LouBelle....The medieval and modern Jewish concept of Lilith as the first mate of Adam, created from the earth like himself but later replaced by Eve and banished, derives from a very late tradition, appearing no earlier than the Alphabet of Ben Sira (9th-10th century AD), which is the earliest known text that articulates this concept, and which actually was a comedic parody of rabbinic midrash. It employs the same eisegetical methodology of midrash, which seeks to maximize information from a text (usually by reading between the lines and interpreting the language creatively, such as using names as points of departure of embellishing the narrative) and resolve discrepensies such as the one between the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and ch. 2-3. There are countless other examples of this kind of midrash in the rabbinics. The author of the satirical Alphabet created the legend by importing the pre-existing superstition of lilith demons into the text of Genesis as an explanation of why the creation of woman was mentioned twice in the two accounts, which at the time was read as a single unified account.
The belief in female lilith (llyt) demons however is very old. It finds expression in Job 18:15, Isaiah 34:14; 11QpsAp, 4Q510 11:4-6a, Nidda 24b, Shab. 151b, etc. but it is nowhere connected with an Adam and Eve story. That connection was only made later in midrash. Job 18:15 (amended) suggests that lilith was a chthonic demon associated with Mot, Isaiah 34:14 designates the lilith as a demon of the wilderness, and 4Q510 11:4-6 mentions "all the spirits of the destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, the lilith, howlers, and desert dwellers". The Jewish Nippur Bowls (c. AD 500) attest the fear of the "wicked lilith" as a vampire who afflicts pregnant women. Nidda 24b relates that "lilith is a demoness who has a human face and has wings". These notions preserve the Akkadian (Babylonian) designation of the male lilu and the female lilitu as demons classed with the ardat lili "restless ghost" and the rabisu "lurking demon" (cf. Genesis 4:7). There were other female demons as well, such as the lamashtu -- scholars have suggested that the lilith of Jewish thought draws both on aspects of the lilitu and lamashtu. Notice that originally the liliths had male counterparts. One Assyrian text designates the male lilu as "the phantom of the night that in the desert roams abroad, unto the side of the wanderer has drawn night, casting a woeful fever upon his body" (Thompson, 97). Gilgamesh's father, according to the Sumerian King List, was a lilu. It must be recognized that the Hebrew llyt derives from the Akkadian lilitu, just as similarly chrwbym "cherubim" derives from the Akkadian karibu, and the Hebrew rbts "lurking demon" derives from the Akkadian rabisu. The direction of dependence in the case of llyt is clear, for both Hebrew and Akkadian versions are derived from the Sumerian LIL "wind, spirit" (e.g. the god Enlil is "lord of spirits"). Jewish tradition has therefore adapted an older Akkadian mythology; note, for instance, that the lilitu was borrowed, but not the masculine lilu and the Jewish lilith traditions do not pair her with a being called Lilu or Lil. And none of the earlier sources portray the lilith as a wife of Adam or place the lilitu in an Edenic setting.
It is also important to recognize that there wasn't a single tradition about Lilith and Adam but several different traditions that do not mesh well.R. Moses de Leon combined these together in the Zohar (13th century AD) without making much attempt to reconcile them. I thus see little reason to privilege the Alphabet tradition as the "real Lilith tradition" over the other traditions wherein the backstory of Adam and/or Lilith is altogether different. We may thus note how R. Isaac b. Jacob Ha-Qohen designated Lilith as the mate of the arch-demon Samael who were both created in the same hour "in the image of Adam and Eve" (Trestise, 19, 22). The Genesis Rabbah 18.4, 22.7, on the other hand, claimed that Adam had a first wife called "the first Eve" who was later replaced, but nowhere is she called "Lilith" and there is no reason to think that she should be identified with Lilith. The tradition diverges from the Alphabet tradition in many ways: The "first Eve" was removed from Adam not because a dispute over sexual dominance but because Adam was disgusted by watching the process of her creation and seeing her "discharge and blood". Furthermore, by the time the second Eve gave birth to Cain, the first Eve did not live on as a demoness but rather "had returned to dust" (22.7). An even older tradition from the Talmud, I believe, is truer to the mythological background of the Lilith and Eve myths:
"Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar said, "During those years after their expulsion from the Garden, during which Adam, the first man, was separated from Eve, he became father to ghouls and demons and Lilin." Rabbi Meir said, "Adam, the first man, being very pious and finding that he had caused death to come into the world, sat fasting for 130 years, and separated himself from his wife for 130 years, and wore fig vines for 130 years. His fathering of evil spirits, referred to here, came as a result ofspontaneous emission of semen." (Erubin 18b).
