Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/102

74 advantage of tourists, is known as "Solomon's Quarries," and devoutly visited as the spot whence the stones for the Temple were quarried. As it stretches 639 feet in a straight line beneath the city, it might well be that here the "stone was made ready before it was brought [to the Temple]; so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building." The Jews, however, have a more romantic tradition as to the cause of this silence. They say that when Solomon had collected all other materials for the Temple—the gold and precious stones and brass—he was at a loss how to proceed in regard to the baser material for he was anxious that the stone should be handled in the same manner as were the Tables of the Law, the method of which was finally delivered to him in a dream. It seems that, at the beginning of the world, God created a small insect, the size of a barley-corn, called the Shemeer, which He kept under His throne until it was required to cut out and engrave the Tables of Stone, after which it was hidden again, in a place unknown to everyone except Satan, who somehow obtained possession of it, and was very unwilling to discover its whereabouts, especially for such a purpose as the building of the Temple, which, as everyone knew, was designed in opposition to Satan himself. However, Solomon called together the Rabbis, and in their presence conjured the Evil One from the bottomless pit, and commanded him to restore the shemeer. Satan, compelled to obey, however unwillingly, fetched from the deep of the sea a stone weighing a thousand tons, which he threw down in a rage at Solomon's feet. The stone smashed, and out of it emerged the shemeer. "When Solomon and the Rabbis beheld it they shouted for joy; but Satan, on the contrary, groaned in anguish, and raved with indignation."

Solomon then went to the quarry, where, with a pencil, he sketched the outline of every stone that would be