The Seal of Solomon: the king's ring in the Bible, Talmud and Qur'an
The legend of Solomon's ring: Josephus, the Testament of Solomon, the Talmud, the Islamic tradition and the uncertainty between hexagram and pentagram.
Few kings of antiquity have enjoyed a second, legendary life comparable to Solomon's. The Bible presents him as the wise ruler who built the Temple in Jerusalem and composed proverbs and songs. Later traditions, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, also made him a master of spirits, thanks to a wondrous object: a ring bearing a seal, which according to the story had been given to him from heaven.
From the Bible to Josephus
The First Book of Kings credits Solomon with immense wisdom and a knowledge of nature that embraced trees, beasts, birds and fishes. In the first century the historian Flavius Josephus, in his Jewish Antiquities, adds that the king had composed formulas against demons. He also tells of a certain Eleazar who, in the presence of Vespasian, is said to have freed a possessed man by means of a ring and a root prescribed by Solomon.
The fullest account is found in the Testament of Solomon, a Greek text whose date is much debated, placed by scholars anywhere between the first centuries of the Christian era and the Byzantine Middle Ages. It tells how the archangel Michael gave the king an engraved ring, with which Solomon compelled the demons to work on the building of the Temple. Each demon reveals its name, the harm it causes and the angel who defeats it.
The ring in the Jewish and Islamic traditions
The Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Gittin, tells the story of the demon king Ashmedai, captured with a chain and a ring engraved with the divine name. Through him Solomon obtained the shamir, the mysterious creature able to cut stone without iron tools, needed to build the Temple. The story ends with the king's temporary fall, deprived of the ring and forced to wander in exile.
The Qur'an remembers Solomon, Sulaymān, as a prophet to whom God subjected the winds and the jinn. The ring does not appear in the sacred text, but it is very present in later literature, in the tales of the prophets and in the Thousand and One Nights, where a jinni lies imprisoned for centuries in a jar closed with the king's seal. In the Islamic world the expression “Seal of Solomon” often refers to the six-pointed star, depicted on coins, ceramics and doors.
Hexagram or pentagram?
The sources do not agree on the shape of the seal. In the Islamic world and in part of the Jewish world the hexagram prevailed, the star formed by two interlaced triangles, which only in modern times became the symbol known as the Star of David. In medieval Europe, by contrast, “Solomon's seal” could also mean the pentagram, as shown by the English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed in the late fourteenth century.
The name even passed into botany. In many European languages a plant of the genus Polygonatum is called Solomon's seal, after the round scars left on the rhizome by the stems of previous years, which recall the impression of a stamp. It is a small sign of how deeply the legend was rooted in the common imagination, to the point of naming a natural object.
The Seal of Solomon is, in short, a symbol without a single original. Each tradition imagined it differently, and this very variety made it so enduring. In the magical books of the Renaissance, such as the Clavicula, the king's name became a guarantee of antiquity and authority, but the roots of the legend lie in far older stories that belong to the religious history of the Near East.