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The Testament of Solomon: The Ring That Bound 72 Demons · Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries

• 0:00
  [gentle music] Three thousand years ago, a boy on Solomon's construction site began dying at sunset. Something came for him every evening, and it fed on him through the thumb of his right hand.
• 0:13
  Solomon prayed over the boy, and the answer arrived as an angel carrying a small ring with a seal cut into the stone.
• 0:20
  The Testament of Solomon, which was left out of the Bible, claims that seal let Solomon drag demons into his throne room and force them to confess their names, their work, and the one angel each of them feared.
• 0:31
  Those confessions raised the most famous temple in history. The price of collecting them came due later, and it was steep. The official story of Solomon's Temple is a story about manpower.
• 0:44
  The Books of Kings count the labor force at roughly a hundred and eighty-three thousand men, with timber crews rotating out to Lebanon in shifts and thousands of supervisors keeping the whole operation on schedule.
• 0:56
  Stone came out of the mountains, and cedar came down from the north, and the holiest building on Earth rose through years of organized, exhausting, ordinary human work.
• 1:07
  There's another record, though, and it tells a much stranger story. It survives in Greek, handed down outside the Bible for centuries, and it speaks in Solomon's own voice from the first line to the last.
• 1:20
  The document is known as the Testament of Solomon, and it doesn't open with architecture. It opens with a sick child.
• 1:29
  Solomon favored one particular boy on the site, the account says, a young worker the king had noticed and grown fond of. That boy started wasting away in front of everyone.
• 1:39
  His wages kept disappearing, his skin lost its color, and none of the men around him could explain what was going wrong. So the king called him in and questioned him face to face.
• 1:51
  The boy's answer has to rank among the strangest confessions ever written down.
• 1:55
  He said a spirit came to him every evening as the sun went down, a thing that called itself Ornias, and that it took half of his pay before it took anything else.
• 2:04
  Then it fed on him, drawing the life out of his body through his right thumb. A detail like the thumb is what gives the account its unsettling texture.
• 2:14
  Legends tend to speak in generalities, but this one records the exact point of contact, the hour of the visit, and the cut the spirit took from a workman's wages before it fed.
• 2:25
  Night after night, the thing returned, and the boy was running out of life to give. Whatever it was, it had picked its victim inside the most sacred project on Earth, in the shadow of the temple walls as they rose.
• 2:38
  The attack wasn't random, and it wasn't hidden from Heaven either. Solomon didn't call for physicians, and he didn't post soldiers at the boy's bed.
• 2:48
  He went into the sanctuary and prayed day and night, asking for one specific thing, authority over the spirit that was killing his workman's son.
• 2:58
  Heaven heard that prayer, and the answer that came back wasn't made of words. The archangel Michael came down carrying an object. It was a small ring set with a precious stone, and cut into that stone was a seal.
• 3:12
  Michael delivered it with a commission that reads like a royal appointment, telling Solomon that with this ring, he would lock up all the demons of the Earth, male and female, and that with their forced labor, he would build up Jerusalem.
• 3:26
  To understand what that ring actually was, it helps to know what a signet ring meant in the ancient world.
• 3:32
  A king's signet was his signature, so pressing it into wax turned a piece of paper into law, and every subject in the kingdom was bound to obey whatever carried that mark.
• 3:43
  Whoever held the king's seal spoke with the king's own voice, and refusing the seal meant refusing the throne itself.
• 3:50
  This ring worked exactly the same way, except the authority behind it belonged to God, and the subjects it bound weren't citizens.
• 3:58
  Binding in this story means a legal arrest backed by Heaven, an authority no spirit had standing to refuse. Nothing about it required chains or chalk circles on a floor. Solomon didn't test the ring himself.
• 4:13
  He handed it to the dying boy with a set of instructions that must have sounded insane, telling him to wait for the spirit at sunset and fling the ring straight at its chest, then order it to walk to the king.
• 4:24
  A child who'd spent weeks being drained alive was now the arresting officer. Sunset came, and so did Ornias. The boy threw the ring, and the moment the seal touched the demon, the fight was over.
