Lilith

• 1. Introduction

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  Lilith is a feminine figure in Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, and her name has also been spelled Lilit, Lilitu, and Lilis. Among the surviving Jewish incantation bowls is one commissioned from an occultist to protect a woman called Rashnoi and her husband Geyonai. Its inscription invokes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and addresses the liliths, male and female. Then it does something unexpected. It hands the spirits a divorce, a writ, and a letter of separation, delivered through holy angels. The household was not only warding off a demon. It was dismissing her in the language of the law.

  Who was this being, that families would draft papers of separation for her? Where does her name come from, and why does the Hebrew Bible keep her almost entirely out of sight? And how did a spirit of the night, feared in Babylonian homes, end up in nineteenth-century paintings, fantasy novels, and video games? The search begins with a single word in the Book of Isaiah.

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• 2. A Word in Isaiah

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  Chapter 34 of the Book of Isaiah contains the only appearance of the word lilit anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. It comes in a prophecy about the fate of Edom, where a ruined land becomes a haunt for wild creatures. The word sits in the middle of a list of eight nouns. Most of the others name animals known from elsewhere in scripture. Lilit and qippoz appear only in this list, which makes them hapax legomena, words whose meaning cannot be checked against other uses. A translator's choice for lilit usually follows from how they read the whole list.

  Scholars have never settled the question. In 1875 Eberhard Schrader, and in 1855 Moritz Abraham Levy, suggested a demon of the night, known to the Jewish exiles in Babylon. Their view depends on dating the later part of Isaiah to the 6th century BC. Judit M. Blair disagrees and argues that the context points to unclean animals. The Great Isaiah Scroll, one of 19 Isaiah fragments found at Qumran, writes the word in the plural, liliyyot. Today some scholars favor a night bird, while others hold that the verse names a literal demon or a whole category of demons.

  The oldest translators already disagreed. The Greek Septuagint rendered both lilith and the word for jackals as onokentauros, apparently assuming that one kind of creature was named twice. The Latin Vulgate of the early 5th century chose lamia. That choice survived in Wycliffe's Bible of 1395, the Bishops' Bible of 1568, and the Douay-Rheims Bible. The Geneva Bible of 1587 went back to the Hebrew and wrote screech owl. The King James Version of 1611 followed it, picking suitable animals for several hard Hebrew words in the passage.

  Modern English versions scatter in every direction. The American Standard Version of 1901 chose night monster, and the Revised Standard Version of 1947 chose night hag. Moffatt's translation of 1922 and the Knox Bible of 1950 both wrote vampires. The New International Version of 1978 says night creature, the New World Translation of 1984 says nightjar, and the English Standard Version of 2001 says night bird. The Jerusalem Bible of 1966 and the New Revised Standard Version of 1989 simply keep the name Lilith.

  The Vulgate's lamia pulled a Greek monster into the story. In one account, the goddess Hera cursed Lamia with stillborn children. In another, Hera killed all of Lamia's children except Scylla, furious that Lamia had slept with her husband, Zeus. Grief turned Lamia into a creature that stole and devoured the children of other mothers. She was human from the waist up and serpentine below. Zeus took pity and let her remove her eyes and replace them, since she could never close them. Siegmund Hurwitz connects the Talmudic Lilith with this figure, who bore the title child killer.

  The French writer Augustine Calmet noted a custom that echoed the fear. In his account, Jews wrote the words "Adam, Eve, be gone from hence lilith" in the four corners of the chamber of a woman who had just given birth.

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• 3. Spirits of Mesopotamia

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  Cuneiform texts from Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia describe the lilû as a class of demonic spirits. They were thought to be adolescents who died before they could bear children. The name Lilith seems related to the masculine Akkadian word lilû and to its female forms, lilītu and ardat lilî. In Akkadian, lili and līlītu mean spirits. The Sumerian female demons called lili have no etymological tie to the Akkadian lilu, which means evening.

  Archibald Sayce argued in 1882 that the Hebrew and the older Akkadian names both come from Proto-Semitic. Charles Fossey, in 1902, read the root as meaning female night being or demon. Yet some Mesopotamian inscriptions use Līlīt and Līlītu for wind spirits that carry disease. Many writers have also linked Lilith to the demon Lamashtu, who holds a similar position and shares similar traits in Mesopotamian myth.

