The Testament of Solomon, Explained

The Testament of Solomon is an ancient Greek text, written sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, in which King Solomon receives a magical ring from the archangel Michael and uses it to summon, interrogate, and enslave demons to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Part story and part demonology catalog, it is the ancestor of virtually every later legend of Solomon the magician — from the jinn-commanding king of Islamic folklore to the medieval grimoires that bear his name. It was never part of any Bible, but few books did more to shape how the ancient and medieval worlds imagined demons, disease, and protection against both.

It is also one of the strangest, most entertaining texts to survive from antiquity: demons hauled before a king one by one, forced to state their names, crimes, and weaknesses, then put to work hauling stone. This guide covers what the book is, what happens in it, who wrote it and when, why it never came near the biblical canon, and how it fathered a thousand years of magical tradition.

What Is the Testament of Solomon?

The book presents itself as Solomon's last testament — a first-person deathbed account of how he built the Temple with the forced labor of demons and how his own reign ended in failure. The "testament" framing places it in a recognized ancient genre: a revered figure looks back over his life and leaves a warning for those who come after.

But the narrative is really a frame around something more practical. The core of the book is a catalog. Demon after demon appears before Solomon and answers the same set of questions: What is your name? What do you do to people? Which star do you belong to? And — the crucial one — which angel has the power to thwart you? The answers read like entries in a reference manual, because that is very likely what they were: the working knowledge of ancient exorcists and amulet-makers, for whom defeating a demon meant knowing its name and the name of the angel that overpowers it. The honest description is a hybrid — one part folktale, one part demonological encyclopedia, one part ancient medical handbook, with a moral sting in its tail.

The Story: A Demon, a Boy, and a Ring from Heaven

The Temple is under construction, and Solomon notices that the young son of his master workman — a boy he is fond of — is wasting away. Questioned, the boy reveals that every evening a demon named Ornias appears, takes half his wages and half his food, and sucks the thumb of his right hand, draining his life.

Solomon prays in the Temple for power over the demon. In answer, the archangel Michael brings him a ring set with an engraved stone, with the promise that it will give him authority to imprison every demon, male and female, and to build Jerusalem with their labor. Solomon hands the ring to the boy: when the demon appears, fling it at his chest and order him to the king.

It works. Ornias — thwarted, he admits, by the archangel Uriel — is dragged before Solomon, sealed, and put to work cutting stone. Then the king does something audacious: he sends Ornias out with the ring to fetch his boss. The demon flings the ring at Beelzeboul, the prince of demons, and brings him in — and with the prince compelled to summon his subordinates, the great parade of the Testament begins.

The Demon Interviews: Name, Crimes, and the Angel That Thwarts You

What follows is the heart of the book: a series of interrogations, each following the same fixed pattern. The demon appears, often in a monstrous or hybrid form. Solomon demands its name, its activity, its star, and the angel that frustrates it. Then he seals it with the ring and sentences it to labor on the Temple. The structure is so consistent that scholars read it as an index of ritual power — know the demon, know its angel, and you hold the cure.

The roster is vivid:

• Beelzeboul, prince of demons, claims an exalted origin: "I was the first angel in the first heaven." He boasts of destroying kings through tyrants, stirring up wars and murders, and inciting people to worship demons. Solomon sets the prince of demons to sawing blocks of Theban marble.
• Onoskelis, a beautiful female spirit with the legs of a mule, who strangles men and haunts caves and ravines — sentenced to spin the hemp for the Temple's ropes.
• Asmodeus, born, he says, of a human mother and an angel father, whose business is wrecking marriages: plotting against newlyweds and driving spouses into madness. He is thwarted by the archangel Raphael — and, he grudgingly admits, by the smoking liver and gall of a certain fish. Readers of the Book of Tobit will recognize him instantly: this is the same demon who kills Sarah's seven bridegrooms there, and the fish-liver remedy is exactly how Raphael defeats him in that book. Solomon has him hemmed in with jars of water, which sap his strength.
• Lix Tetrax, the demon of the wind, who whips up dust storms and fires — put to work hurling stones up to the heights for the builders.
• A headless demon who calls himself Murder.
• Obizuth, a wild-haired female demon who confesses she prowls at night to strangle newborn children. Solomon has her hung up by her hair before the Temple as a public warning.
• Abezethibou, a one-winged demon who claims he stood with Pharaoh's magicians against Moses — and has been trapped under a pillar in the Red Sea ever since the waters closed.

