Solomon

Solomon is, in the biblical account, the son of David and Bathsheba and the third king of a united Israel, whose reign in the tenth century BCE is portrayed as the kingdom's golden age of peace, wealth and empire. He is remembered above all for two things: for wisdom, granted at his request in a dream and displayed in the famous judgment between two women claiming one child; and for building the first Temple in Jerusalem, the house of God at the centre of Israelite worship.

The books of Kings and Chronicles describe a magnificent court, vast building works, a fleet and international trade, and the visit of the Queen of Sheba, drawn by his fame. They also record his fall: many foreign wives, the toleration and building of shrines to their gods, and, as a consequence, the divine sentence that the kingdom would be torn apart, which it is, splitting after his death into Israel and Judah.

The historical Solomon is harder to reach. No contemporary inscription names him, and archaeologists dispute how far the grand united monarchy of the biblical text corresponds to the more modest realities on the ground in tenth-century Jerusalem. The debate remains open; what is not in doubt is the enormous later importance of the figure the text created.

Solomon's reputation for wisdom made his name a magnet for a whole tradition of writing. Biblical and later books were attributed to him, the book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (whose narrator presents himself as a king in Jerusalem), and the Song of Songs, as well as, in the Greek scriptures, the Wisdom of Solomon, and among the pseudepigrapha the Psalms and Odes and Testament of Solomon.

Modern scholarship regards these attributions as largely pseudonymous: the ascription to Solomon is a literary convention that lends the authority of the wise king to works composed, in several cases, centuries after him. Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon in particular are dated by their language and thought to the later Second Temple period.

The effect was to make Solomon a byword for wisdom across Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and to gather under his name a body of reflection on justice, mortality, love and the limits of human knowledge far larger than any single reign could have produced. In this sense the literary Solomon outgrew the king: he became the patron figure of the entire biblical wisdom tradition, invoked wherever the scriptures turn from law and narrative to the counsel of experience.

A third Solomon, distinct from both the king and the sage, grew in legend: Solomon the master of hidden powers. Its roots lie partly in the biblical wisdom over nature, Solomon is said to have spoken of trees and beasts and birds, and it flowered in post-biblical Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition into the figure of a ruler who commanded spirits.

In Islam, Sulayman is a prophet and king to whom God gave dominion over the jinn, the wind, and the speech of animals, together with a signet ring by which he ruled them; the Qur'an tells of his hoopoe messenger and the throne of the Queen of Sheba (Bilqis), and warns against the sorcery falsely attributed to him. Jewish legend elaborated his mastery of demons through a magic ring bearing the divine name, the Seal of Solomon.

From this soil grew a long tradition of Western magical texts fathered upon him, the Testament of Solomon, and the medieval and early-modern grimoires such as the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key with its catalogue of spirits bound by the wise king. These works are the products of the traditions that produced them, not of Solomon, but they show how completely his name came to stand for the command of the unseen, a legacy this atlas also traces through its entries on the grimoires and the seal.