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Lilith

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This article is about the demon Lilith. For other meanings of the word, see Lilith (disambiguation).

Lilith is a female Mesopotamian night demon believed to harm male children. In Isaiah 34:14, Lilith (לִּילִית, Standard Hebrew Lilit) is a kind of night-demon or animal, translated as onokentauros; in the Septuagint, as lamia; "witch" by Hieronymus of Cardia; and as screech owl in the King James Version of the Bible. In the Talmud and Midrash, Lilith appears as a night demon. The idea of Lilith as the first wife of Adam arose in the Middle Ages.

Lilith (1892), by John Collier

Etymology

Hebrew לילית lilith, Akkadian līlītu are female Nisba adjectives from the Proto-Semitic root LYL "night", literally translating to nocturna "female night being/demon". Sayce (Hibbert Lectures, 145ff.), Fossey (La Magie Assyrienne, 37ff.) and others reject an etymology based on the root LYL and suggest the origin of Līlīt was as a storm demon; this view is supported by the cuneiform inscriptions quoted by these scholars. The association with "night" may still be due to early popular etymology. The corresponding Akkadian masculine līlû shows no Nisba suffix and compares to Sumerian (kiskil-)lilla.

Akkadian mythology

Kiskil-lilla

Lilith has been identified with ki-sikil-lil-la-ke4, a female demon in the Sumerian prologue to the Gilgamesh epic.

Kramer translates:

a dragon had built its nest at the foot of the tree
the Zu-bird was raising its young in the crown,
and the demon Lilith had built her house in the middle.
[...]
Then the Zu-bird flew into the mountains with its young,
while Lilith, petrified with fear, tore down her house and fled into the wilderness

Wolkenstein translates the same passage:

a serpent who could not be charmed made its nest in the roots of the tree,
The Anzu bird set his young in the branches of the tree,
And the dark maid Lilith built her home in the trunk.

The Burney relief

The Burney Relief, ca. 1950 BC.

The Gilgamesh passage quoted above has in turn been applied by some to the Burney relief (Norman Colville collection), which dates to roughly 1950 BC and is a sculpture of a woman who has bird talons and is flanked by owls.

The key to this identification lies in the bird talons and the owls. While the relief may depict the demon Kisikil-lilla-ke of the Gilgamesh passage or another goddess, identification with Lilitu is more tenuous and likely influenced by the "screech owl" translation of the KJV. A very similar relief dating to roughly the same period is preserved in the Louvre (AO 6501).

Babylonian Lilitu

After these reliefs, there is a gap of about a millennium, and it is only from circa the 9th century BC that vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are known from Babylonian demonology. These female demons roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. Akkadian Lilitu forms a triad with Ardat Lili and Idlu Lili. As stated above, they may have originated as storm demons, and the "night" association may be a Semitic popular etymology.

The "Lilith Prophylactic" of Arslan Tash (Aleppo National Museum) has been suspected a forgery, but if genuine it would be a 7th century BC plaque featuring a sphinx-like creature and a she-wolf devouring a child, with a Phoenician inscription addressing the sphinx creature as Lili.

The association with the owl is difficult to date, and may be due to the bird having been seen as a blood-sucking night spirit. Elements of the cult spread to Ancient Greece and can be traced in the Erinyes and Hekate.

Lilith in the Bible

Isaiah 34:14, describing the desolation of Edom, is the only occurrence of Lilith in the Hebrew Bible:

Hebrew (ISO 259): Template:Semxlit
literal translation: "yelpers meet-[perfect] howlers; hairy-ones cry-[imperfect] to fellow. liyliyth reposes-[perfect], acquires-[perfect] resting-place."
KJV: "The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest."

Schrader (Jahrbuch für Protestantische Theologie, 1. 128) and Levy (ZDMG 9. 470, 484) suggest that Lilith was a goddess of the night, known also by the Jewish exiles in Babylon. Evidence for Lilith being a goddess rather than a demon is lacking. Isaiah dates to the 6th century BC, and the presence of Jews in Babylon would coincide with the attested references to the Līlītu in Babylonian demonology.

The Septuagint translates onokentauros, apparently for lack of a better word, since also the Template:Semxlit "satyrs" earlier in the verse are translated with daimon onokentauros. The "wild beasts of the island and the desert" are omitted altogether, and the "crying to his fellow" is also done by the daimon onokentauros

Christian Bible

Hieronymus of Cardia translated Lilith with lamia, in Horace (De Arte Poetica liber, 340) a witch who steals children, similar to the Breton Korrigan, in Greek mythology described as a Libyan queen who mated with Zeus. After Zeus abandoned Lamia, Hera stole Lamia's children, and Lamia took revenge by stealing other women's children.

