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.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.