148 myths · Page 4 of 5
Every day ten oxen, a hundred sheep, and a bird from Barbary carrying itself to the kitchen. The world came to Solomon unbidden. Then it stopped coming.
The rabbis could not place Solomon in paradise or Gehinnom. They placed him at the gate between them, which is where he had always lived.
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi descended through all seven chambers of Gehinnom and returned. Solomon never went himself, but he sent his workforce there instead.
A demon was draining the life of a child on Solomon's Temple site. Solomon got a ring from the archangel Michael and built his entire workforce from it.
No king who came after Solomon could replicate his throne. The problem was not the gold or the ivory. The throne was built to humble whoever sat on it.
Beyond what the Torah prescribed, Solomon planted golden trees inside the Temple that bore fruit continuously until the day the Babylonians breached the walls.
Jeroboam rebuked King Solomon in public for what looked like apostasy. He was wrong, and the rabbis say the ripple stretched across centuries.
Hiram of Tyre supplied the cedar for Solomon's Temple, then spent centuries building seven false heavens to claim the throne that was not his.
The king who speaks every language hears an ant warn her colony before his army crushes them and learns his glory looks like danger from the ground.
Solomon sees the Angel of Death eyeing his two scribes and sends them to Luz, where death cannot enter. But death is already waiting there.
Solomon finds a silver plate deep in a statue that speaks of Shadad ben Ad, who ruled a thousand thousand kingdoms and vanished at a touch.
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.
Solomon binds Ashmedai with the Ineffable Name to get the shamir. After the Temple is built, Ashmedai borrows the royal ring and throws Solomon into exile.
Rabbi Yosei reads the Song of Songs as a charter protecting the Western Wall, while Solomon's Temple dedication echoes the single voice heard at Sinai.
Devarim Rabbah shows one angel turning a sword to marble at Moses's neck and an unseen scribe standing beside every mouth that defames a neighbor.
Solomon's hidden name means gatherer. He carried a clay jar through Jerusalem collecting one Torah line per sage, one trait per visit, one warning per king.
Most people read Kohelet as world-weary poetry. The rabbis read it as a confession from a king who tried to master every wisdom under heaven and could not stop.
Solomon chased every pleasure under the sun and called it vanity. Kohelet Rabbah says he was waiting for Isaiah to finish the sentence he could not.
God was not strolling through Eden when Adam hid. The rabbis hear the verb differently: flinching, already leaving, the way a guest pulls on a coat.
Before Adam ate, God's voice was quiet. After, it cracked through the trees like thunder. Solomon later needed sixty armed men just to fall asleep.
Solomon read in the stars that his daughter would wed a pauper, so he sealed her in a sea tower, then a great bird carried the very man inside.
A vampire-spirit drinks the life from Solomon's young builder to stall the Temple, until the king turns the night-creature into his own catalog of demons.
Two brothers of Tiberias dream the Angel of Death is coming, so they flee south and dismount in a strange square where he already stands waiting.
A chained Ashmedai read every stranger on the road like a sealed verdict, then clawed a two-headed man out of the ground to outsee a king.
Solomon set Beelzeboul and the powers of darkness to dig his Temple while Benaiah met a queen on the road and shone like the morning star.
A donkey whispers a sly trick to the weary ox, never knowing their master understands the speech of beasts and will turn the scheme back on him.
Each month an official staged races, gilded lions breathing perfume, and a throne that roared, until the wisest king ruled by dazzling the eye.
On the night Solomon weds Pharaoh's daughter, an angel plants a reed in the sea, and the silt that gathers will one day burn Jerusalem.
Solomon mapped the sea and spoke with ants, but four roads left no marker he could follow, and he confessed he was once simple.
Solomon hands a builder a silver goblet that fuses his wife's mouth to her lover's, and a robber on the road exposes a second wife's heart.
