Asmodeus- Hebrew/Jewish DemonDemon"King of Demons"

The Seven Husbands

Sarah, daughter of Raguel, had been married seven times. Each husband died on the wedding night before the marriage could be consummated, killed by Asmodeus, the demon who desired Sarah for himself. Her maidservants mocked her as a husband-killer. The Book of Tobit records that the reproach drove her to pray for death.

When the young Tobias came to claim her as his bride by kinship law, Sarah's father was so certain of another death that he dug a grave before the wedding feast. But the archangel Raphael, disguised as Tobias's traveling companion, had taught the young man a remedy. On the wedding night, Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish he had caught in the Tigris. The acrid smoke filled the bridal chamber. Asmodeus fled screaming to the remotest deserts of Upper Egypt, where Raphael pursued and bound him. Sarah was free. Raguel, rising early to check the grave he had prepared, found his daughter's husband alive.

The Road in Chains

The Talmud tells a different Ashmedai. King Solomon needed the shamir, a creature no larger than a barley grain whose touch could split stone without iron, to build the Temple. Only Ashmedai, king of demons, knew where it was.

Solomon sent his servant Benaiah with a chain inscribed with the divine Name and a ring bearing the Tetragrammaton. Ashmedai drew his water from a sealed well on a mountaintop. Benaiah drained the well and filled it with wine. When Ashmedai came to drink, he hesitated. "Wine is a mocker," he muttered, quoting Proverbs. His thirst won. He drank until he slept, and Benaiah bound him.

On the road back to Jerusalem, Ashmedai wept when he saw a wedding party and laughed when he saw a man ordering shoes to last seven years. He guided a blind man back to the road. When asked to explain, he said the bridegroom would be dead within thirty days, the shoe-buyer within a week. The blind man was sitting on a buried treasure and did not know it.

Solomon and the Shamir

Ashmedai revealed where the shamir was kept and was forced to assist in the Temple's construction. But the demon was patient. He appealed to Solomon's curiosity about demonic power and convinced the king to remove his protective ring. The moment Solomon's hand was bare, Ashmedai seized the ring and hurled the king four hundred parasangs across the world.

The Demon on the Throne

Ashmedai took Solomon's form and sat on the throne, ruling Israel as an impostor. The Talmud in Gittin 68b records the clues to the deception. The false king violated laws of ritual purity with Solomon's wives, approaching them during their periods of separation. He demanded intimacy from Bathsheba, Solomon's own mother, and her suspicion that this was not her son prompted the Sanhedrin to investigate. The divine ring was recovered and returned to the true king.

The real Solomon wandered the land as a beggar. "I, Koheleth, was king in Jerusalem," he told anyone who would listen. Later tradition read those words as the opening of Ecclesiastes: the testimony of a man who had possessed everything and lost it.

Three Heads

The Testament of Solomon describes Asmodeus in his full form: three heads on one body. A bull for wrath, a man for lust, a ram for vengeance. He rides a lion, breathes fire, and commands legions of lesser demons.

Aramaic incantation bowls from late antiquity, buried face-down beneath houses throughout Babylonia, invoke protection against Ashmedai by name. The bowls date from the fifth to seventh centuries CE. Fear of the demon king was not confined to sacred texts. It was pressed into wet clay and buried under the floors where families slept.