Here the scene is not prior to the creation of Eve but after Adam's expulsion from the Garden, during which time he lived in isolation from Eve. The claim is that Adam spontaneously procreated the lilin, which were lilith-type spirits with human shape but with wings (Rashi, Sanhedrin 109a). Likewise Eve bore demons to the male spirits during the 130 year period. Thus all the demons were half-human (Hag. 16a), and one very late kabbalistic text refers to Lilith as the mother who collected Adam's semen and bore the lilin after her husband Samael had been castrated (Bacharach, 'Emeq ha-Melekh 19c, 84b-d). The description of demonic monsters being created through "spontaneous emission" is strikingly reminiscent of Hesiod's account of the Titans and Ouranos fathering all sorts of monstrous beings after his castration by bleeding onto Gaia. And the whole notion of "two Eves" or two wives of Adam derives from an attempt to reconcile the two creation accounts in Genesis, and the concept that the manner of Eve's creation was somehow different from someone else's can be found in the eccentric interpretation of z't h-p'm "This is now" in Genesis 2:23 as "This time". Thus the Alphabet and rabbinic traditions do not represent any early or original traditions which lay in the background of the Genesis accounts themselves.
An even later development in this folklore is the conflation of Lilith with Satan, making her a half-serpent female demon who was tempress of Eve. This "tradition", if it could be called as such, did not appear until 1648, when something vaguely like it was first articulated in Bacharach's 'Emeq ha-Melekh. The relevant passage is thus:
And the Serpent, the Woman of Harlotry, incited and seduced Eve through the husks of Light which in itself is holiness. And the Serpent seduced Holy Eve, and enough said for him who understands. An all this ruination came about because Adam the first man coupled with Eve while she was in her menstrual impurity -- this is the filth and the impure seed of the Serpent who mounted Evebefore Adam mounted her. Behold, here it is before you: because of the sins of Adam the first man all the things mentioned came into being. For Evil Lilith, when she saw the greatness of his corruption, became strong in her husks, and came to Adam against his will, and became hot from him and bore him many demons and spirits and lilin.
It was only through later Christian iconography and art that Lilith was firmly identified as being half-snake and the tempress of Eve (cf. Abel Pann's 1926 painting and Jappie King Black's 1980 painting, both which identify the figure as "Lilith"). The artistic representation of the Eden serpent in female form is a Christian art motif that originated outside of the kabbalistic tradition (cf. this painting from 1415), with no attempt being made in such works to identify the serpent explicitly with Lilith, and at any rate there is no Jewish story which corresponds to the pictorial representations. The one exception is the aforementioned Bacharach folktale, but it is confusing and quite problematic. The story is not of Eve's temptation at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but a sexual seduction by the Lilith-Serpent so that the Lilith-Serpent lay with Eve who was a virgin at the time and the semen that Lilith produced inside Eve was the origin of menstruation! This notion is totally alien to the rest of the Lilith tradition, both in representing Lilith as the serpent in Eden as well as portraying her as a semen-producing female serpent who had sex with Eve before Adam had the chance. Bacharach, in turn, was influenced by Moses Cordovero (1522-1570) and R. Isaac b. Jacob Ha-Kohen (thirteenth century AD) who did not identify Lilith with the serpent in Eden, but did describe her as "the Torturous Serpent" who mated with Samael (i.e. Satan) who was the "Slant Serpent". This, in turn, is derived from the much older concept of Lilith as the consort of the wicked demon Samael. Within this version of the Lilith tradition, Lilith was not Satan/Samael but rather his mate! And the notion of Lilith being serpentine derives not from a midrash of the Eden story (which nowhere enters Cordovero's and Ha-Kohen's depiction of Lilith) but from a midrash of Isaiah 27:1 which mentions "Leviathan the Slant Serpent, Leviathan the Tortorous Serpent, and the Dragon that is in the sea". Both Cordovero and Bacharach interpreted this as referring to THREE seperate individuals, Samael, Lilith, and a bizarre Blind Dragon who served as Samael's penis when he would mate with Lilith. All preceding material however does not characterize Lilith in serpentine terms and regarded her as distinct from the serpent in the Garden of Eden (= Samael or Satan). Thus b. Nidda 24b (before the sixth century AD) describes Lilith as "a demoness with a human appearance except that she has wings". This is just the description we get in the Arslan Tash amulet (7th century BC), and the mention of her "flying away" in the Alphabet of ben Sira (9th-10th century AD), so the concept of her being winged is certanly more ancient. In the later Ha-Kohen, Cordovero, and Bacharach material, where she does appear as the "Torturous Serpent", she is not Satan but the mate of Samael. In all the older medieval material, she is either the mate of Adam (cf. Alphabet) or the mate of Samael (cf. Zohar Sitrei Torah). Zohar 1:19b explicitly says that Lilith was banished from Eden after the creation of Eve (and thus could not have been the snake in the Garden), and the Alphabet even more pointedly claims that she had to be pursued by angels and steadfastly refused to return to the Garden. Moses b. Solomon of Burgos and R. Ya'aqov and R. Yitzhaq both describe as Samael and Lilith as born together androgynously, and R. Isaac b. Jacob Ha-Kohen similarly claimed that Samael and Lilith "were born at the same hour in the image of Adam and Eve, intertwined in each other" (Trestise 19-22). Yet, in the stream of tradition that knows nothing about Lilith as the consort of Samael, we find that Adam and Lilith were created together, "from the same earth" according to the Alphabet, or with "the female attached to his side" who God "sawed her off" from him (Zohar 1:34b, 3:19). In all this we see a complex, multivaried tradition with many different concepts of Lilith and how she related to Adam and Samael/Satan.
