Is Lilith in the Bible?

Genesis knows only Eve

The first pages of the Bible tell the making of humankind twice. In Genesis 1, man and woman are created together, on the sixth day.

God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.

In Genesis 2 the story starts again, closer in. The man is shaped from dust and lives alone among the animals, until God puts him to sleep and builds a woman from his side (Genesis 2:21–22). She is the only wife Adam has in the text, and he names her Eve (Genesis 3:20). There is no other woman, and no Lilith.

The two accounts did puzzle ancient readers. Some rabbis imagined the first human as two halves, later split apart (Genesis Rabbah 8:1). One spoke of a “first Eve” who had returned to dust (Genesis Rabbah 22:7). They noticed that when Adam greets the woman, the Hebrew says zot ha-pa’am, “this time,” as if there had been an earlier time. None of these teachers names Lilith.

The one verse with the word

The Hebrew word lilit appears once in the whole Bible, in a poem against Edom, Israel’s neighbor to the southeast. Isaiah pictures its cities abandoned, thorns in its palaces, and wild creatures moving in.

The wild animals of the desert will meet with the wolves, and the wild goat will cry to his fellow. Yes, the night creature shall settle there, and shall find herself a place of rest.

That night creature is lilit. Nobody is sure what Isaiah meant. Many scholars think of a night bird, in a list full of owls and jackals. Others hear the name of a female demon from Mesopotamian spells, the lilitu, spirits of wind and night. Translators split the same way:

• King James Version (1611): screech owl.
• Latin Vulgate (around AD 400): lamia, a child-snatching monster of Greek legend.
• Jerusalem Bible (1966) and New Revised Standard Version (1989): Lilith.
• World English Bible: night creature.

Whatever it is, Isaiah’s creature lives in ruins. It has nothing to do with Eden.

Where Adam’s first wife comes from

The story most people know comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous Hebrew book written between the 8th and 10th centuries AD. In it the sage Ben Sira, called to the court of Nebuchadnezzar, writes an amulet for the king’s sick son and explains it with a tale. God made Lilith from the earth, just as he made Adam. She refused to lie beneath him, saying they were equal, since both came from the earth. Then she spoke God’s secret name and flew away. Three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, caught up with her at the sea, but she would not go back. She agreed only to spare any baby protected by an amulet with their names.

Scholars still argue whether the book is serious folklore or a sly parody. It is the oldest surviving source for the first-wife story, written more than a thousand years after Isaiah.

A demon before she was a wife

Lilith was feared long before she was married off to Adam. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Songs of the Sage, names her in a list of demons to drive away. The Babylonian Talmud warns against sleeping alone in a house, lest Lilith seize the sleeper (Shabbat 151b). In Babylonia, between about AD 300 and 600, families buried clay bowls under their houses, inscribed in spirals with spells against liliths.

The modern Lilith is newer still. Goethe’s Faust (1808) has Mephistopheles point her out as Adam’s first wife. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her combing her long hair in Lady Lilith, and 20th-century feminists took her up as the first woman who refused to obey. Genesis tells none of it. The Bible’s whole Lilith is one word in Isaiah, and even that may be an owl.