The screech owl translation of the KJV is without precedent, and apparently together with the "owl" (yanšup, probably a water bird) in 34:11, and the "great owl" (qippoz, properly a snake,) of 34:15 an attempt to render the eerie atmosphere of the passage by choosing suitable animals for difficult to translate Hebrew words.

Later translations include:

  • night-owl (Young, 1898)
  • night monster (ASV 1901, NASB 1995)
  • night hag (RSV 1947)
  • night creature (NKJV 1982, NLT 1996)

Jewish tradition

A Hebrew tradition exists in which an amulet is inscribed with the names of three angels and placed around the neck of newborn boys in order to protect them from the lilin until their circumcision. This practice lends weight to the argument that Lilith had existed in earlier Hebrew mythology and is not the creation of later medieval authors. There is also a Hebrew tradition to wait a while before a boy's hair is cut so as to attempt to trick Lilith into thinking the child is a girl so that the boy's life may be spared.

Dead Sea scrolls

Lilith's name also appears in a list of demonic creatures in the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q510 frag. 11.4-6a; frag. 10.1f), in a passage referring to Isaiah 34:14.

Talmud

The word "lilith" appears several times in the Talmud. In Tractate Niddah 24b it refers to a winged human, while in Erubin 100b it refers to something with long hair.

Erubin 18b says that after the expulsion from Eden, Adam was separated from Eve for 130 years, during which time the seed he wasted created "ghouls, demons and lilin". I. e. in Talmudic tradition, not Lilith but Adam engendered the lilin, a connection that may be the origin of the later association of Lilith and Adam.

Kabbala

In some passages of the Kabbala, as well as in the 13th century Treatise on the Left Emanation [1], Lilith is the mate of Samael.

In others, probably informed by The Alphabet of Ben Sira, she is Adam's wife (Yalqut Reubeni, Zohar 1:34b, 3:19 [2])

Lilith as Adam's first wife

The passage in Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (before describing a mate being made of Adam's rib and being called Eve in Genesis 2:22) is sometimes believed to be an indication that Adam had a wife before Eve.

A medieval reference to Lilith as the first wife of Adam is the anonymous The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. Lilith is described as refusing to assume a subservient role to Adam during sexual intercourse and so deserting him ("She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.'"). Lilith promptly uttered the name of God, took to the air, and left the Garden, settling on the Red Sea coast. As a side note, this places Lilith in a unique position, for she left the Garden of her own accord and before the Fall of Man, and so is untouched by the Tree of Knowledge. However, she also knows the true name of God, which makes her even more powerful.

Lilith then went on to mate with Asmodai and various other demons she found beside the Red Sea, creating countless lilin. Adam urged God to bring Lilith back, so three angels were dispatched after her. When the angels, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, made threats to kill one hundred of Lilith's demonic children for each day she stayed away, she countered that she would prey eternally upon the descendants of Adam and Eve, who could be saved only by invoking the names of the three angels. She did not return to Adam.

The background and purpose of The Alphabet of Ben-Sira is unclear. It is a collection of stories about heroes of the Bible and Talmud, it may have been a collection of folk-tales, a refutation of Christian, Karaite, or other separatist movements; its content seems so offensive to contemporary Jews that it was even suggested that it could be an anti-Jewish satire [3], although, in any case, the text was accepted by the Jewish mystics of medieval Germany.

The Alphabet of Ben-Sira is the earliest surviving source of the story, and the conception that Lilith was Adam's first wife became only widely known with the 17th century Lexicon Talmudicum of Johannes Buxtorf.

In the late 19th century, the Scottish Christian author George MacDonald incorporated the story of Lilith as Adam's first wife and predator of Eve's children into a mythopoeic fantasy novel in the Romantic style.

The role of Lilith as Adam's faithless wife has parallels with the ideas about Eve herself in the Unification theology of Sun Myung Moon.

Modern magic

An 18th or 19th century Persian amulet, a protective charm for a newborn boy, kept in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, depicts Lilith in chains, with "Bind Lilith in chains" written under each arm.

Lilith appears as a succubus in Aleister Crowley's De Arte Magica.

  • The title of the Lilith Fair was taken from the legend of Lilith as Adam's first wife, honoring her modern image as a feminist icon.
  • George MacDonald's seminal fantasy Lilith (1895) builds upon the notion of Lilith as both Adam's first wife and the epitome of a creature in need of Divine redemption.
  • In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the central antagonist, the White Witch, is said to be a descendant of Lilith.
    • World of Darkness Roleplaying games Lilith is said to have comforted Caine after the death of Able, and to have given him vampire powers, it is also implied that she is a Mage, perhaps an early Verbena, a sect that later clames her as a spiritual predecessor *See Lilith (disambiguation).
  • See Lilith (disambiguation).

See also

References

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