Why, hello there! Check out this little piece of my senior thesis! If you're wondering about the title of this blog post, this link might help :)
Few mythological figures can claim a history of belief as long as that of Lilith. She exists, albeit in different forms, in legends ranging from the time of Mesopotamia to the middle ages. Though details have changed, certain key elements of her mythology persist unchanged throughout the ages: Lilith interrupts the natural cycle of fertility, kills children, seduces men, and defies the male authority deemed ‘right’ and ‘natural.’ Though belief in her existence no longer persists, she still serves as an inspiration for writers and artists, a seductive yet demonic woman who destroys rather than procreates.
Though the Torah only references Lilith once, she also appears a few times in the Talmud, Jewish extracanonical explanations of biblical passages. These mentions, though brief, provide a context for the way in which Lilith was adapted from the ancient Babylonian cosmology to Judaic tradition. For the rabbis, the scripture was the word of God and thus every word should be taken literally. Due to this literal reading, contradictions in the scripture sometimes arose. In the case of Lilith, the contradiction arises between the two different creation narratives found in the book of Genesis. Genesis 1:27 reads: "male and female he created them,” implying that man and woman were created simultaneously, assumedly in the same way. However, in the second biblical account of creation, Adam is created and then Eve is later created from his rib. These two differing account of creation led Rabbis to determine that the woman created subsequently with Adam in Genesis 1:27 was a different woman than Eve, and they named Lilith as that first wife (Hellig 42-44).
A later Jewish text, called The Alphabet of Ben Sira, provides further illumination on the legend surrounding Lilith as Adam’s first wife. In this text, it is said that Lilith believed that she was Adam’s equal due to the fact that they were both created from the dust of the earth. She refused to lie beneath Adam during sex because she felt that this would mean taking an ‘inferior’ position to him. When Adam refused to allow this, Lilith fled from Eden to the desert across the Red Sea, where she took up with demons. God sent three angels to bring her back to Eden but she refused. Because of this, she was punished to have 100 of her demonic children die every day. From here, Lilith becomes a succubus who seduces men at night, using their nocturnal emissions to breed more demons. Due to her anger at God’s punishment that 100 of her own children should die daily, she strangles newborn humans to death. In the way that the Babylonian Lilith interrupts fertility by keeping Inanna from ascending her throne, this Lilith interrupts fertility by using her demonic powers to cause the death of infants, miscarriages, infertility, and complications during childbirth (Patai 295-296).
