He knew everything, he could turn lead into gold, conjure demons and become invisible. Jamaicans even credit him with discovering marijuana. If you know the Captain Marvel comic book superhero, the keyword he uses to change from Billy Batson to Captian Marvel is an acronym, SHAZAM – the S stands for Solomon and Solomon gave Cap wisdom.
But he was also the prototype for Faust. According to the Talmud, written around 500 A.D., Solomon cut a deal with the devil to build the great temple of Jerusalem – with disastrous consequences.
“In order to build the temple, there were secrets he could only learn by capturing a demon. The demon gets loose and does terrible things to Solomon,” explained Stanford Jewish studies scholar Steven Weitzman, author of Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (Yale University Press).
The Faust legend, adopted by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is “the quintessential modern metaphor to explain man’s helplessness before the results of his ingenuity, whether cloning or nuclear power … all the double-edged advances that are like letting a genie out of the bottle,” said Weitzman.
