The Demon Who Wanted to be King
Why the Talmud Tells the Story of Asmodeus
A remarkable feature of the Talmud is the speed at which it can switch from one subject to another, even from complex legal arguments to fanciful stories. We can still be grappling in our heads with a problem of analytical logic when we find ourselves seamlessly transported into a mythical world that may or may not appear related to the topic we have been studying. Sometimes the Talmud’s stories offer us good advice or an ethical perspective on the topic, at other times they seem to be little more than fairy tales. Perhaps fairy tales is all they ever were. Or maybe we can no longer appreciate what was in the minds of the people who first told them.
Among the more fanciful of the Talmud’s legends is one about the demon Ashmedai, or Asmodeus as he is known in English. We first hear of him in the Book of Tobit where every time the heroine Sara married, he killed her husband on their wedding night. This happened seven times.
Tobias, the hero of the book, wanted to marry Sara but was afraid that he too would die. The angel Raphael told him that all he had to do was to place the liver of a fish that he had caught onto burning coals, and the angel would take care of the rest. That night, as he and and Sara entered their wedding chamber Tobias placed the fish’s liver onto the coals. Instantly Raphael swept in, scooped up Asmodeus, flew him to the Egyptian desert and tied him up. This, we are led to assume, was the last we would ever hear of Asmodeus. But it wasn’t.
Written in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE, Tobit is one of the books of the Apocrypha, the collection of mainly Hebrew works that form part of the Catholic Bible but are regarded as non-biblical by Protestants and Jews. Asmodeus appears in Tobit with no introduction, suggesting that the original readers of the work already know of him. His name Ashmedai is believed by some scholars to be connected with that of the Persian demon Aeshma. If that is correct then he is likely to have been a character in local folklore, sufficiently well known that no explanation is necessary when he crops up in Tobit.
We hear of Asmodeus a second time in the Testament of Solomon, a fanciful, mystical, 2nd century CE retelling of the stories in the Bible about King Solomon. The author relied on the Book of Tobit for his portrayal of Asmodeus; once again the demon was captured by the angel Raphael after a fish’s liver had been burnt, but this time it was King Solomon who burnt the liver, not Tobit. Asmodeus was just one of several demons who Solomon captured in the Testament, using a sacred ring that the angel Michael had procured for him from heaven.
The Testament of Solomon tells us more than Tobit did about Asmodeus. We learn that he was the son of an angel and a human mother (this tells us, by the way, that angels must be men). He knows the future and he tells Solomon that his kingdom will be divided. “I am the renowned Asmodeus” he brags, “I cause the wickedness of men to spread throughout the world. I am always hatching plots against newlyweds, I mar the beauty of virgins and I cause their hearts to grow cold.” “Is that all you do?” asks Solomon somewhat ingenuously. “No” continues Asmodeus. “I spread madness about women through the stars and I have committed a host of murders”.
Again Solomon asked him if there is anything else about him he should know. Asmodeus, who could never have read Brer Rabbit, said that there was just one more thing. “Please” he begged, “do not expose me to water.” Quick as a flash Solomon placed him in a clay pit, surrounded him with jars of water and ordered him to mould clay for use in building the Temple.
There are many legends about Asmodeus, some more absurd than others. In most of them he is the king of the demons, Many of the legends involve Solomon and it is the connection between King Asmodeus and King Solomon that interests the Talmud.
The Talmud’s story begins when Solomon was building the Temple. He needed to cut the rocks that would form the Temple wall but he could not use metal tools, as metal can be an implement of violence. Solomon was told that the only way to hew the massive stones was to get hold of the Shamir worm, a mystical, magical creation capable of cutting even the hardest of objects. He asked the rabbis how he could get hold of this worm. (Chronology is not the strong point of this story, the first rabbis lived about 1,000 years after Solomon). The rabbis told him to torment a male and female demon in the hope that they would give him the information he needs. Solomon does so but all the demons can advise is that he goes to ask their king, Asmodeus. They tell him that he lives halfway up a mountain, on the edge of a pit of water that he has dug and covered with a magical seal. Every day, they say, he flies up to heaven to study Torah. Solomon should take advantage of his absence to devise a trap for him.
