Lilit, Lilim

לילית

From Layil (ליל) = "night", the same root that gives the Aramaic Delilah, and the Mesopotamian En-Lil.

The Lilim (ללים) were nocturnal spectres (though they were also screech-owls, as per Isaiah 34:14), equivalent to the Greek Empusae, and Lilit (Lilith in English) herself the equivalent of Empusa, or Hecate, was their mother; indeed the mother of what we now call witchcraft but in the ancient world was simply the rites and ceremonies of the cult of the three-part moon goddess: new moon (Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Maid Marian, Mary Magdalene), full moon (Madonna), waning moon (wicked step-mother, Hecate, Snow Queen).

She was made from filth and sediment rather than from pure dust as Adam was. The Talmud says she took the form of a beautiful woman and lay in wait for children at night. Arabian myths speak of Ghules (whence our ghouls), female monsters who inhabited the desert and tore men to pieces. Isaiah 34:14 speaks of various monsters of the Edomite desert, but his are clearly linked to the goddess as owl, which is to say Anat (ענת), the wife of Ba'al (whose Greek equivalent Athene was also an owl-goddess). To the Beney Kena'an she was Lilit, which was also their word for the scritch-owl (which we now call the "screech-owl, though actually it doesn't - see Shakespeare's "Midsummer's Night Dream, Act 1, Scene 5,).

The Talmud also speaks of her as the first wife of Adam; but as such she was completely excised from the Tanach by the Ezraic Redactor. References do remain though, particularly in Isaiah 34:14, where she is pictured as "inhabiting desolate ruins".

She appears as the fertility-goddess Lillake in the Sumerian "Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree" (from the Chaldean Lilitu = "a wind spirit"), where she is a demoness who dwells in the trunk of a willow tree; the tree is tended by Inanna - who is Anat - on the banks of the Perat (Euphrates). But in Yehudit Lilit connects etymologically to Layil = "night", whence she becomes a night spirit. In the Moslem tradition, Shelomoh (Solomon) thought the Queen of Sheba (who is named Bilqīs) was Lilit because she had hairy legs! 

Adam is said in the Midrashim to have coupled with this demoness (Lilit, not Bilqīs) and produced Asmodeus, the oldest form we have of a fallen angel (but not ha Satan). By all accounts Adam and Lilit were never happy, mostly because he preferred the missionary position which required her to lie beneath him: which she refused on the grounds that, in Genesis 1:27, Elohim had declared them equal. Adam tried to force her (typical male!), but Lilit, in the first recorded act of true feminist self-assertion, pronounced the magic name of Elohim, and vanished.

Some Midrashim claim that his next helpmeet was Na'amah, the sister of Tuval Kayin, from whom a host of other demons were produced who still plague Humankind (no need to name them!). Later, again according to Midrash, though the Bible text does not explicitly name them (1 Kings 3:16 ff) Na'amah and Lilit both turned up at Shelomoh's throne disguised as harlots; the tale that Brecht would transform into "The Caucasian Chalk Circle".

Honoré Daumier’s drawing of a nightmare (1856)

After Lilit's disappearance, Adam complained to Elohim (not YHVH), who sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Sewmangelof to fetch her back – clearly not Yehudit names nor Yisra-Eli demons. They found her at the Red Sea, coupling endlessly with the local demons and producing Lilim (night spirits) at the rate of more than a hundred per day, a female equivalent of the Greek Ouranos, who was castrated by his sons in order to arrest his proliferations. Lilit refused to return. She was later held responsible for strangling infants in the womb and seducing dreaming men; the origin of the nightmare, for she was also depicted as a female horse.

Elohim then made the First Chavah (Eve), allowing Adam to watch as he composed her out of bits of his own body (Genesis 2:21; the fifth rib, according to Jewish tradition, the same one in which the javelin was pressed at the Crucifixion - John 19:34). The process disgusted Adam to such a degree that he refused to have anything to do with her. Elohim took her away, and made the Second Chavah while Adam was in a trance: whether from the rib or from the tail is a matter of Midrashic dispute; but the latter seems a good, healthy aetiological explanation of the coccyx.

In yet another version Elohim created Adam and Chavah at the same time, as a single androgynous creature facing each other with two heads: like Siamese twins; he then cut them apart as Marduk did Tiamat, allowing them to reunite only for the purpose of procreation.

Until the late Middle Ages Jews made amulets to wear as a protective charm against the Lilim; and her offspring, in the Arab world, became identified with the djinni, though these are also associated with mosquitoes (who are actually a far greater trouble than any night-spirits!)

To the Greeks the Empusae had the haunches of asses and wore shoes of brass; they liked to upset travelers by hurling abuse at them, disguised either as female animals or beautiful maidens; again a source of the night-mare.

The Transylvanian vampire-bats named the Draculae are evidently a later version of the Lilim or Empusae, specifically in those creatures' predilection for lying with men at night and sucking their vital forces from them till they die. The male Dracula invented by Bram Stoker (stolen by Bram Stoker, actually, from John Polidori's 1812 short story "The Vampyre", itself borrowed, this time with permission, from an unfinished tale of his friend Lord Byron) is a mythological falsehood: the Lilim and Draculae and Empusae were unequivocally female.

Hecate, as noted above, is part of the moon-triad, in which the goddess appears as maiden (waxing), mother (full), and grandmother (waning). The grandmother governs the phase of dying and is thus also the consort of the ruler of the Underworld. She is associated with Aphrodite and Hera. In the pre-Moslem world, the Arabs regarded the triad as "the daughters of al-Lah" and named them al-Lat, al-Uzzah and Manat, with al-Lat as maiden, al-Uzzah as Madonna, and Manat as Hecate.

Those who think these goddess and shrine theories are ridiculous, may have changed their minds to some degree after reading this entry; and learning that so many of the tales not included in the final redaction of the Tanach were nonetheless retained as Midrash by the Rabbis in the Talmudic and post-Talmudic texts, is quite remarkably confirmatory. For anyone seriously interested in the sources of the Bible tales, whether as a believer or a sceptic, go and read Midrash, and then come back to these pages. They will surprise your credulity much less when you return.

I have also attached a link (here) to a splendid piece by Naomi Gryn, the beloved daughter of one of the modern world's greatest Rabbis, Hugo Gryn; Naomi's piece retells the myth of Lilit from the female perspective, and does so very beautifully.

Copyright © 2020 David Prashker

All rights reserved

The Argaman Press