrieked. He begged. He tried to bribe the child. Take this ring off me and I will give you all the gold of the earth. Only do not lead me to Solomon. But the boy had been told not to listen to anything he heard. He ran. The demon stumbled behind him, bound by the seal, dragging himself up the street toward the throne of the wisest king who ever lived (1 Kings 6:1).

Ornias was the first. He was not the last. The Testament of Solomon turns into a kind of interrogation log. Solomon uses the ring to bind demon after demon. He asks each one its name, its territory, its weakness, the name of the angel who has authority over it. The book preserves the whole taxonomy. Beelzeboul, prince of the demons. Asmodeus, who spoils the sex lives of newlywed couples. Obyzouth, who kills infants in the womb. Lix Tetrax, the demon of dust storms. Each is catalogued, each is forced to speak its true name, and each is set to work hauling stones up the slope toward the Temple Mount. The wisdom of Solomon that the Hebrew Bible celebrates at length in (1 Kings 4:29-34) is, in the Testament of Solomon, a wisdom specifically about how to cross-examine a spirit until it surrenders.

The later Kabbalists of Castile and Safed inherited this tradition and spent centuries refining it. The medieval book called Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, whose printed edition appeared in Amsterdam in 1701 CE, drew on earlier Jewish magical traditions that ran through the apocryphal stream. The Testament of Solomon is the head of a very long river. And the source of the river is a thin child with a stolen thumb, praying silently for help while his king prayed aloud in the unfinished Temple.

Solomon ended up with a ring that could bind every demon on earth. The boy who served the master craftsman ended up with his color back. One of them got a legend. The other one got to eat his full portion of bread at the end of the day and walk home on his own feet. The Testament of Solomon never tells us which of the two the archangel Michael was really sent for.