  In 1932, Samuel Noah Kramer translated a Sumerian phrase, ki-sikil-lil-la-ke, as Lilith. He published the translation in 1938, in connection with Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh, dated to about 600 BC. That tablet is not part of the epic proper. It is a later Assyrian Akkadian translation of the final part of the Sumerian epic. The phrase belongs to a story in which a huluppu tree grows in the garden of the goddess Inanna in Uruk. She plans to use its wood for a new throne.

  Ten years after the tree sprouts, Inanna comes to harvest it and finds three tenants. A serpent lives at its base, a Zu bird raises young in its crown, and the ki-sikil-lil-la-ke has built a house in its trunk. Gilgamesh kills the serpent. The bird flies off to the mountains with its young, and the spirit fearfully destroys its house and runs for the forest. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, published in 1999, identifies the spirit as Lilith. Other suggested readings include sacred place, spirit, water spirit, or simply an owl nesting in a trunk. In 1978, Sergio Ribichini rejected the link to the Jewish Lilith on textual grounds.

  Kramer's reading had a second life in 1937, when Henri Frankfort and Emil Kraeling used it to argue that a winged, bird-footed woman on the disputed Burney Relief was Lilith. Modern research has dropped the idea. Most scholars now see one of the main goddesses of the Mesopotamian pantheons, most probably Ereshkigal. Thorkild Jacobsen, working from the symbols on the figure and from texts, identified the goddess of love and war, Inanna.

  The Arslan Tash amulets are limestone plaques discovered in 1933, and their authenticity is disputed. William F. Albright and Theodor H. Gaster accepted them as a pre-Jewish source showing that the name Lilith existed in the 7th century BC. Torczyner, in 1947, called them a later Jewish source. Lowell K. Handy holds that Lilith does derive from Mesopotamian demonology, but finds evidence of the Hebrew Lilith in these frequently cited sources scant, if present at all.

  Jewish writings supply a clearer trail. The first undisputed mention appears in a hymn among the Dead Sea Scrolls, meant to drive such spirits away.

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• 4. Scrolls and Talmud

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  Songs of the Sage, catalogued as 4Q510-511, holds the one indisputable reference to Lilith among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The speaker calls himself the Instructor. He proclaims God's glorious splendour in order to frighten the spirits of destroying angels, demons, and Lilith, among others. The hymn assumes the audience already knows who she is. It works as an exorcism, like An Exorcism (4Q560) and Songs to Disperse Demons (11Q11), and it suits a community deeply involved in demonology.

  In 1991, Joseph M. Baumgarten proposed that the unnamed woman in The Seductress (4Q184) was related to the female demon. John J. Collins called that idea intriguing, but thought it safe to say the text is based on the strange woman of Proverbs.

  The Mishnah, from around the year 200, never mentions Lilith. The Gemara of the Talmud, from around 500, does. The Jerusalem Talmud has a single mention in the Bomberg edition of 1523, but no manuscript supports it. The Babylonian Talmud uses the word lilit five times, and the passages range from legal rulings to folk cures.

  In tractate Niddah 24b, a ruling says that if a miscarried fetus has the likeness of lilit, its mother is unclean by reason of birth, because it is a child except that it has wings. Eruvin 100b lists among the curses of womanhood that she grows her hair like lilit. Gittin 69b prescribes an Arrow of Lilith, upturned and doused with water, as a drink to cure a pricking sensation.

  The strangest entry is Bava Batra 73a. Rabbah says he saw Hormin, the son of Lilith, running along the parapet of the wall of Mahoza. A rider galloping below on horseback could not overtake him. On another day, two mules were saddled on two bridges over the Rognag, and Hormin leaped back and forth between them. He held two cups of wine and poured from one to the other without spilling a drop. Word reached the house of the king, and they killed him.

  Shabbat 151b records Rabbi Hanina's warning that no one should sleep in a house alone, since whoever does is seized by lilit. Eruvin 18b may explain the fear. Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar taught that during the 130 years after his expulsion from Eden, when Adam kept apart from his wife, he fathered ghosts, male demons, and female demons. The rabbi traced this to semen that Adam emitted accidentally.

  The Midrash Rabbah collection mentions Lilith by name in Numbers Rabbah 16:25. God has threatened to destroy the Israelites after the spies' bad report, and Moses pleads with him. He fears the nations will call God cruel, and he asks God not to act like Lilith, who turns on her own children when she finds nothing else.

  Not every authority accepted her. Maimonides and Menachem Meiri, both rabbinic authorities, rejected the existence of Lilith altogether.

