Lilith

The claim that Lilith was Adam's first wife, made from the same earth, who refused to lie beneath him and left Eden speaking the divine name, is repeated as though it were a suppressed passage of Genesis. It comes from a single medieval text, and that text is probably a satire.

Genesis contains two creation accounts. In the first, God creates humankind male and female. In the second, God forms the man and later the woman from his side. Medieval commentators noticed the discrepancy, and the story of a first wife is one way of resolving it. It is a reading of the tension, not a report of a lost verse.

The narrative appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous Hebrew work of roughly the eighth to tenth century, most likely from the Islamic east. The work is a collection of stories built around proverbs, and it is bawdy, irreverent and full of material that reads as deliberately outrageous, it has been argued to be a parody of rabbinic literature, possibly aimed at rabbinic exegetical method itself, and possibly an anti-Christian or anti-rabbinic squib. Scholars disagree about its purpose; almost none read it as a straight repository of ancient tradition.

Earlier Lilith material exists and is different. The Babylonian Talmud mentions a lilith with long hair and wings, in passing, as a demon of the night. The Hebrew Bible has the word once, in Isaiah 34:14, in a list of desert creatures inhabiting a ruin, where it may be a night bird or a demon and translators have never agreed.

The rest is later Kabbalah, which developed her considerably, and the twentieth century, which developed her again.

Behind the Hebrew word stands a genuinely ancient Mesopotamian complex, and the relationship is real but looser than usually claimed.

Akkadian sources have lilu and lilitu, and Sumerian has related terms, denoting a class of wind or night spirits associated with sexual predation, sleep and harm. Distinct from and often confused with them is Lamashtu, a specifically child-killing demon against whom protective amulets survive in quantity, frequently invoking Pazuzu as a counter-force. The etymology connecting the Hebrew word to the Akkadian is accepted; the assumption that a single continuous figure runs from Sumer to the Talmud is not supportable, and the popular claim that Lilith was originally a Sumerian goddess rests on a reading of a passage in the Gilgamesh material that its own translator later withdrew.

The function that carried across is protective magic. Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, buried under house floors, name liliths among the spirits being bound, and Jewish amulets to protect women in childbirth and newborn infants against Lilith were in use into the modern period.

The reclamation is recent and explicit about being recent. From the 1970s, Jewish feminist writers took the Ben Sira story and read the refusal to lie beneath as a refusal of subordination, deliberately reversing the polarity of a text that had presented it as monstrous. The magazine named for her began in 1976. This is a knowing reinterpretation rather than a recovery of a suppressed original, and the writers who made it have generally said so.