Busch provides both the first German translation of C. C. McCown's critical edition of the Greek text of the Testament of Solomon (1922) and the only comprehensive commentary published on that text to date. The first of two parts situates the Testament within the wider ancient phenomenon of exorcistic discourse associated with the name of Solomon and discusses the textual identity, literary genre and main demonological ideas of the Testament itself. The larger part of the study consists of twenty-six chapters corresponding to the main textual divisions in McCown's edition, with the German translation being followed in each chapter by discussion of tradition-historical issues and comparative sources. The Greek text is not included; but variant readings are indicated in the German translation, whose footnotes include comments on select aspects of the Greek. Against McCown, Busch argues persuasively that manuscripts D and E (along with BN, no. 2011, which was unknown to McCown) do not represent revisions of a pre-Testament Urschrift into which the magico-medical discourses of chapters 3–18 were later inserted, but instead belong to the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Testament in its long forms (e.g. manuscripts H, N and P). By carefully distinguishing between participant and analytic-observer understandings of ‘magic’, Busch avoids McCown's ethnocentric tendency of describing the Testament as a product of ‘superstition’ and ‘primitive mentality’; and in that connection Busch's claim that the Testament consistently portrays Solomon as untainted by ‘magic’ in the negative sense has validity for the document's first eighteen chapters. Busch also deserves praise for suggesting that at least part of the Testament's last eight chapters (e.g. the portrayal of the Queen of the South in chapters 19 and 21) are best understood as instances of ‘rewritten Bible’. Despite strenuous attempts by Robert Daniel and others to find evidence in Papyrus Vindobonensis G 330 (T.Sol. 18.27–8, 34–40, by far the earliest attested portion of the document) for the superiority of recension B to recension A, Busch upholds McCown's high estimation of the former (i.e. manuscripts H, I and L), primarily by arguing that the unique tradition history of the Testament's eighteenth chapter minimises the value of P. Vind. 330 for recovering the textual history of the Testament as a whole. Behind the two main recensions, Busch postulates a Grundschrift of Christian orientation, but one in which evidence can be discerned of still earlier non-Christian Jewish sources. The composition of the Grundschrift Busch situates in early post-Constantinian Jerusalem. Busch says almost nothing about either the possible interplay between the Ephippas theme in the Testament and the iconographic tradition of Solomon as horseman, or the literary seams and rhetorically dysfunctional codas at the end of chapters fifteen and eighteen, or the ideological tensions between the Testament's first eighteen chapters and its last eight. None the less, his work fills a large gap in research on the Testament and strengthens recent efforts to rethink the text's literary complexity and its perspective on ‘magic’.