Along the way come seven female spirits personifying deception, strife, and distress; a three-headed dragon; a lion-shaped spirit commanding legions; and more. The demons complain, bargain, flatter, and mock; some lie until the seal forces the truth out. It is genuinely lively reading — antiquity's answer to a police procedural, with the king as interrogator.

The Thirty-Six Decans: Demons of Disease

The longest chapter brings in thirty-six spirits at once: the decans, spirit-rulers of the thirty-six ten-degree segments of the zodiac, a scheme borrowed from Egyptian astrology. Each steps forward, names itself, and states the ailment it causes — headaches, sore throats, fevers, convulsions, colic, insomnia — and each names the angel, or in some cases the exact spoken formula, that drives it away.

This is ancient medicine encoded as demonology: a diagnostic table pairing every complaint with its remedy. Tellingly, the oldest surviving physical witness to the Testament — a papyrus fragment from around the fifth or sixth century AD — preserves precisely this material. People were not copying the Testament as literature; they were using it.

The Demon of the Cornerstone — and Solomon's Fall

The final movement ranges beyond Jerusalem. The king of Arabia writes begging for help: a murderous wind demon is suffocating his land. Solomon sends a servant boy with the ring and a leather flask, and by holding the sealed flask against the gale, the boy traps the demon — Ephippas — inside it like wind in a bottle. The image of a demon imprisoned in a sealed vessel will echo through folklore for the next two thousand years.

Back in Jerusalem, Ephippas lifts an enormous stone that all the workmen together could not move and sets it at the head of the corner of the Temple — a scene that plays deliberately on the famous psalm line about a rejected stone becoming the cornerstone. Then he and the Red Sea demon Abezethibou raise a colossal column and are condemned to hold it in the air until the end of days.

And then the story turns. Solomon, at the height of his power, falls in love with a foreign woman, and her priests set a price: a token sacrifice to their gods. Solomon crushes five locusts in his hand in the name of Moloch — a small gesture, and everything is lost. The spirit of God departs, his wisdom deserts him, and he ends his days building shrines to idols. The Testament closes as a confession: the man who bound every demon was undone by an ordinary temptation, and he writes it down as a warning. Whatever else the book is, its frame is a moral one.

Solomon's Ring in Later Folklore: The Seal of Solomon

The Testament did not invent Solomon's reputation for esoteric mastery — 1 Kings already credits him with encyclopedic wisdom, the historian Josephus, writing around 93 AD, describes a Jewish exorcist casting out a demon before the emperor Vespasian with a ring and incantations attributed to Solomon, and an exorcism scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls appears to invoke Solomon's name against demons. The Testament is simply the fullest early telling of a legend already in the air.

But it is from this stream of tradition that the "Seal of Solomon" flows outward:

• Byzantine amulets from late antiquity show a holy rider spearing a female demon, frequently inscribed "Seal of Solomon" — wearable protection straight out of the Testament's worldview.
• Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia (roughly the 5th–7th centuries AD) invoke the seal-ring of King Solomon to bind demons away from households.
• Islamic tradition remembers Solomon as a prophet-king to whom God subjected the winds and the jinn — and later Arabic storytelling gave us the jinni sealed in a brass bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, the setup of the famous fisherman's tale in the Thousand and One Nights.
• The star itself — the five-pointed pentalpha or six-pointed hexagram associated with the seal — is later tradition. The Testament says only that the ring bore an engraved stone; the geometry came afterward.

