Rewriting the Testament of Solomon: Tradition, Conflict, and Identity in a Late Antique Pseudepigraphon

By analysing previously overlooked astrological schemes in the Testament of Solomon, this study opens up new understandings of that document's literary structure, tradition history, textual transmission, religious context, and rhetorical goals. Chapters 1-18 are given a fresh reading as preserving a second-century CE pro-Solomonic handbook of magico-astrological healing, whereas the Testament's last eight chapters (19-26) are contextualised as reflecting a later redaction whose style corresponds to 'rewritten Bible', and whose aim is to undermine the authority of the Solomonic tradition of magico-religious health care and healing. A fresh collation of the main textual witnesses indicates the high value of the Colbert manuscript ('P') for purposes of text-critical and tradition-historical analysis, a manuscript treated with some contempt by previous studies. The prominence of the demon Ephippas in the Testament is contextualised interdiscursively as a response to the popular iconography of Solomon the cavalier familiar from late antique Syro-Palestinian amulets.