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

Most readers know Solomon as the wise king who built the First Temple in Jerusalem. The cycle preserved in Gittin 68a-b, and gathered for English readers in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, tells a stranger version of the construction story.

The Temple, this tradition says, could not be cut with iron tools. The Torah forbade it (1 Kings 6:7). Stone had to be shaped without metal. So Solomon, faced with an impossible engineering problem, did what an Israelite king is not supposed to do. He sent a soldier to capture the king of the demons and force him to reveal a creature only the demons remembered.

The tale is one of the strangest in the Talmud, and it ends with the king of Israel thrown four hundred miles from his own throne.

The Question Solomon Could Not Solve With Iron

The opening of the cycle shows Solomon asking the rabbis for help. The Torah's command is unambiguous. No iron tool may touch the stones of the altar. How, then, will the Temple be built?

The rabbis remember an insect. They call it the Shameer, a small creature created at the dawn of the world whose powers exceed the hardest substance. The same creature, the rabbis say, was used by Moses to cut the precious stones of the high priest's ephod. If Solomon can find the Shameer, the building can begin.

Solomon asks the obvious question. Where is the Shameer kept? The rabbis confess they do not know. They suggest the king summon a male and a female demon and torture them for the answer. The fact that they suggest this calmly, almost as a procedural step, tells the reader what kind of world the Talmud is describing. Israelite kings have access to demonic intelligence. The Holy One has not closed that door.

Solomon conjures the demons. Solomon tortures them. The demons confess they do not know. There is, they say, only one demon who might know, and his name is Ashmedai, the king of the demons. To find Ashmedai, Solomon must send someone braver than himself.

The Wine-Filled Trap Benaiah Dug

Solomon sends Benaiah son of Jehoiada, the commander of his bodyguard, with two extraordinary objects. A chain inscribed with the Name of God. A signet ring also inscribed with the Name. Benaiah is also given a fleece of wool and skins of wine. The capture scene is one of the great heist set-pieces of rabbinic literature.

Ashmedai keeps a private pit of water on a remote mountain, sealed with his own demonic signet so no other being can drink from it. Benaiah locates the pit, digs another pit just below it, drains the water through a channel, plugs the channel with the fleece, and refills the upper pit with wine. He levels the ground and hides in a tree to watch.

Ashmedai returns. He inspects his seal. Intact. He lifts the stone. Wine. The Talmud lingers on what happens in the demon's mouth. He quotes the Book of Proverbs to himself. Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging. He hesitates. He looks at the wine again. Then, the text says, he drinks. He passes out. Benaiah climbs down from the tree and locks the chain of the Name around Ashmedai's neck.

The detail that sticks is the proverb. The king of the demons, in this story, has memorized Scripture. He warns himself, in the exact words a sage would use, that wine is a trap. And then, like everyone else, he drinks anyway.

The Cock, the Sea-Prince, and the Hidden Custody of the Shamir

Chained, hauled to Jerusalem, kept three days before the king grants him an audience, Ashmedai finally arrives in Solomon's hall. The interview is full of menace. Ashmedai measures four cubits of the floor with his staff and says, When you die, this is all of the world you will possess. And still you conquered the world, and were not satisfied until you had also conquered me.

The king answers calmly. He wants only the Shameer. Ashmedai tells him the custody chain. The Shameer does not belong to the demons. It is held by the Prince of the Sea, who entrusts it to one creature only, the great wild cock, who must swear an oath to return it. The cock uses the Shameer to crack barren mountainsides so that seeds can grow in the cleft. Solomon sends men to the cock's nest, distracts the bird, and steals the worm. The Temple goes up.

The custody chain is itself a small theology. The Shameer is not in any single being's possession. It moves from heaven through the sea to a wild bird to a king. Each holder is sworn to return it. The world's most powerful instrument of stone-cutting, the Talmud is teaching, is held in trust, not in ownership. Even Solomon must steal it for limited use, not keep it.

The Day Ashmedai Threw Solomon Across the World

The cycle does not end with the Temple's dedication. The closing scene tilts toward catastrophe. Solomon, alone in a chamber with the captive Ashmedai, asks a question he should not have asked. What is your superiority over us, exactly?

Ashmedai offers a demonstration. Remove the chain. Hand over the signet ring with the Name. Solomon, possibly drunk on his own victory, complies. Ashmedai swallows Solomon whole, stretches one wing to the heavens and the other to the earth, and vomits the king of Israel out at a distance of four hundred miles. The ring is gone. Ashmedai sits on Solomon's throne. The king of Israel, suddenly nobody, begins wandering.

The Talmud anchors the moment to Ecclesiastes. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? This is my portion of all my labor. Solomon's reflection on emptiness, the rabbis say, is not abstract philosophy. It is the king writing in exile, after his own ring was stolen, after the demonic king had taken his place, after he had learned in his body the limits of royal cleverness.

What the Cycle Was Really Asking

Read together, the four passages refuse to allow the Temple to be remembered as a clean achievement. The Holy House was built with a worm a demon king disclosed to a king of Israel after a chain stamped with the Name was used to subdue him. The wisdom that purchased the Shameer was the wisdom that lost the throne. The same Solomon who outwitted Ashmedai with wine was outwitted by Ashmedai with a question.

The cycle is the rabbis' way of insisting that no human achievement, even one as sacred as the First Temple, is achieved without contact with darker forces. The Shameer cracks stone. The chain of the Name binds Ashmedai. Pride, alone, hands the throne back. And Solomon, looking up at the building from four hundred miles away, writes the book of Ecclesiastes about it.