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Why Solomon Had to Trap the King of Demons to Build the Temple

Solomon needs the Shamir worm to cut the Temple stones without iron, so he sends Benaiah to capture Ashmedai king of demons, and later pays a terrible price.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Engineering Problem Only Demons Could Solve
  2. How Benaiah Captured Ashmedai
  3. Solomon Catches the Shamir and Loses His Throne
  4. The Day Ashmedai Threw the King Four Hundred Miles

The Engineering Problem Only Demons Could Solve

Solomon had a building to finish and a law he could not break.

The Torah was explicit: no iron tool could touch the stones of the altar (1 Kings 6:7). Iron was the metal of weapons. The place where God would dwell could not be shaped by the same substance that shaped swords. Every stone for the First Temple had to be cut without a blade, split without a chisel, fitted perfectly without the sound of metal striking rock.

He asked the rabbis. They remembered something. At the dawn of creation, before the world settled into its ordinary rules, a small creature had been made whose power exceeded every substance known to the world. The Shamir. A worm no larger than a grain of barley that could split stone the way a hot blade splits wax. Moses had used it to cut the stones of the high priest's breastplate without metal. Nobody knew where it was now. The last person who had custody of it was the rooster of the hoopoe bird, which meant the last person who had the information was the king of the demons.

How Benaiah Captured Ashmedai

Solomon sent Benaiah, his captain, with specific instructions. Ashmedai came to a certain well on a mountain to drink. Benaiah drained the well and filled it with wine. When the demon king arrived and saw the wine, he knew a trap had been set. He refused to drink. Then thirst overtook reason. He drank. He fell asleep. Benaiah was waiting with a chain engraved with God's name, which was the one restraint Ashmedai could not break, and he bound the demon king while he slept.

The journey back to Jerusalem was a study in the peculiar logic of demon kings. Ashmedai refused to go around anything. He walked in straight lines and knocked over whatever was in his path. A palm tree a widow was weeping over, because a soothsayer had once told her it shaded her house and would outlive her, was torn up by the roots when Ashmedai's straight path intersected it. The logic was his own: a widow weeping for a tree while the king of demons passes is a misallocation of grief.

He saw a wedding procession and wept. He saw a man buying shoes to last him for years and laughed. When asked why, he explained. The groom would be dead within thirty days. The man buying shoes for years had only seven days left. What looked like occasion for joy was grief to the eye that could see ahead. What looked like a foolish purchase was the saddest kind of hope.

Solomon Catches the Shamir and Loses His Throne

When Ashmedai was brought to Solomon, the king kept him restrained and questioned him about the Shamir. The demon told him where to find it: with the Prince of the Sea, who had entrusted it to the wild rooster, who kept it sealed under his wing. A man went and watched the rooster's nest, covered the glass top with a lead sheet, and waited. The rooster returned and, unable to lift the glass to reach the young birds inside, brought the Shamir and placed it on the glass. The watcher shouted. The rooster dropped the Shamir in fright. The man took it. The rooster, according to the Talmud, then killed itself, because the guardian of a sacred trust that has been lost cannot survive the loss.

The Temple was built. The stones were cut with the Shamir, shaped without the sound of iron, fitted with a precision that matched the sanctity of the place.

The Day Ashmedai Threw the King Four Hundred Miles

After the Temple was finished, Ashmedai was still in Solomon's court. The king, who was wiser than any man alive, made the mistake of curiosity. He asked the demon king to show him what his powers actually were. He loosened the chain. Ashmedai grew until he was as tall as both his feet together, one foot planted on earth and one on heaven. He tore the king from his throne and threw him four hundred parasangs, the ancient measure of distance, until Solomon landed in an unknown country without his ring, without his throne, without anyone who knew who he was.

He wandered for years, saying to anyone who would listen that he had been king of Jerusalem, and nobody believed him. He was a beggar with a memory of splendor and no evidence that the memory was real. The ring that bore God's name, which was the source of his authority over the spirits, was gone. Ashmedai wore it on his own finger and sat on the throne, and whoever came to court thought they were speaking with Solomon, because the demon wore the king's face along with the king's ring.

Solomon came back in the end. The ring was recovered. The throne was restored. The Temple stood and would stand for four centuries. But the story the Talmud preserved remembered that the wisest king in Israel's history had touched the edge of demonic power to build the holiest building, and that the edge had touched him back.

GittinTalmudSolomonDemonsTempleAshmedaiShamirHebraic Literature
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From the tradition

Sources

5 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Gittin 68a-bHebraic Literature (1901)

When Solomon set out to build the Temple, he faced a strange obstacle hidden in plain sight in the Torah. Scripture says that "the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither; so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building" (1 Kings 6:7). Iron could not touch the stones of a house meant for peace.

So Solomon asked the Sages: "How shall I shape these stones without iron?" They remembered an ancient creature, one of the ten things created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, the Shameer, a worm no bigger than a grain of barley, whose touch could split the hardest substance on earth. It was the same creature Moses had used to cut the precious stones of the Ephod, the High Priest's breastplate.

Hunting a Worm Through the Demon Kingdom

Where was the Shameer? The Sages told Solomon: summon a male and female demon and interrogate them. He did. They knew nothing, but they knew who would, Ashmedai, king of the demons.

Ashmedai, they reported, lived in a distant mountain. There he had dug a pit, filled it with water, covered it with a stone, and sealed it with his own seal. Every morning he ascended to heaven and studied in the celestial academy of wisdom. Every afternoon he descended and studied in the earthly academy. Then he checked his seal, broke it, drank, resealed the pit, and vanished.

This story, preserved in Gittin 68a-b, pictures Temple-building as an act that reaches down into creation's undergrowth and up into the academies of angels. A tiny worm held in the beak of a moorhen would, in the end, shape the stones that held the Shechinah.

