Asmodeus

The seventh husband died the way the six before him had died, on the wedding night, behind a shut door, with the lamps still burning out in the courtyard. By then the servants in Raguel’s house at Ecbatana had stopped whispering and started saying it to Sarah’s face: husband-killer. They had the direction of it backwards. What was killing the bridegrooms had fallen in love with the bride, and it had no intention of sharing her.

The name of that thing is Asmodeus, and this is the oldest place it appears. The Book of Tobit was written somewhere in the third or early second century before the common era, most likely in Aramaic, and turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls in four Aramaic copies and one Hebrew. Tobit calls him simply the evil demon. The Hebrew and Aramaic versions promote him to king of the demons, a title that later hands added to a figure who had already earned it.

The cure for him is one of the least dignified remedies in scripture. On the road to Ecbatana a fish lunges out of the Tigris at Sarah’s cousin Tobias, and the angel Raphael, walking beside him in the shape of a hired kinsman, tells him to keep the heart, the liver and the gall. In the bridal chamber Tobias lays the heart and liver on the incense embers. The room fills with the smell of scorched fish offal, and the spirit that had killed seven men goes out of the house, fleeing into the farthest parts of Egypt, where Raphael binds him.

A few centuries later he speaks for himself. In the Testament of Solomon, a pseudepigraphon whose date is still argued over and whose surviving text carries clear Christian additions, Asmodeus stands before the king and gives a plain account of his trade: he plots against the newly wedded so that they may not know one another, he wastes away the beauty of virgins and estranges their hearts, and he throws husbands into fits of madness and desire for other men’s wives. He also volunteers what stops him, which is Raphael and the smoke of a certain fish’s gall. Solomon uses both, then sets him to work in chains, treading clay with his feet and drawing water for the Temple. The king refused to free him afterwards, on the grounds that this fierce demon knew the future.

The Babylonian Talmud tells a longer version, and a much odder one. Solomon needs the shamir, the small creature whose touch splits rock, because the Temple stone may not be shaped with iron. None of the demons know where it is kept. Their king does.

Ashmedai lived on a mountain and his habits were exact. He kept a well there, capped it every morning with a heavy stone and secured it in other ways besides, went up to heaven to sit in on the arguments of the celestial academy, came down to stand invisibly at the study houses of the earth, then came home, checked his fastenings to see that nothing had been touched, and drank.

Benaiah ben Jehoiada arrived with a chain, a ring cut with the divine Name, a bundle of wool and a skin of wine. He bored the well below the water line, plugged the spring with the wool, and filled the shaft with wine. Ashmedai came down at his usual hour, found every seal exactly as he had left it and wine standing where his water should be, and refused to touch it. He quoted Proverbs at himself, then Hosea, working up his own moral courage. He drank anyway, because he was thirsty. He woke with the chain at his neck and Benaiah telling him that the Name of his Lord was upon him.

He went quietly after that and behaved appallingly on the road. He brushed against a palm tree and tore it out of the ground. He knocked into a house and the house came down. Turning aside from a poor woman’s hut because she begged him to, he broke a bone doing it, and asked with perfect timing whether it is not written that a soft tongue breaketh the bone. He set a blind man back on his path, and did the same for a drunk. He wept when a wedding party went past. He laughed at a man ordering shoes built to last seven years, and again at a conjurer working a crowd. Solomon eventually asked why. The bridegroom had a month to live. The customer would not own the shoes a week. The conjurer was standing on buried treasure and had no idea.

Ashmedai stayed until the Temple was finished. Then Solomon, holding the shamir and no longer needing him, made the mistake of asking aloud what was so impressive about demons if a mortal could keep their king in irons. Take off the chain, said Ashmedai, and lend me the ring. Solomon did. The demon opened one wing until it touched heaven and the other until it reached the ground, picked the king up, threw him four hundred parasangs from Jerusalem, and sat down on the throne wearing his face.

Nobody caught it for a long time. Solomon wandered and was taken for a madman when he came back claiming the crown. Suspicion started with small failures of detail: Benaiah, first man in the kingdom, had not once been admitted to the king’s presence; the king was not keeping the household laws of separation; and the women of the palace mentioned that he never took his slippers off. Demons have the feet of a cock. Solomon got hold of a second ring, walked in on him, and Ashmedai took flight.

