Solomon Lost His Throne to a Demon and Begged for Bread

The Mistake Only the Supremely Confident Make

Solomon needed a single thing from Asmodeus, king of the demons: the location of the shamir worm, the creature that could split stone without iron tools. The Temple had to be built without metal instruments, and the shamir was the only solution the tradition knew. Solomon captured the demon using a chain inscribed with the divine name, extracted the information he needed, and successfully completed the Temple.

Then he kept Asmodeus around.

He wanted to understand the limits of demonic knowledge. He wanted to see what a demon knew that a human did not, and whether wisdom could contain even what wisdom was not supposed to contain. He sat the demon beside him and asked him questions. He tested the edges of his own understanding against the king of the underworld. This is the part of the story the tradition calls his error, not because curiosity is wrong but because Asmodeus was not information. He was a threat with infinite patience.

The Chain Comes Off

The demon waited. When the moment arrived, Asmodeus persuaded Solomon to remove the protective chain briefly, just to demonstrate something, just to show Solomon a point the demon claimed could not be made while Solomon was holding the chain. Solomon removed it.

Asmodeus threw him four hundred miles from Jerusalem. He dropped a convincing double onto the throne and sat back to watch. Bathsheba did not know the difference. The court did not know the difference. Nobody in Jerusalem could tell that the man sitting on the six-stepped throne surrounded by golden lions and eagles was not the king who had built the throne.

Only Solomon, wandering the roads of Ammon with a staff and no identification except his own knowledge of who he was, knew who he was. And nobody believed him.

Three Years of Begging

He went from city to city saying: I, Kohelet, was king over Jerusalem. The tradition records that he was treated as a madman or a fool. The man who had spoken with God twice, who had judged the two mothers with a single threat, who had built the Temple and organized the kingdoms of the earth, was spending three years sleeping in strangers' doorways and working for food. The book of Ecclesiastes, in the rabbinic reading, carries the signature of these years: the meditation on vanity, on the meaninglessness of accumulated achievement, on the fact that everything the builder builds will pass from him. Solomon wrote it from experience.

He met an old man during his wandering who recognized something in him despite the poverty and the confusion, who heard him say he was the king and did not immediately dismiss it. This encounter, preserved in the tradition, is the beginning of his return. The old man's willingness to listen, not to believe necessarily but to hear, gave Solomon enough of a foundation to reconstruct the chain of events that had led him here and to begin working back toward Jerusalem.

The Gate Between Exile and Return

The tradition preserves a further dimension of the exile: Solomon stood at a gate between this world and a higher one, a threshold that opened onto something like paradise, and he understood from that position what his years on the throne had not taught him. The wandering had stripped away the categories he had used to understand himself. On the throne he was the wisest man who ever lived. On the road he was a beggar with an implausible story. The gate showed him that neither description was the full thing.

When he returned to Jerusalem and Asmodeus was expelled, he rebuilt his court. The tradition notes that he slept for the rest of his life with sixty warriors around his bed because of the fear that had entered him during the exile, the fear of the dark, of the night, of what could come for a man while he slept. The terror did not leave when the throne was restored. He had learned something about his own vulnerability that could not be unlearned.