The Rabbis teach that King Solomon, for all his wisdom, committed three transgressions of kingship that the Torah had warned against. He multiplied horses. He multiplied wives. He amassed silver and gold beyond the limit set for a Jewish monarch (Deuteronomy 17:16–17). God decreed that he would be punished, and the punishment, when it came, was strange and elaborate.
After the building of the Beit Ha-Mikdash in Jerusalem, Ashmedai, king of the demons — whom Solomon had bound into service with the Ineffable Name — promised to show Solomon some wonders if the king would lend him his signet ring, the ring that carried the Name itself. Solomon, in a moment of pride, handed it over. Ashmedai seized the ring, grew to the size of a mountain, flung Solomon four hundred miles across the earth, and took his seat on the throne disguised as Solomon himself.
Solomon woke in a foreign country with nothing. No robe, no ring, no crown. He wandered as a beggar into the city of the king of Ammon, where the head cook of the royal kitchen pressed him into service — first as a load-carrier from the market, then as an assistant in the kitchen. One day Solomon prepared a dish that so delighted the king of Ammon that the exile was appointed head cook of the palace.
Naamah, the daughter of the king of Ammon, fell in love with the new cook. Her mother warned her off. She refused to listen. Her father was furious; he wanted to kill them both, but instead exiled them together into the desert to die. The couple wandered until they reached a town by the sea. Solomon, recognizing that his wife was hungry, bought a single fish that had just been pulled from the water. When Naamah opened it to clean it, she found inside — the signet ring. Solomon's own ring, swallowed by a fish on the other side of the world, carried through currents for years, finally come home.
He put the ring on. Ashmedai, back in Jerusalem, felt the Name return to its true bearer and fled. Solomon and Naamah traveled to Jerusalem. Solomon climbed the throne. He summoned the king of Ammon and asked why he had condemned two innocent people to the desert. The king of Ammon explained. Solomon made himself known. The king and queen of Ammon blessed the God of Israel and returned home.
The story, preserved as exemplum no. 404 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis and appearing in the Talmud (Gittin 68b), is one of the strangest in the whole Solomonic cycle. Its quiet point is about the ring. The Name of God, carried by a man, can be loaned away for a moment — but it will always find its way back to the person to whom it was really given. Solomon lost his throne. He served dishes to a foreign king. He walked through the desert. And then a fish came out of the sea with his ring in its belly. Wisdom and power, the Rabbis are telling us, are not things you hold. They are things that circulate. Sometimes you have to lose them completely to learn that you never really owned them.