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• 5. Bowls and Amulets

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  Eighty Jewish occult incantation bowls survive from Babylon under the Sassanid Empire, dating from the 4th to the 6th century AD and showing Iranian influence. Lilith features prominently in their protective spells, alongside Bagdana, "king of the lilits." Householders buried the bowls upside down beneath the structure of the house or on its land, to trap the demon or demoness. Almost every house excavated turned up protective bowls. The bowls and amulets from Mesopotamia also give us the earliest known images of Lilith.

  The image sits at the centre of the bowl, and the writing spirals around it, often starting in the middle and moving to the rim. The text is most commonly scripture or a reference to the Talmud. Analysed bowls are inscribed in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac, Mandaic, Middle Persian, and Arabic. Some use a false script with no meaning at all. The figure is often chained at the arms and legs, a sign of the family's control. It faces the viewer, with a fully visible face, very large eyes, and large hands if hands are shown. It never moves.

  The inscriptions also describe how the demon operated. Lilith could take on a woman's physical features, seduce the husband, and conceive a child. She then grew hateful toward the children of the married couple and sought to kill them. The male form, Lilit, took the husband's features instead and seduced the wife. When the child proved not to be the husband's, the child was looked down on, and Lilit took revenge on the family by killing the couple's children.

  The Mandaeans, a Gnostic community, knew liliths too. Their scriptures, including the Ginza Rabba and the Qulasta, place them in the World of Darkness. A lead amulet from about the 7th century, labelled BM 135794 II, repeats the line "Sahras, Dews, Rhuas, Humartas and Lilits" in a banning formula. Later in the charm, a gnostic tree is built from demon groups. Dews form the trunk, Latabas the foliage, and Lilits the branches. The archangel Gabriel expels a Dew from the tree. The charm links the demons to units of time, such as season, month, day, and hour, so scholars read it as protection against the demons of time.

  The amulet belongs to a set of lead, silver, and gold amulets attributed to the family archive of Mah-Adhur Gushnasp, prime minister of the Sasanian Empire under Ardashir III in 628-629. Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Alexander found it in a lead jar under the foundations of a private house near el-Qurnah in southern Iraq, during a dig between 1910 and 1920. It now sits in the British Museum. Christa Müller-Kessler translated the text, and it was published in 2002.

  Protection against Lilith lasted for centuries in Europe. The Krasmesser, or circle knife, played a part in Jewish birth rituals in Alsace, Switzerland, and southern Germany between the 16th and 20th century. A midwife or the husband used it to draw a magic circle around the woman in labor, shielding her from Lilith and the evil eye. Rabbi Naphtali Hirsch ben Elieser Treves described the custom as early as 1560. Oral accounts from Baden-Württemberg in the 20th century still mention the circling knife.

  One popular explanation of the word lullaby is a myth. A manuscript note in a copy of Stephen Skinner's Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ, from 1671, claimed that lullaby came from Lillu abi abi, a Hebrew incantation meaning "Lilith begone." Charles Richardson quoted the note in his dictionary but did not endorse it, and modern lexicographers consider it a false etymology.

  A late 17th-century printed Hebrew sheet, tucked into a copy of Jean de Pauly's translation of the Zohar held in the Ritman Library, carries two amulets, one for a male and one for a female. In its Yiddish lines, the prophet Elijah meets Lilith with her host of demons as she goes to kill a mother and take her newborn, "to drink her blood, suck her bones and eat her flesh." She tells him she will lose her power if anyone uses her secret names, and she reveals them, beginning with lilith, abitu, abizu, and hakash. In other amulets, probably shaped by the Alphabet of Ben Sira, she is Adam's first wife.

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• 6. Adam's First Wife

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  Sometime between the 8th and 10th centuries AD, an anonymous text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira told the oldest surviving version of Lilith as Adam's first wife. Whether the idea is older is unknown. The question behind it came from Genesis itself. Genesis 1:27 says that God created humankind "male and female," yet Genesis 2:22 has him build Eve from Adam's rib. Rabbinic readers noticed the doubling. They also seized on Adam's cry in Genesis 2:23, "this time," as a hint that there had been a first time.

  Genesis Rabbah 18:4 supplies a first woman of its own. Adam is disgusted to see her full of discharge and blood, so God provides another. Genesis Rabbah 22:7 and 18:4 also report Rabbi Yehuda saying that God made a second Eve after the first had to return to dust. These passages never use the word Lilith. They say only "the first Eve." Medieval folklore and amulets later equated the two, but the equation should not be pushed back into late antiquity. The rabbis never said what became of the first woman, and that silence left room for a story.

