﻿What does the Bible say about Lilith? Is she really the first wife of Adam?
You’re just about to find out.
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Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome to my channel.
I’m a Ph.D. and a university lecturer, and this is your online resource for the academic study
of magic, esotericism, paganism, shamanism, and related currents.
In this video, we are going to talk about Lilith and her representation in the Bible.
Lilith. Rebellious demon, Pagan deity,
Feminist icon, even. But what does the Bible really say about her? What role does she play?
In Jewish and Christian folklore, Lilith is depicted as the first
and disobedient wife of Adam. Interestingly, though,
this concept is nowhere to be found in either the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament.
This perception of Lilith, in fact, derives from rabbinic interpretations of the Genesis stories.
In these passages, you find two different stories of the creation. In the first one, God creates
THE Adam – as in, humankind – both female and male, whereas in the second story you have God
creating Adam, the first man, and then Eve, the first woman from his rib. In an attempt to read
two subsequent and different accounts of God’s creation as one coherent narrative, the idea
of ‘The Adam’ as being comprised of the well-known first man, Adam, and another woman arose.
The concept of Lilith being this woman and the first wife of Adam, who disappears from creation
due to her rebellious nature was possibly informed by accounts of this figure found in
Talmudic literature and Aramaic incantation texts uncovered in Nippur, in Babylon.
The only occurrence of ‘Lilith’ in the Bible is found in one of the books of the Hebrew Bible,
also known as the Old Testament by Christians and specifically in Isaiah 34:14
as part of a narrative that describes the ruins of Edom after the divine judgement.
And the passage says; “The wild beasts of the desert shall meet with the howlers and the
wild goats shall call to each other; Lilith shall settle there, and shall find a place
of rest there shall the owl nest and lay and hatch and brood in its shadow”.
It is important to notice that some translators/redactors of this passage
kept ‘Lilith’ while others rendered it as a donkey-centaur or as ‘Lamia’, a Greek
child-eating female demon. In the Qumran rolls ‘Lilith’ appears in the plural as Liliyyot. So,
the Biblical Lilith refers clearly to the Mesopotamian demon. As de Gruyter suggest,
Isaiah 34 is a likely a text dating back to the Persian period and hence possibly authored by a
Jewish scribe in exile in Babylon, learning there about the demoness and placing her as a character
inhabiting the ruins of a desolate wilderness brought about by the God of the Bible.
Lilith is probably an adaptation of the Akkadian Lilitu, which comes from the Sumerian
Lil. She appears for the first time in a Sumerian text on Gilgamesh as a female demon
linked to stormy winds. Akkadian texts show the triad of demons: Lilu,
Lilitu, (w)ardat Lili as ruling over the winds and living in ruins and living in ruins, which might
explain why in the Qumran Rolls Lilith appears in the plural form. The latter two of the triad,
Lilitu, (w)ardat Lili, are also related to sexual fears and fantasies and they all seduce and kill
young men. Lilitu cannot bear children. In fact, she kills them with poison that comes from her
breasts. Due to these features, she had been associated to Lamashtu since 2nd millennium BCE.
To sum it up, Lilith is only found in the Bible as – depending on the translation-
a demon, a spirit, or a night bird populating the ruins of the city of Edom
after the divine judgement. The figure of Lilith as a rebellious woman
is inspired by a number of different texts and folk tales that have been employed to interpret
the two different accounts of the creation in the book of Genesis as one coherent story.
Lilith as the first wife of Adam is, therefore,
not present in the Bible but a product of later interpretations mixing folklore,
Talmudic material, and Babylonian texts to make the biblical creation into a unitarian narrative.
So, What do you think? Was this surprising to you?
Let me know in the comments section. Also, do tell me if you’d be interested in knowing more
about Lilith, for instance, the engagement with this figure on the part of contemporary Pagans,
the Feminist reinterpretations as well as what the Talmud and other Aramaic texts say about her.
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