Solomon Forced Demons to Build the Temple

Solomon sat on his throne with a ring on his finger and a demon kneeling in front of him, and he opened his interrogation with the simplest possible question: what is your name.

The demon said Beelzeboul. Prince of the spirits of the air. The most powerful of the aerial demons, whose throne was set at the pinnacle of the sky and who claimed authority over all who fell beneath him. Solomon pointed to the floor. Beelzeboul came down.

The Ring Came Down From Michael

Before the Temple could be built, a boy on the construction site began to waste away. A demon named Ornias was coming every night and draining him. Solomon prayed, and the archangel Michael brought him a signet ring sealed with the divine name. With the ring, Solomon could summon any spirit, bind it, question it, and put it to work. He started with Ornias, then worked his way up the hierarchy until he had Beelzeboul himself standing before the throne.

What Solomon got from Beelzeboul was not labor. Not immediately. He got information. He pressed the demon to describe the workings of heaven. Beelzeboul leaned forward. If you burn gum, incense, and sea-bulbs with nard and saffron, and light seven lamps in a row at dawn, you will see the heavenly dragons coiling along the sky and dragging the chariot of the sun. Solomon cut him off. Be silent. Go saw the marble. The information was noted and set aside. The work came first.

Thirty-Six Spirits and the Manual of Their Undoing

After Beelzeboul, they came one by one. The parade of demons before Solomon's throne described in the Testament of Solomon, a Jewish pseudepigraphical text with layers stretching from the first through fifth centuries CE, reads like the construction of a field manual. Thirty-six spirits of the zodiac, each with its own domain, each compelled to name itself, to describe the affliction it causes, and to reveal the angelic name that cancels it.

Metathiax: kidney pain. Banished by the angel Adonael. Katanikotael: strife in households, hard temper, domestic fury. Write the name of his opposing angel on seven laurel leaves, wash them in water, sprinkle from inside the house outward. Saphathorael: partisan drunkenness. Write six angelic names on a piece of paper, fold it, and wear it against the chest.

Thirty-six confessions. Thirty-six prescriptions. Solomon recorded every one.

The last of the thirty-six was Bianakith. He laid waste to houses. He caused flesh to decay. His countermeasure was simple: write certain holy names on the front door. He would flee from any home marked that way.

Solomon glorified the God of heaven and earth. Then he put the full court to work.

The Temple Rose From Forced Confessions

Some demons were set to fetch water. Some he locked in prisons. Some he ordered to work with fire, smelting the gold and silver that would line the walls of the sanctuary. Others cut the marble blocks in the quarry outside the city. The labor that usually required an army of conscripts, tens of thousands of men working in rotating shifts across years, was augmented by a workforce that did not tire, did not eat, and had no choice.

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's early twentieth-century synthesis of rabbinic and pseudepigraphical legend, carries this tradition forward from an angle that focuses on the angelic command structure above the demons. The demons were not working only under the seal of Solomon's ring. There were angelic overseers above them, assigned to ensure that the work of God's house was not sabotaged by the same workforce doing the building. The Temple rose clean despite the hands that cut its stones.

The Fall That Ended the Power

It ended the way every acquisition of extraordinary power ends in Jewish literature. Not with a battle. With a woman.

Solomon's wives brought their gods with them. The Shunamite woman, a foreign queen he loved, made a request. Her god needed a lamp lit. Could he do that for her? Could he just kneel down, just this once. He knelt. The ring did not leave his finger, but the power that had animated it drained out through the compromise. The name he had used to bind a hundred demons could no longer bind anything. He picked up a locust to test it. He spoke over the locust with the formula that had commanded Beelzeboul. The locust jumped away.

The Temple was already finished. The demons were already locked away. Jerusalem had already rejoiced and the kings of the earth had already come from the ends of the world to see what Solomon had built. But the wisdom itself, the specific channel through which God's authority had run into Solomon's hand, was gone. What remained was ordinary intelligence. Remarkable, but human. The Temple stood. The king who built it was less than he had been.