• 4:38
  The spirit was stamped by it and lost the power to resist or flee. There was no battle and no struggle worth recording, just an arrest.
• 4:48
  The thing that had been draining the boy night after night now walked through Jerusalem at his command, the child leading the creature that almost killed him.
• 4:57
  Ornias was brought before the throne and made to stand there, sealed and helpless, waiting for a human king to speak. Then the first interrogation in the most bizarre legal proceeding ever recorded got underway.
• 5:10
  What Solomon did next shows how fast he understood the weapon in his hand. Questioning Ornias and locking him away would have been the cautious move.
• 5:20
  Instead, the king gave the demon the ring and ordered him to find Beelzebub, the prince of demons, and stamp the seal on him.
• 5:28
  It was an act that still reads as breathtaking arrogance or breathtaking faith, depending on the reader. A bound spirit can't refuse, so Ornias went.
• 5:39
  He carried the ring to wherever the prince of demons held his court and pressed the seal on Beelzebub himself.
• 5:46
  The ruler of the unclean spirits was placed under arrest by one of his own subjects, acting on a warrant from Heaven, and hauled to Jerusalem to stand in front of a man. The scale of that scene is easy to miss.
• 5:59
  Beelzebub, in this text, commands every unclean thing that moves through the world, and that being stood in a human throne room, stamped like a confiscated document. Waiting to be questioned by a king made of flesh.
• 6:12
  Beelzebub raged, and then Beelzebub submitted. What he offered Solomon next is the hinge of the entire story.
• 6:19
  He agreed to parade every unclean spirit under his command before the throne, one after another, each of them bound and compelled to answer.
• 6:28
  The Prince of Demons became, in effect, a bailiff in Solomon's court, escorting his own subjects to the stand. Solomon's reaction is worth pausing on because he didn't respond like a sorcerer celebrating a conquest.
• 6:43
  The text has him praising God for the authority, treating the whole operation as an extension of divine power rather than his own. In his eyes, this wasn't magic at all. It was jurisdiction.
• 6:55
  Then the questioning began, and it followed a fixed protocol from the first demon to the last.
• 7:00
  Every spirit had to give its name, describe its work, meaning the specific harm it did to human beings, and then reveal the name of the angel with the power to break it. That last requirement is the chilling one.
• 7:13
  It means every demon in creation carries the knowledge of its own defeat the way a lock carries the shape of its own key, and under the seal, they had no choice but to hand that knowledge over.
• 7:23
  Solomon was building an inventory of the enemy, extracted under compulsion, written down for whoever came after him. The parade that followed turned the throne room of Israel into something no court had ever been.
• 7:36
  The roster the text preserves runs through names like Tephras, Rabdos, Rath, Cunapaston, and Enepsigos, along with a winged dragon and seven spirits who present themselves as sisters, tied in the text to the cluster of stars called the Pleiades.
• 7:52
  Some of what walked in had a shape, and some of it did not. One of the first to stand before the king was Onoskelis.
• 8:00
  She appeared as a beautiful woman from the waist up, but her legs were the legs of a mule, and her confession was simple and ugly. She strangled men.
• 8:10
  Solomon's questions never changed, and neither did the demon's obligation to answer. Under the seal, evasion collapsed into testimony, and each spirit's account went into the record beside the last one.
• 8:22
  The court moved through the unseen world like a magistrate clearing a docket. Onoskelis was only the start of the procession because the next name to enter had a reputation reaching far beyond this one text.
• 8:35
  Asmodeus, when the seal forced his mouth open, confessed to a specialty that sounds almost administrative until the details sink in.
• 8:44
  His work was newlyweds, marring the beauty of virgins, turning spouses against each other in the first days of marriage, and steering the resentment he planted all the way to murder.
• 8:56
  Under questioning, Asmodeus also gave up the thing he feared. He named the archangel Raphael, and then he named something stranger, admitting that smoke from the liver and gall of a burning fish drives him away.