Even Solomon, the wisest king who ever lived, needed the cooperation of worms and demons to build a house for God.

Full source
Gittin 68aHebraic Literature (1901)

When Solomon needed the king of the demons to help build the Temple without iron, he sent his captain Benaiah son of Jehoiada into the wilderness. Benaiah carried two weapons that no demon could resist: a chain and a ring, and upon each was engraved Shem HaMeforash, the Ineffable Name of God.

Benaiah also carried a fleece of wool, some skins, and wine.

He found the pit where Ashmedai, king of the shedim, came each day to drink. Benaiah dug a lower pit, drained off the water, and plugged the channel with the fleece. Then he dug a higher pit and filled it with wine, letting the wine run down into Ashmedai's cistern. He smoothed the ground so the demon would suspect nothing, climbed a tree, and waited.

Ashmedai arrived. He checked his seal, untouched. He lifted the stone. And found wine. He hesitated. "Wine is a mocker; strong drink is raging" (Proverbs 20:1), he muttered. "Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart" (Hosea 4:11).

But he was thirsty. He drank. He drank more. And then the king of the demons lay down in his pit and slept.

Benaiah dropped from the tree and looped the chain around Ashmedai's neck. The demon woke roaring, wrenching at the chain, until he saw the Name engraved in the iron. At that he went quiet. The Name of God holds even the strong (Gittin 68a).

The lesson is not that demons can be outsmarted. It is that a holy Name, spoken rightly, binds even what seems unbindable.

Full source
Gittin 68a-bHebraic Literature (1901)

King Solomon needed the Shamir, a creature no larger than a barley grain but strong enough to split any stone, because the Torah forbade iron tools on the Temple's stones. To find it, he had to capture Ashmedai, king of the demons.

Three days after Ashmedai was brought in chains to Jerusalem, he was led before the king. The demon measured off four cubits on the floor with his staff and said, "When you die, Solomon, you will possess in this world no more than these four cubits of earth. You have conquered the world and were not satisfied until you conquered me as well."

Solomon answered him quietly. "I want nothing from you. I wish only to build the Temple, and I need the Shamir."

Ashmedai shrugged. "The Shamir is not in my charge. It is entrusted to the Prince of the Sea, who entrusts it only to the great wild cock, and even then only under oath that the bird will return it."

"And what does the wild cock do with it?" Solomon asked.

"He carries it to a barren mountain," the demon replied, "splits the rock with it, and drops seeds of trees and plants into the cleft. That is how desolate places become green and fit for habitation." This, the sages explain, is the same nagger tura, the mountain splitter, named among the creatures of Leviticus 11 and rendered so in the Targum.

Even demons, in Solomon's court, served a sanctuary built without the sound of iron.

Full source
Gittin 68bHebraic Literature (1901)

Once Solomon had chained the demon king Ashmedai, he held him captive until the Temple was completed. When the work was done, the king grew curious. "What is your superiority over us," he asked, "if it is true, as it is written (Numbers 23:22), that God has the strength of a wild ox, which tradition says means ministering angels and demons alike?"

Ashmedai smiled the smile of one who knows he is about to be released. "Take this chain from my neck," he said, "and give me your signet ring, and I will show you." Solomon, to his sorrow, obeyed. No sooner did the demon have the ring than he seized the king, swallowed him, stretched out one wing touching heaven and the other the earth, and vomited Solomon forth four hundred miles away.

Stripped of his throne, Solomon wandered from door to door. Rav and Samuel disagreed about what he carried, one said his staff, the other said his water-jug. Wherever he came he declared (Ecclesiastes 1:12), I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem, and people laughed at him. Of this time he wrote (Ecclesiastes 1:3; 2:10), What profit hath a man of all his labor?

The Talmud (Gittin 68b) tells this story as a parable of pride. Solomon had conquered a demon, built a Temple, and held every secret of creation in his hand. And one moment's curiosity about evil sent him begging. Only when the Sanhedrin recognized him and restored him to his throne did he learn that even the wisest man's kingdom is held by a thread.

Full source
Jewish Fairy Stories, King Solomon and the WormJewish Fairy Stories (Friedlander, 1920)

Solomon wanted to build a Temple without lifting a single iron tool against the stone. He had read the warning himself: if you raise your blade upon the altar, you defile it (Exodus 20:25). Iron was the metal of swords, of war, of death. The house of God would rise without it.

One problem. How do you cut a mountain of stone with no blade?

His wisest counselor leaned in with an answer the Babylonian Talmud preserves in tractate Gittin. There is a creature, he said, no bigger than a grain of barley, born in the twilight of the first Sabbath eve. The Shamir. It splits the hardest rock at a touch, and iron shatters in its presence. But no human knows where it hides. For that, you must command the demons.

Solomon turned the ring on his hand, the one engraved with the Holy Name, and a demon appeared trembling. Even the demon did not know. Only Ashmedai, king of the spirits, kept that secret, asleep each night atop a far mountain beside a sealed well.

So Solomon sent Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, with a golden chain bearing the Divine Name. Benaiah drained Ashmedai's well and refilled it with wine. The demon king drank, staggered, and dropped into sleep, and Benaiah locked the chain around his neck.

On the road home, Ashmedai wept at a wedding because the groom would die in three days. He laughed at a man ordering shoes to last seven years, knowing the man had a week to live. Demons, he said, judge things by their true worth, not their appearance.

The Shamir, he finally admitted, was guarded by a wild bird on a lonely peak. Benaiah trapped the nest under glass. The desperate bird fetched the worm to cut through, and Benaiah snatched it. With that tiny worm, Solomon raised the Temple, and the Shamir vanished from the world.

Full source