That is very nearly the whole of the early physical record, which is startling for a figure so frequently drawn. Tobit does not describe him. The Talmud grants him the wings, and grants the feet only by implication, through a pair of slippers. The rest arrived later and arrived from Europe. The Ars Goetia, the demon catalogue assembled in the seventeenth century out of Johann Weyer’s earlier list, gives him three heads, a bull’s and a man’s and a ram’s, the tail of a serpent, flames coming out of his mouth and feet webbed like a goose’s, seated on an infernal dragon with a lance and banner held in his hand.

His parentage depends on who is asked. The Testament of Solomon has him say he was born of angel’s seed by a daughter of man. Medieval Jewish commentators, Nachmanides among them, give him a father named Shamdon and a mother named Naamah, the sister of Tubal-Cain. The name itself has been disputed for well over a century. One school reads it against the Persian Aeshma-daeva, the Zoroastrian demon of wrath, and the overlap in function is genuine; the philology is another matter, since the ending of Ashmedai does not correspond to daeva and no Persian text pairs the two words. Others take it from the Semitic root for destroying, or read it flatly as the cursed one. Nobody has closed the argument.

Europe kept him busy. Peter Binsfeld, classifying demons for witch-hunters in 1589, assigned him lust. The Ursuline nuns of Loudun named him among the spirits sent against them, and Urbain Grandier burned at the stake for it in 1634. In 1707 Alain-Rene Lesage corked him in a bottle in Madrid, let a fleeing student break him out, and sent him over the rooftops lifting the tiles off houses to show what people do when they believe nobody is watching.

What he can do follows directly from where he spends his time. He hears the arguments of heaven, so he knows what is coming. He listens at the study houses of earth, so he knows the law better than many who keep it. He sees things as they are instead of as they look, which is why his laughter and his tears land in the wrong places. He can uproot a palm without meaning to, and his wings measure the distance from the ground to the sky. He can wear another man’s face well enough to run his kingdom. The grimoire tradition hands him a schoolmaster’s portfolio on top of all that: he grants the Ring of Virtues, teaches arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and every handicraft absolutely, makes a man invincible, and shows where treasure lies before settling down to guard it.

His limits are almost domestic. He gets thirsty, and he has a weakness for wine, which is the entire mechanism of his capture. The divine Name cut into a ring or worked into a chain holds him. Burning fish liver empties a room of him. Raphael has authority over him and once bound him in Egypt. He cannot change his own feet, so he has to hide them, and the ordinary observances of a Jewish household are beyond his power to counterfeit, which is what finally gave him away. Later kabbalists pushed the limits further still and made him mortal, holding that demons die, that Ashmedai wore the crown only for a term, that Bildad took it after him, and Hind after Bildad.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Asmodeus?

Asmodeus is the king of the demons in Jewish tradition, first named in the Book of Tobit as the spirit who killed Sarah of Ecbatana’s seven husbands on their wedding nights. He appears again in the Testament of Solomon and in the Babylonian Talmud, where he is captured and forced to help build Solomon’s Temple. Later Christian demonology adopted him as a prince of hell.

Why did Asmodeus kill Sarah’s husbands?

He was in love with Sarah himself and killed each bridegroom before the marriage could be consummated. The Book of Tobit gives no other motive. Seven men died this way before Tobias married her and drove the demon off.

How was Asmodeus defeated?

He was driven out of Sarah’s house by the smoke of a fish’s burning heart and liver, on the angel Raphael’s instructions, and fled to the farthest parts of Egypt, where Raphael bound him. In the Talmud he is captured a second time by Benaiah ben Jehoiada, who filled his drinking well with wine and chained him while he slept.

How did Asmodeus take King Solomon’s throne?

Solomon removed the demon’s chain and lent him the ring engraved with the divine Name. Ashmedai then spread one wing to heaven and one to the earth, hurled Solomon four hundred parasangs away, and impersonated him on the throne. He was exposed because he never removed his slippers, since demons have the feet of a cock.

What does Asmodeus look like?

The oldest sources do not describe him. The Talmud gives him wings that reach from heaven to the ground and feet he has to keep covered, while the seventeenth-century Ars Goetia depicts him with three heads of a bull, a man and a ram, a serpent’s tail, fire issuing from his mouth and webbed goose feet, riding an infernal dragon and carrying a lance with a banner.

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