• 9:09
  That exact remedy, the same organs of the same creature, appears in the old story of Tobit, where Raphael teaches a young man to burn fish organs to save his bride from a killing spirit.
• 9:21
  Two separate ancient texts agree on how to hurt this specific demon, down to the recipe.
• 9:27
  Agreement like that is rare, and it suggests the tradition behind these stories treated the remedy as something known rather than invented.
• 9:35
  Asmodeus carried the best-known name in the parade, but the darkest confession belonged to a spirit with almost no reputation at all.
• 9:43
  The text calls her Obizuth and describes her as a female spirit with wild, disheveled hair, and what she admitted to may be the worst sentence in the whole document.
• 9:54
  She spends every night of her existence traveling the world, searching for women in labor, and when she finds one, she tries to strangle the newborn. Even she had to surrender her weakness.
• 10:06
  The angel Raphael stood against her, too, and her power failed wherever her own name was written on papyrus.
• 10:13
  In the world of this text, a mother in labor could hold off a demon with a scrap of paper because the demon herself had been forced to explain how. That detail grows heavier the longer it sits.
• 10:25
  A written name over a birth bed counted as a real defense in this worldview, and the instructions came from the enemy's own mouth, extracted in a throne room under a seal no spirit could resist.
• 10:36
  Confession after confession, the pattern held. Every spirit that walked in fighting ended up betraying itself. The king wrote it all down.
• 10:45
  The document calls itself a testament because that's exactly what it is, a record meant to outlast him, a handbook of the enemy left for the generations after him.
• 10:55
  Solomon didn't stop at questioning because the ring had come with a construction order attached. The bound spirits were sentenced to labor.
• 11:03
  The text describes demons cutting stone and hauling materials for the temple, unclean hands put to work on the holiest project on Earth because a seal from heaven left them no alternative.
• 11:15
  Together, the two records make for unsettling reading.
• 11:18
  The Books of Kings tally the human workforce down to the last supervisor, and the Testament describes the crews no census taker could see working the same site at the same time.
• 11:29
  One record counts the men, and the other counts the spirits moving between them. Neither account bothers to deny the other.
• 11:37
  A hundred and eighty-three thousand men still swing their hammers in the official history, and the strange labor of the sealed spirits runs underneath it like a second shift nobody logged.
• 11:48
  The temple, in this telling, was built twice over. Deep in the text sits its most unearthly section, and it has nothing to do with quarries. Thirty-six spirits step forward as a group, and these aren't ordinary demons.
• 12:02
  They present themselves as powers tied to the turning sky, linked to the divisions of the zodiac, and each one claims a specific ailment of the human body as its personal territory.
• 12:14
  One by one, they name fevers, pains in specific parts of the body, and madness in its different forms, each affliction confessed by the spirit claiming to cause it.
• 12:25
  Under the seal, each of the thirty-six also surrendered the formula, or the angelic name that drives it out, turning this stretch of the text into something like a medical manual written by the diseases themselves.
• 12:39
  The picture that emerges from these chapters is bigger than one king's power over spirits.
• 12:44
  The demon world, as this document maps it, has ranks, numbers, departments, and assignments, all of it ordered like a dark mirror of a royal administration.
• 12:55
  Illness has a name that can be spoken, and harm has a structure that can be mapped. For the audience this text was written for, that idea offered hope because a cataloged enemy can be fought.
• 13:07
  And still, the greatest engineering problem on the site had no solution because one stone at the temple was too heavy for anyone to move.
• 13:16
  A cornerstone was needed at the entrance of the temple, and it was judged too great to lift. No crew of men could raise it, and none of the bound spirits already in the king's custody managed it either.
• 13:27
  The solution came from outside the city, and it came in a container. Word reached Solomon of a violent spirit in Arabia, a demon of the wind named Ephippas.
• 13:39
  He was captured and brought to Jerusalem sealed inside a leather flask, a storm folded up and stoppered like wine.
