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The Testament of Solomon
Anonymous, attributed to Solomon (c. 1st–5th century) · tr. F. C. Conybeare · 1898 · 17,292 words
The Greek pseudepigraphon in which King Solomon, given a magic ring by the archangel Michael, summons and questions the demons one by one and sets them to build the Temple: a source of later Solomonic magic.
Opening
Introductory Remarks
The Testament of Solomon, translated in the following pages, was published in a volume of anecdota by Fleck in the year 1837. This volume forms the fourth and last of his work entitled Wissenschaftliche Reise durch Deutschland, Italien, &c. Seven years later, in 1844, Bomemann made a German translation in the pages of the Zeitschrift für die histor. Theologie, III, pp. 9–56. This translation is accurate, and to the footnotes which accompany it I am under obligations. The same scholar contributed an essay, entitled Conjectanea in Salomonis Testamentum, to a serial publication called Studien von Geistlichen des Königr. Sachsen, in its second year, 1843, pp. 45–60, and fourth year, pp. 28–69. The latter work is not in Bodley's Library, and to my regret I have not seen it. In Fürst's Orient appeared a reprint of Fleck's Greek text, along with a German translation.
It has been regarded by the few scholars who have examined it as a Christian work written as late perhaps as the fifth century of our era. And in this preface to my translation I will confine my remarks to an examination of the grounds of this view.
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