Who Actually Wrote the Testament of Solomon — and When?

Not Solomon. The historical king reigned in the 10th century BC; the Testament is written in Greek and presupposes a world of Greco-Egyptian astrology, developed angelology, and — in several passages — Christianity. Like many ancient texts written under a famous name, it belongs to the pseudepigrapha: attaching Solomon's name to a demonology manual was a way of claiming his legendary authority for it.

Most scholars, following the 1922 critical edition of Chester McCown, date the work between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, with some arguing for a later final redaction. Many see a Jewish core from around the 1st century — its demonology matches the world of the Gospels, where Beelzebul is already the prince of demons — reworked by Christian editors, whose hand shows in passages where demons confess they will be undone by Emmanouel or by a savior born of a virgin. The earliest fragment dates from around the 5th–6th century; the complete manuscripts are medieval. It is a layered text that grew in the copying — exactly what you would expect of a working manual.

Why Isn't the Testament of Solomon in the Bible?

Because it was never a candidate. This is a different situation from books like Tobit or the other Apocrypha, which appear in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. The Testament of Solomon was never part of the Hebrew Bible — it was composed in Greek roughly a millennium after Solomon — and it never appears on any Christian canon list, Eastern or Western. No council debated it; no church father argued for it.

The reasons are straightforward when framed historically. The criteria that shaped the canon — genuine antiquity, prophetic or apostolic origin, established use in public worship — all cut against it: it was recent, pseudonymous, and read for protection rather than proclamation. And it belonged to a category the early church explicitly kept at arm's length: books of ritual power. The New Testament itself records new converts at Ephesus burning their magic books, which captures the era's attitude — demon-binding manuals were the competition, not Scripture. The Testament circulated for centuries anyway, precisely because it was useful; it simply circulated as folklore and practical lore, alongside the many other lost books of the Bible's wider world, rather than as canon.

How It Shaped Magic and Folklore for Centuries

Measured by influence per page, the Testament of Solomon punches absurdly above its weight. Its central premises — that demons have names, that naming them gives power over them, that each is checked by a specific angel, and that Solomon mastered them all with a seal — became the operating system of Western magical literature.

• In Byzantium, a Greek handbook known as the Hygromanteia, or Magical Treatise of Solomon, carried the tradition through the Middle Ages.
• From it descended the Latin Key of Solomon, the most copied grimoire of Renaissance Europe.
• The 17th-century Lesser Key of Solomon includes the famous Ars Goetia: a catalog of 72 demons, each with its name, rank, powers, and constraining seal — demons Solomon is said to have shut inside a brass vessel. That is the Testament's premise, industrialized.
• Even now, the standard furniture of exorcism and demon-binding stories — the ring, the seal, the demon compelled to state its name — traces back through this lineage.

Historians value it for a quieter reason too: it is a rare window into how ordinary people in the Roman world experienced illness and misfortune — as the work of nameable spirits — and how Jewish, Greek, Egyptian, and Christian ideas blended in everyday practice.

Should You Read the Testament of Solomon?

Yes — easily. It is short (an evening's read), episodic, and far more entertaining than its reputation as an obscure pseudepigraphon suggests: demons wisecrack, bargain, and complain about their work assignments, and the ending lands with genuine moral weight. Readers interested in the Bible's wider world get the fullest ancient picture of the demonology the Gospels assume; readers of folklore and fantasy get the taproot of a thousand stories about sealed jinn, true names, and magic rings.

It also connects outward. Read the Book of Tobit alongside it to meet Asmodeus in his earlier role, and note the family resemblance to the Book of Enoch: when Asmodeus claims descent from an angel and a human mother, he is speaking the language of the Watchers tradition — the fallen angels whose offspring haunted Jewish imagination for centuries. Read it as ancient religious literature and cultural history, not doctrine, and it is one of the most rewarding short texts the ancient world left behind.