• 13:46
  Then the flask was brought to the temple site, and the imprisoned wind lifted the cornerstone into place at the entrance while the builders watched a stone move with nothing visible touching it. Ephippas wasn't finished.
• 13:59
  Together with another spirit, one that rose out of the Red Sea, he hauled up a colossal pillar from the water and carried it through the air toward Jerusalem.
• 14:09
  The Red Sea spirit gave its name as Abathubut, and its history is the most audacious claim in the entire document.
• 14:16
  This demon told Solomon that he was there in Egypt when Moses stood before Pharaoh, that he sided with the court magicians, and that he was the power that hardened Pharaoh's heart.
• 14:26
  One of the most famous disasters in scripture, the stubbornness that drowned an army, gets an author in this text, and the author has a name. The confession carried its own sentence inside it.
• 14:38
  When the sea collapsed on the Egyptian army, it collapsed on Abathubut too, and the pillar pinned him at the bottom for centuries until Ephippas arrived to lift it.
• 14:48
  The spirit that helped drown Egypt spent the whole age of the judges and the early kings trapped under a column of the sea. What the two spirits did with that pillar is the image the text leaves hanging in the air.
• 15:01
  They were set to holding it, suspended, and they swore they would hold it until the end of the age. On the day that pillar falls, the text warns, the world ends with it. Solomon now had everything.
• 15:14
  The temple stood finished, the demon world was cataloged and enslaved, and the knowledge of every unclean spirit's weakness sat in the royal archive.
• 15:23
  At the absolute height of that power, the whole structure came down because of a woman and five insects. Near the end of the text, Solomon falls in love.
• 15:34
  The woman was a Shunammite, and her people's priests set a price on the marriage. Before he could have her, they demanded that he bow to their gods, Remphan and Moloch. He refused, at least at first.
• 15:48
  The man who held the seal of God wasn't going to burn offerings on a foreign altar, so the priests scaled the demand down to almost nothing, and that smallness was the trap.
• 15:58
  All he had to do was take five locusts and crush them in his hand, one token gesture offered to Moloch. There was no altar involved and no public ceremony.
• 16:09
  Nobody watching would even have understood what they were seeing. He did it. It probably took a second, and it must have felt like nothing at all, five insects dying in a closed fist.
• 16:21
  The text says the Spirit of God left him at that moment, immediately, the way the life had once drained out of a boy on his construction site. The power that followed the seal followed the spirit out the door.
• 16:34
  Solomon grew weak and foolish, and the king who had bound the prince of demons went on to raise temples for Baal, for Raphan, and for Moloch. His name, the text says bluntly, became a joke to men and to demons alike.
• 16:49
  The demons never beat the ring, and that's the horror the story has been building the whole time. No spirit broke the seal, and no prince of the unclean outfought heaven's warrant.
• 17:00
  Solomon was defeated by his own closed hand, holding five dead locusts instead of the ring. The last thing he does in the text is write it all down as a warning.
• 17:11
  In his own voice, the wisest king who ever lived tells whoever finds the document that he lost everything for desire, and that the power heaven lends can be forfeited in a single moment.
• 17:22
  The Testament names its demons one at a time, with thirty-six of them bound to the turning sky.
• 17:28
  Centuries later, the tradition that grew out of this text produced the Lesser Key of Solomon, a book assembled in the sixteen hundreds, and its opening section fixed the roster at seventy-two demons, each with a name, a rank, and a seal, everyone commanded in Solomon's name.
• 17:46
  The number came later, but the claim underneath it starts here, with a ring handed down at sunset. The books of Kings counted the workmen, and the Testament counted the demons.
• 17:56
  Between those two records stands one unresolved account, a pillar over the Red Sea, held up by two spirits who swore to keep holding it until the end of the age.
• 18:06
  According to the oldest copy of this story, they are still there, keeping the pillar in place. This has been Midnight Signals. I'm Russ Chamberlain guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery.
• 18:21
  Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello. If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and share to help more people find the show.
• 18:33
  Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal, a story waiting to be told. [outro music]