  The Alphabet fills it. After God says that it is not good for man to be alone, he makes a woman from the earth and calls her Lilith. The two fight at once. She says, "I will not lie below," and Adam insists on being on top. Lilith answers, "We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth." Neither listens. She pronounces the Ineffable Name and flies into the air, and Adam appeals to his Creator.

  God sends three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, with an ultimatum. If she returns, all is well. If she refuses, one hundred of her children will die each day. The angels overtake her in the midst of the sea, in the waters where the Egyptians were destined to drown, and threaten to drown her. Lilith answers, "I was created only to cause sickness to infants." She says she holds power over a newborn boy for eight days and over a girl for twenty. The angels still insist, so she swears by the living and eternal God that she will lose her hold wherever she sees their names. The text adds that one hundred demons perish every day, and that this is why the angels' names are written on amulets for young children. The amulet is hung around the neck of newborn boys until their circumcision, though the amulets themselves are thought to be much older than the story.

  The Alphabet's purpose is unclear. It is a collection of tales about biblical and Talmudic heroes. It may be folk-tales, or a rebuttal of Christian, Karaite, or other separatist movements. Some have called it satire, even anti-Jewish satire, but Louis Ginzberg concluded it was meant seriously. Jewish mystics in medieval Germany accepted it. In the folk tradition that grew from it in the early Middle Ages, Lilith became the queen of Asmodeus, King of Demons, whom the Talmud already knew. Legends also placed another world beside this one, called Yenne Velt in Yiddish. There the pair were believed to breed demonic offspring without end.

  Two roles run through these legends. Lilith appears as the incarnation of lust, who leads men astray, and as a child-killing witch who strangles newborns. The two roles seem to have developed separately, and hardly any tale gives her both.

  A parallel story turns up in Arabic folklore recorded around 1953. A jinn named Qarinah was rejected by Adam and mated with Iblis instead. She became the mother of a host of demons and, to avenge herself on Adam, pursues human children. She kills a baby in the womb, causes impotence in men, and attacks small children with illness. Lilith has no place in the Islamic creation narrative, but her folklore influenced Qarinah's. Earlier, the occult writer Ahmad al-Buni, who died in 1225, had named a demon called the "mother of children."

  The notion that Lilith was Adam's first wife became widely known only through the 17th-century Lexicon Talmudicum by the German scholar Johannes Buxtorf.

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• 7. Kabbalah's Demon Queen

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  Six centuries separate the Aramaic incantation texts from the early Spanish Kabbalistic writings of the 13th century, and when Lilith returned, her life history was far richer. Her creation is told in many competing versions. In one, she came before Adam, on the fifth day, among the living creatures that swarmed in the waters. In another, she was fashioned from the same substance as Adam shortly before him. A third says God created Adam and Lilith with the female contained inside the male, and her soul lay in the depths of the Great Abyss until God called her.

  In that third version, a thousand souls from the Left, evil side tried to attach themselves to Adam's body, and God drove them off. A cloud descended, God commanded the earth to produce a living soul, and he breathed it into Adam. The female was attached to Adam's side, then separated. She was Lilith, and she flew to the Cities of the Sea to attack humankind. Another version has her born spontaneously from the Great Supernal Abyss, or from Gevurah of Din, a negative and punitive aspect of God, and then joining Samael. A different tale makes her a husk that grew around the first light.

  The Midrash A.B.K.I.R., from about the 10th century, is the first medieval source to show Adam and Lilith in full. After Adam recognizes his sin, or Cain's murder of Abel, he separates from Eve and fasts for 130 years. During that time Pizna, either another name for Lilith or her daughter, desires his beauty and seduces him against his will. She bears multitudes of djinns and demons, the first named Agrimas. Methuselah slays thousands of them with a holy sword, forces Agrimas to give him the names of the rest, and casts them into the sea and the mountains.

  The Treatise on the Left Emanation, by the brothers Jacob and Isaac Hacohen, predates the Zohar by a few decades. It says Samael and Lilith were born as one androgynous, double-faced being, matching the way Adam and Eve were born as one. A related tradition makes Lilith the first of Samael's four wives, with Naamah, Eisheth, and Agrat bat Mahlat. Each is the mother of demons. The marriage was arranged by Tanin'iver, the Blind Dragon, who is eyeless like the dragon in the sea. Samael is called the Slant Serpent and Lilith the Tortuous Serpent.

