And it came about through my prayer that grace was given to me from the Lord Sabaoth by Michael his archangel. [He brought me] a little ring, having a seal consisting of an engraved stone, and said to me: "Take, O Solomon, king, son of David, the gift which the Lord God has sent thee, the highest Sabaoth. With it thou shalt lock up all demons of the earth, male and female; and with their help thou shalt build up Jerusalem. [But] thou [must] wear this seal of God. And this engraving of the seal of the ring sent thee is a Pentalpha.With this ring, Solomon commanded and bound many demons. Solomon was also in the habit of sealing rebellious demons inside many different types of vessels and containers. It did not seem to matter much what the demons were sealed into, as long as the impression was made with the stone on Solomon's ring.
Legend has it that this stone could cut any other stone, thereby allowing the temple of Solomon to be built without tools of iron. The stone was used in the building of the temple on the Temple Mount and was used to "build up Jerusalem." The stone was called shamir and was engraved with a pentalpha (pentagram).
If we look, we can find clay pitchers bearing such a stamp. It is possible there was at least one ring that made these impressions.
We also find the same impression in stone:
(Image snagged from HERE
)
)Even if we cannot prove that King Solomon had a ring with a seal as described in ancient lore, we can at least see some of the impressions that inspired the story. We can also, I believe, see the origin of the name of the stone in King Solomon's ring.
The first black pentagram you see here has the letters Yud-Resh-Sin-Lamed-Mem, written in Paleo-Hebrew. The second black pentagram has the same letters in their modern Hebrew forms. The third black pentagram shows the letter equivalents using English letters.
As you can see, this seal reads YRSLM. Most readers will know this word better as "Jerusalem".
Readers of modern Hebrew might be thinking I made a little error in writing a regular mem instead of mem sofit. It is no error. Paleo-Hebrew had no final forms. Not only does this change gematria, it means that if a person did not know the word in this seal, or if one of the letters of the seal were obscured, one might easily misread the word in the seal.
What if the lamed was obscured and we started reading from the letter sin?
The word now becomes shin-mem-yud-resh. That spells ShaMIR.
You also might be interested in these pages:
Beyond the Golem
Wikipedia
Kabbalah Online
