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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Lilith
A night demon named once in Isaiah, in a list of creatures living in a ruin.
Isaiah 34:14, in every translation this tool compares.
One appearance, in a list of creatures left living in a ruin. English versions cannot agree whether she is a night creature, a screech owl or a night monster. Everything else people know about Lilith comes from later Jewish writing, not from this verse.
One occurrence, in a list of desert creatures living in Edom's ruins. English versions render it night creature, screech owl, or night monster, and the Vulgate keeps lamia. The Talmudic Lilith material is specific and separate from the Ben Sira legend below. Eruvin 100b and Niddah 24b describe her as a demon with long hair and wings, Shabbat 151b warns a man not to sleep alone in a house in case Lilith finds him, and Bava Batra 73a makes her the daughter of Ahriman, the Zoroastrian opponent of Ohrmazd, the same Persian dualism that reshaped Satan and the devil in this period. None of these passages give her an origin as Adam's equal; that detail belongs to Ben Sira alone.
H3917 (לִילִית), 1 occ
A Mesopotamian night demon attested well before Isaiah, with roots in the third millennium BC and in the Sumerian lil, "wind" or "spirit." The Babylonian Lilitu was a female spirit unable to bear children who poisoned infants from her breasts, associated with storm winds and with escaping houses through windows, and amulets and records show real popular fear of the lilu, a class of malevolent demons believed to attack infants and mothers in childbirth. DDD (M. Hutter) traces the figure to the Sumerian epic "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld." Inanna plants a tree meaning to make a throne and a bed from it, but a snake nests in its roots, the Anzu bird settles in its crown, and the demon ki-sikil-lil-la makes her home in the trunk, so Gilgamesh has to cut the tree down to clear all three out. From the Middle Babylonian period on, Lilitu was merged with Lamashtu, the child-killing demon, and the ancient versions translate Isaiah 34:14 accordingly: the LXX has onokentauros, a donkey-centaur (echoing amulets that show Lamashtu standing on a donkey), Aquila transliterates "Lilith," and Symmachus and Jerome's Vulgate both give lamia, which Jerome's commentary glosses as an Erinys, a Greek fury.
Animal or demon. English versions give night creature, screech owl or night monster, which keeps the verse inside a list of wild animals. The demon reading leans on the Mesopotamian Lilitu, which DDD's Hutter traces back to the Sumerian Gilgamesh material, and on Aquila keeping the name and Symmachus and the Vulgate giving lamia. One occurrence cannot settle it.
Everything about Adam's first wife. That story comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval work that Eli Yassif, who produced its critical edition, places among the Jews of Abbasid Iraq in the ninth and tenth centuries. It was revised repeatedly, survives in more than a hundred manuscripts, and reached print only much later, at Constantinople and then Venice in 1544, and it isn't in Isaiah, the Talmud's Lilith passages, or any ancient Jewish source in that form. In it Lilith is created from the earth alongside Adam as his equal, refuses sexual subservience, speaks the divine Name, and flies off to the Sea of Reeds; when angels come to bring her back she says she would rather be a demon, and God makes Eve instead. It is a medieval recasting of the old Mesopotamian night demon as a figure of primordial rebellion.
- Isaiah 34:14
- Christian M. M. Brady, "Lilith," Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 810
- M. Hutter, DDD s.v. "Lilith," 520-521
- Eli Yassif, "Alphabet of Ben Sira," *Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception* 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), cols. 876-878
- Eli Yassif, *Sippurei Ben Sira bi-Yemei ha-Beinayim* (critical edition; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1984)
- David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., *Rabbinic Fantasies* (Yale Judaica Series, 1998), for an English translation of the Lilith passage