  God did not allow the union to last. To keep the demonic children, the Lilin, from filling the world, he castrated Samael. Many 17th-century Kabbalistic books seem to reinterpret an older Talmudic myth in which God castrated the male Leviathan and slew the female. Denied Samael, Lilith turned to men who experience nocturnal emissions. A text of the 15th or 16th century says God cooled the female Leviathan, leaving Lilith infertile.

  The Treatise also names two Liliths. The Matron Lilith is Samael's mate. The lesser Lilith is the daughter of Mehetabel, daughter of Matred, and of Asmodeus, the great king of the demons. The same text accuses Lilith of being the tempting serpent that deceived Eve.

  The Zohar, from about the 13th century, makes her a night wanderer. She roams at night, and goes all about the world, and makes sport with men. Wherever a man sleeps alone in a house, she visits him, bears from him, and afflicts him with sickness he does not know about. Gershom Scholem suggests that its author, Rabbi Moses de Leon, knew both the folk tradition and an older, conflicting version. In the Zohar, Lilith and Naamah both seduce Adam, and their offspring are demons called the plagues of humankind. According to Raphael Patai, older sources say Lilith returned to Adam after her time at the Red Sea and bore his children by forcing herself upon him. Before that, she attached herself to Cain and bore him many spirits and demons.

  The Zohar adds that all this takes place when the moon is on the wane.

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• 8. Modern Afterlives

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  Goethe gave Lilith her earliest appearance in the literature of the Romantic period, in his 1808 work Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. Mephistopheles first warns Faust, then ironically encourages him to dance with the Pretty Witch. Lilith and Faust briefly talk, and she recalls the days spent in Eden. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed around 1848, was strongly influenced by Goethe's treatment of her. In 1863 Dante Gabriel Rossetti began painting the first version of Lady Lilith, which he expected to be his best picture so far. Poppies stand for death and cold, and white roses for sterile passion. He wrote a sonnet to go with it, renamed Body's Beauty in 1881, and placed it as number 78 in The House of Life, after Soul's Beauty. In 1870 he explained that the painting shows a modern Lilith combing her abundant golden hair and gazing at herself in a mirror.

  Writers kept reworking the myth. Robert Browning's poem Adam, Lilith, and Eve, first published in 1883, shows Lilith and Eve sitting on either side of Adam. Under threat of death, Eve admits she never loved Adam, while Lilith confesses she always did. George MacDonald published the fantasy novel Lilith in 1895, giving her long dark hair, pale skin, a fear of children, and a habit of drinking blood. The Australian poet Christopher John Brennan included a section of thirteen Lilith poems in Poems: 1913. C. L. Moore's 1940 story Fruit of Knowledge retells the Fall as a love triangle in which Lilith manipulates Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, hoping to win Adam back. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem called Lilith in 1928, and he insisted readers should not look for links to Lolita. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver traces the White Witch's ancestry to Lilith.

  George Sterling's 1919 verse drama Lilith drew extravagant praise. H. L. Mencken called it the greatest thing Sterling wrote, and Theodore Dreiser found it richer in thought than any American dramatic poem he knew. J. R. Salamanca's 1961 novel Lilith, about a man seduced by a schizophrenic woman of that name, became a 1964 film written by Robert Rossen and starring Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty. In 2022, Samuel de Ceccatty's animated short Lilith & Eve sends Eve out of Eden to learn about Lilith despite Adam's protests.

  Occultists adopted her as well. Aleister Crowley's first child, who lived from 1904 to 1906, carried Lilith among a long string of middle names. Charles Leland linked Aradia to her, and Gerald Gardner claimed her worship had continued unbroken to the present day. Doreen Valiente called her a moon goddess and a patroness of witches, and also mistook the Burney Relief for Lilith. Some theistic Satanists revere her as patron of strong women, while Michael W. Ford's Luciferian works, first published in 1999, place her as equal to Samael.

  Popular culture then turned her into a queen and a villain. The role-playing game series Vampire: The Masquerade gives her a major part in its mythology. The 2018 series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina reveals Madam Satan to be Lilith. In the 2019 animated series Hazbin Hotel, she is the wife of Lucifer and queen of Hell, and the mother of the protagonist, Charlie. In the Diablo games she is the daughter of Mephisto, and she is the main antagonist of Diablo IV.

  The singer-songwriter Saint Avangeline released a song called Lilith in 2022 on her debut album Gardener of Eden. It went viral on TikTok and Instagram and gained over 56 million streams. She uses the character as a symbol of both beauty and danger. Saint said she wrote it "to try to cope and heal," after toxic relationships and sexual assault.

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