King Solomon is known for his wisdom, for his glorious and pacific reign over a united Israel, and also for the moral corruption of his old age. In one of its longest, and perhaps one of its most baffling, tales about a biblical figure, the Talmud describes how Solomon once succeeded in capturing Ashm’dai (Asmodeus), ruler of the demons. At the story’s end, Ashm’dai impersonates Solomon, sitting on his throne while the real king wanders the land as a beggar. The late Israeli rabbi Naḥum Eliezer Rabinovitch, in an essay translated into English by Elli Fischer, subjects this narrative to a meticulous allegorical reading, which he uses to explain the contradictions of the biblical monarch:

The [talmudic] sages [believe] that precisely what seems to be the supreme expression of [Solomon’s] “wise and discerning mind” (2Chronicles 3:12) was not simply a gift from God, and it in fact pushed him into the abyss of destruction. The sages said: “Solomon sought to pronounce judgment based on intuition—without witnesses, [in contravention to the requirements of Deuteronomy].” Solomon wanted to circumvent the Torah’s demands with his wisdom. It was not with divine wisdom that he sought to do so; wisdom has its own dark drives.

In the Talmud’s reading, the famous account in 1Kings 3 of the judgment of Solomon, where he adjudicates between two harlots claiming the same child as their own, is a sign of this defect. The rabbis even suggest that one of the litigant mothers may have simply duped the wise king. To Rabinovich, there is an important lesson here about the very essence of Jewish morality:

The wisest of all men wished to go beyond the boundaries of human intelligence and liberate himself from the shackles of the mitzvot [commandments], which are merely the tools with which the body confines the soul. . . . Since the purpose of the mitzvot is to refine people, one who has access to the wellsprings of wisdom and knows how to refine his soul with the fire of love for God, whose flames cannot be quenched with much water, does not need to perform the mitzvot.

[O]nce he became aware of the reasons and purposes of most mitzvot, Solomon thought he could aim straight for the ultimate purpose and no longer needed safeguards and prohibitions. [Thus] Solomon wanted . . . to arrive at the truth without troubling himself to penetrate the different layers of human experience, which cloak the truth like a husk conceals its kernels.

But Solomon’s experiment in living a virtuous life without law—described in both the book of Ecclesiastes and in his encounter with Ashm’dai—failed, and he found himself corrupted.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].