Lilith, the Night Demon

Lilith’s story begins long before the Bible, in ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerian and Akkadian texts speak of a group of demons called lilu, lilitu and ardat lili, spirits connected with wind, storms and the night. The female ardat lili was imagined as a young woman who had died unmarried and who prowled in search of men. Incantations to drive such demons away were part of everyday religious practice. Most scholars think the Hebrew name Lilith derives from this Mesopotamian word, which is probably related to a Sumerian term for wind or air rather than to the Hebrew word for night.

In the Hebrew Bible Lilith appears only once. Isaiah 34 describes the coming desolation of Edom, a land where thorns will grow in the fortresses and wild animals will roam. Among them, “there too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest”. The Hebrew word was hard for translators. The Latin Vulgate rendered it lamia, a female monster of Greek legend, and the King James Version chose “screech owl”. Many modern translations keep the name Lilith or use “night hag” or “night creature”.

Lilith appears again in the Dead Sea Scrolls. A text known as the Songs of the Sage lists “liliths” among the demons and spirits that the wise teacher drives away by proclaiming the majesty of God. By the turn of the era, she had become one of a host of evil spirits that Jews of the Second Temple period sought to keep at bay.

Lilith became most vivid in Jewish Babylonia in late antiquity. The Babylonian Talmud, completed around the sixth or seventh century, mentions her only a few times, but the details are memorable: she has long hair and wings, and a man should not sleep alone in a house lest Lilith seize him. Another passage, discussing unusual births, explains the “likeness of Lilith” as a form with wings.

Archaeology shows how widely she was feared. Many hundreds of clay incantation bowls survive from Mesopotamia in the period of the Sasanian Persian empire, roughly the fifth to seventh centuries CE. Spells were written on the inside in a spiral, often around a drawing of a bound demon, and the bowls were buried upside down under the floors of houses to trap evil spirits. Jews, Christians, Mandaeans and others used them, and Lilith is among the demons most often named. The bowls are vivid evidence of everyday religion, since they usually name the clients who commissioned them, identified by their mothers’ names, along with their children and households. Some bowls borrow the language of a Jewish bill of divorce, ordering Lilith to leave the household as a divorced wife leaves her husband’s home.

Most of all, Lilith was feared as a threat to mothers and newborn children. Like other demons of the ancient Near East, such as the Mesopotamian Lamashtu, she was blamed for deaths in childbirth and in infancy, a constant sorrow in the premodern world. Protection for mother and child became the central purpose of the amulets and spells that bore her name.

The best-known story of Lilith comes from a medieval Hebrew work called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, written somewhere in the Islamic world between about the eighth and tenth centuries. It is a strange, often irreverent text, and many scholars read it as partly satirical. In one episode, the sage Ben Sira writes an amulet to cure the king’s son and explains the names on it. When God created Adam, he says, he also created a woman from the earth, called Lilith. She refused to lie beneath Adam, insisting that they were equal because both had been made from earth. When Adam would not agree, she spoke the divine name and flew away to the Red Sea.

God sent three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, to bring her back. Lilith refused to return but swore that whenever she saw their names or images on an amulet, she would spare the child it protected. The story offered an explanation for a puzzle in Genesis, which seems to describe the creation of woman twice, and a reason for the familiar amulets. In later centuries, Jewish families in Europe and the Middle East hung amulets bearing the three angels’ names around the bed of a new mother, often with the formula “Adam and Eve, out Lilith”.

Medieval Kabbalah raised Lilith’s rank. In the Zohar and related writings of the thirteenth century, she becomes the consort of Samael, a prince of demons, and the queen of the “other side”, the realm of impurity that mirrors the divine world. She was also said to seduce men in their sleep and to bear demon children from them. These ideas shaped Jewish folklore and amulets for centuries.

In the nineteenth century Lilith entered European art and literature. Goethe has her appear briefly in the Walpurgis Night scene of Faust (1808), where Mephistopheles warns Faust against her beautiful hair. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Lady Lilith in the 1860s, a woman absorbed in combing her golden hair, and wrote a sonnet about her. John Collier’s Lilith of 1887 shows her entwined with a serpent. For these artists she embodied a dangerous, alluring femininity. The Scottish writer George MacDonald made her the title character of his fantasy novel Lilith (1895), and in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) the White Witch is said to descend from Lilith, Adam’s first wife.

The twentieth century turned her into a symbol of independence. In 1972 the theologian Judith Plaskow wrote The Coming of Lilith, a short retelling in which Lilith and Eve meet and become allies. In 1976 a Jewish feminist magazine took the name Lilith, and the Lilith Fair music festivals of the late 1990s celebrated women musicians. Some writers have presented her as an ancient goddess, though the ancient sources describe her as a demon.

Lilith’s long history shows how a figure can change entirely across the centuries: from a Mesopotamian wind demon, through a demon feared by mothers and a queen of the mystical underworld, to an emblem of equality. Each age has read in her its own fears and hopes.