Lilith: How a Night Demon Became Adam's First Wife
c. 700–1000
Ask people who Lilith was and many will say: Adam's first wife, created before Eve, who refused to obey him and left the Garden of Eden. It is a powerful story, and it is not in the Bible. Lilith's real history is stranger. She began as a whole class of ancient Middle Eastern demons, slipped into a single verse of Isaiah, was feared by Talmudic rabbis, gained her famous Eden story in a medieval Hebrew satire, became a cosmic figure in Jewish mysticism, and in the 1970s was reborn as a feminist symbol.
Demons that had once been human
Long before Lilith had a name of her own, there were liliths in the plural. The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, published by the Jewish Women's Archive, explains that ancient Babylonian religion feared male lilû demons and female lilītu. These were believed to be the ghosts of people who died young and unmarried, now hungry for living partners; they crept into homes through windows. Wikipedia gives the same picture from cuneiform sources. Both also describe how these spirits blended with Lamashtu, a separate Babylonian demoness who preyed on newborn babies, producing a single type of evil spirit that seduced adults and attacked children.
Wikipedia adds a caution. Several ancient objects are often said to show Lilith, such as the Burney Relief from Babylonia, a passage in the Sumerian Gilgamesh cycle, and plaques found at Arslan Tash in Syria, but some scholars think the evidence linking them to the Hebrew Lilith is thin or absent, and the Arslan Tash amulets' authenticity is disputed.
One word in Isaiah
The Hebrew Bible never tells a Lilith story. It uses the word lilit just once, in Isaiah 34:14, in a vision of a ruined land where wild creatures roam. Both the Jewish Women's Archive and Wikipedia make this point. What the word means there is debated: Wikipedia says interpretations range from a female demon to a night bird. The King James Version translated it "screech owl", and other translations say "night creature" or "night monster". There is no Lilith in Genesis.
The earliest clear mention of Lilith as a demon, according to Wikipedia, is in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Songs of the Sage, in which a teacher proclaims God's splendour to frighten off destructive spirits, including liliths.
Bowls, amulets and the Talmud
The best physical evidence for belief in liliths comes from ordinary pottery. The Jewish Women's Archive describes Aramaic incantation bowls made in Babylonia, roughly 400 to 800 AD, by Jewish, Christian, Mandaean and pagan neighbours alike. Spells were written on the bowls, often around a drawing of a bound demon, to drive evil spirits from a home. Liliths appear on them as male and female spirits that haunt dreams, attack in the sexual realm and harm children. Strikingly, some bowls use the language of a divorce document to send a lilith away, a detail Wikipedia also notes.
The Babylonian Talmud mentions Lilith a handful of times. Both sources quote its warning that a man should not sleep alone in a house, lest a lilith seize him. The Archive adds that the Talmud describes her with wings and long hair, matching drawings on the bowls. Wikipedia notes that some later rabbinic authorities, including Maimonides, rejected the existence of Lilith altogether, a reminder that Jewish tradition has never spoken with one voice on her.
Adam's first wife
The famous Eden story first appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Hebrew work. The Jewish Women's Archive describes it as a provocative, often misogynist satire of the eighth century; Wikipedia says scholars date it between the 8th and 10th centuries and notes that while some call it satire, the folklorist Louis Ginzberg thought it was meant seriously.
In this tale, as the Archive retells it, God makes Lilith from the earth, just as he made Adam. The two quarrel at once because Lilith insists they are equal, both having been made from the earth. She speaks God's name and flies away. God sends three angels to bring her back; she refuses and says she was made to harm newborn infants. They agree to a bargain: she will spare any child protected by an amulet bearing the angels' names. The Archive notes that the tale seems designed to explain amulets against Lilith that were already in use, and that such amulets can still be bought in Jerusalem today.
Queen of the Other Side
In medieval Kabbalah, Lilith grew into a figure of cosmic evil. The Jewish Women's Archive explains that a 13th-century text, the Treatise on the Left Emanation, made her the partner of Samael, an evil angel, and that the Zohar developed the pair as the dark mirror of holy male and female powers. Wikipedia likewise records the Zohar's description of her as a fiery female who first lay with man. In this tradition she seduces men and threatens newborns.
A feminist icon
Then came a dramatic reversal. The Archive says that in 1972 Lilly Rivlin wrote about Lilith for Ms. magazine to reclaim her for modern women, and that the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, founded in 1976, took its name from her fight for equality with Adam. The theologian Judith Plaskow's retelling of the story helped turn the demon into a role model, and the name later passed to Lilith Fair, a touring festival of music by women, which Wikipedia also lists.
Legend vs evidence
Popular belief: The Bible says Lilith was Adam's first wife. Evidence: It does not. That story comes from a medieval text written well over a thousand years after Genesis.
Popular belief: Lilith is an invention of the Middle Ages. Evidence: Also untrue. Belief in lilith-demons is ancient, attested in a Dead Sea Scroll, in the Talmud and on hundreds of years of amulet bowls. What the Middle Ages added was her biography.
For believers, Lilith has meant very different things: a danger to guard against, a figure of evil, or a symbol of independence. Her history shows how a single word can gather centuries of fears and hopes around it.