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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > October 2001

Lilith

Seductress, heroine or murderer?

By Janet Howe Gaines

For 4,000 years Lilith has wandered the earth, figuring in the mythic imaginations of writers, artists and poets. Her dark origins lie in Babylonian demonology, where amulets and incantations were used to counter the sinister powers of this winged spirit who preyed on pregnant women and infants. Lilith next migrated to the world of the ancient Hittites, Egyptians, Israelites and Greeks. She makes a solitary appearance in the Bible, as a wilderness demon shunned by the prophet Isaiah. In the Middle Ages she reappears in Jewish sources as the dreadful first wife of Adam. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo portrayed […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Tzvi Abusch, “Gilgamesh: Hero, King, God and Striving Man,” AO 03:04.

2.

But see David R. Freedman, “Woman, a Power Equal to Man,” BAR 09:01.

Endnotes

1.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty,” in The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928), p. 183.

2.

James Joyce, Ulysses, chap. 14, “Oxen of the Sun.”

3.

All Gilgamesh quotations are from Samuel N. Kramer, Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree: A Reconstructed Sumerian Text, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Assyriological Studies 10 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1938).

4.

Translated by Theodor H. Gaster in Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith—The First Eve (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon, 1992), p. 66. Another translation does not mention Lilith’s name and reads, “Be off, terrifying ones, terrors of my night.”

5.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Bible quotes are from TANAKH: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

6.

These items may arise from Lilith’s association with darkness. Some translators and commentators have mistaken the etymology of Lilith’s name. Lilith, lylyt [tylyl], was not derived from the Hebrew word for night, lylh [hlyl], as they supposed. Instead, Lilith’s name originated in her depiction as a mythic Mesopotamian fiend and foe of Gilgamesh.

7.

4Q510. See Joseph M. Baumgarten, “On the Nature of the Seductress in 4Q184,” Revue de Qumran 15 (1991–1992), pp. 133–143.

8.

All talmudic references are to The Babylonian Talmud, trans. Isidore Epstein, 17 vols. (London: Soncino, 1948).

9.

Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enlarged ed. (Detroit: Wayne State, 1990), p. 226.

10.

The translation is my own. The full Hebrew text of The Alphabet of Ben Sira is found in Ozar Midrashim: A Library of Two Hundred Minor Midrashim (New York: J.D. Eisenstein, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 35–49.

11.

All references to the Zohar are to the edition translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, 2nd ed. (London: Soncino, 1984), vol. 1.

12.

David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).

13.

Joseph Adler, “Lilith,” Midstream 45:5 (July/August 1999), p. 6.

14.

Rossetti, “Eden Bower,” in Poems (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873), pp. 31–41.

15.

Judith Plaskow Goldenberg, “Epilogue: The Coming of Lilith,” in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 341–343.

16.

Pamela White Hadas, “The Passion of Lilith,” in In Light of Genesis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980), pp. 2–19.