When Asmodeus Wore Solomon's Face and No One Knew

Among all the demons that Solomon called before his tribunal during the construction of the Temple, one stands apart from the rest in the Ginzberg legends. A demon came forward that had all the limbs of a man but no head. It introduced itself as Envy. Its purpose, it said, was to devour heads, because it desired above all things to have a head, and specifically it wanted Solomon's head. The demon did not pretend otherwise. It was a headless spirit powered entirely by the desire for something it could not possess, and it said so plainly when asked.

Solomon processed this information, sentenced the demon to labor, and continued hearing cases. He was very good at this. The Temple grew. Thirty-six world-rulers of darkness came before him and were assigned to carry water. Female and male demons appeared in succession and were variously imprisoned, put to work wrestling with fire in the making of gold and silver, or set to preparing places where other demons could be confined. A spirit named Rabdos appeared and showed Solomon a green stone useful for adorning the Temple's walls. The interrogation of the headless demon was simply one episode in a long and relentless judicial workday.

But the tradition did not record that session without intention. Envy was present in the court, named and catalogued and assigned, and then something happened to Solomon that looked very much like Envy's revenge.

Solomon had married foreign wives. He had violated three commandments that the Torah applies specifically to kings: do not multiply wives, do not multiply horses, do not multiply gold and silver. He had done all three, and had whispered to himself that he could do these things without sinning, that the commandments applied to ordinary kings but surely not to him. The Talmudic midrash on Ecclesiastes in the Midrash Rabbah collection records the heavenly response: the attribute of justice presented these three violations formally, and God told Solomon to descend from the throne.

An angel came down wearing Solomon's face and sat on the throne. Asmodeus, the king of demons, whom Solomon had captured and chained and used as a servant, was now free and wearing the king's likeness. Solomon himself was cast out. He wandered through Jerusalem with a staff, stopping at synagogues and study houses, telling anyone who would listen that he was Kohelet, that he had been king over Israel in Jerusalem. People struck him with reeds. They put a bowl of grits in front of him. They thought he was a lunatic who had fixed on a royal delusion.

He arrived eventually at the kingdom of Ammon. The king there had banished a cook and the cook's wife under circumstances that Solomon, in his former life, had formally investigated. In the account of his restoration, Solomon appears before the king of Ammon as a beggar and is recognized by the queen, who turns out to be his own daughter, whom he had not seen since his fall. The scene is brief and strange. The reunion of a wandering beggar-king and his daughter in the court of the nation he once judged from his throne in Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, meanwhile, the Sanhedrin had begun to notice that something was wrong with the figure sitting on Solomon's throne. Benaiah son of Jehoiada, the man who had originally captured Asmodeus, had not been admitted to the king's presence in a very long time. This was unusual. Solomon's wives and his mother Bathsheba reported that the king's behavior had changed entirely, that it was not befitting royalty, that it bore no resemblance to how Solomon had previously conducted himself. Most tellingly: the figure on the throne never allowed his foot to be seen. He kept his feet always hidden. A demon cannot fully disguise the marks of its demonic nature, and the feet were apparently where the disguise failed.

The Sanhedrin gave Solomon's magic ring to the wandering beggar who kept insisting he was the real king. They arranged for the beggar to appear before the pretender on the throne. The moment the true Solomon, protected now by the ring with God's Name inscribed on it, came into the throne room, Asmodeus fled. He could not stand before the ring. He flew away and was gone.

Solomon recovered his throne. He wrote, or had attributed to him, Ecclesiastes, the book of a man who had possessed everything and then held it like vapor. He wrote: I am a greater fool than a man. The tradition understood this as a reference to Noah, who was cursed through wine, and to Adam, whose single act cost the world its original condition. Solomon placed himself third in that line. The headless demon made of Envy had named what it wanted. It got something like it: not Solomon's head, but Solomon's crown, for a long season of wandering and bowls of grits and being struck with reeds in the streets of his own city.