Solomon sent his trusted aide Benayahu ben Yehoiada to capture Asmodeus. Benayahu dug a pit at the bottom of the mountain, to drain all the water out of Asmodeus’s well. Then he dug another pit above the well and filled it with wine. He climbed into a tree and waited. The wine from the upper pit flowed down into Asmodeus’s well. When the demon returned home, he removed his seal from the pit and drank the wine. As soon as he was suitably drunk Benayahu leapt down from the tree, and threw a chain inscribed with the sacred, divine name around the unfortunate demon. Such a chain can never be broken.
The story rambles on until Benayahu and Asmodeus reached Jerusalem. The demon king told Solomon how to get hold of the Shamir worm and the human king got on with building the Temple. He kept Asmodeus close at hand, still wrapped in the sacred chain. Being a wise and inquisitive king, one day he asked Asmodeus what demons can do that humans can’t. “Take your ring off your finger and unchain me” said Asmodeus, “and I will show you.”
Exhibiting the sort of naivety that is only found in ancient legends, Solomon unchained Asmodeus and gave him his sacred ring. Asmodeus swallowed the ring and grew so large that one of his wings reached heaven while the other touched the earth. He picked up Solomon and threw him 400 parasangs (about 1,500 miles).
With Solomon gone, Asmodeus impersonated him and took over the kingdom. Solomon meanwhile wandered the world, lost and homeless. One day he turned up at the door of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court in Jerusalem (again, there is no sense of chronology). He told them that he was the king and of course they didn’t believe him. But he persisted and eventually the rabbis decided to investigate further. They discovered that not only had the person they thought was King Solomon ostracised his trusted aide Benayahu, he was also behaving inappropriately with the women in the harem. “Does he wear socks when he sleeps with you?” they asked. “Yes” replied the women.
That was the moment the rabbis knew that something was wrong. For demons do not have human feet. They have the feet of chickens. Hence the socks.
So the rabbis wrought a new chain, carved the secret divine name on it and gave it to Solomon, together with another sacred ring. When Asmodeus saw Solomon coming, armed with the chain and the ring, he fled. Solomon regained his throne and kingdom and everybody lived happily ever after.
What is the point of this story? It doesn’t seem to be connected to the legal theme that the Talmud is discussing, which is the legal competence of people suffering from an illness-induced, temporary insanity. Rather, it appears to be a long winded commentary on an aspect of the biblical story of King Solomon that is often overlooked. Solomon, in the Bible and later tradition, was extremely wise and phenomenally wealthy. He was the wisest person in the world. But when he grew old he became distracted; he worshiped idolatrous gods and did things that biblical kings are not allowed to do. God told him that as a punishment his kingdom will be divided. But it would not happen in his lifetime because of the merit of Solomon’s father, King David. Instead, the kingdom will be divided during the lifetime of Solomon’s son.
This seems terribly unfair. It goes against the key principle that children are not punished for their parent’s sins. And so the rabbis of the Talmud retrospectively created a punishment for Solomon. They told a story of how he was cast into exile, forced to wander the world while a demonic usurper sat on his throne.
They can justify this through the biblical text. After God told Solomon that his kingdom will be divided he twice ‘raised an enemy’ against him, meaning an invasion of hostile forces. Unusually, the Hebrew word used here for enemy is ‘satan’. The word ‘satan’ in the bible usually means an adversary or opponent, not a military enemy. But by the time of the Talmud the word’s meaning had changed, it now meant an accuser or a tempter. So the phrase ‘raises an enemy’ might be understood, with a bit of interpretative licence, as ‘raising a demon’. And if a demon is to be raised against King Solomon, the wisest of all humans, who else could it be but King Asmodeus, the craftiest of all the demons? Asmodeus didn’t succeed in the end because humans are smarter than demons. But Solomon received his punishment.
Perhaps that is why this lengthy story is in the Talmud. Or perhaps it’s just a fairy tale.