As writers, we get to have fun with the idea: ‘What if this character really existed?” Since it’s October and the season for fear and frights, in this post we’ll take a look at Lilith, a nasty creature who shows up with annoying regularity in my heroine Romy’s life. They don’t play well together, to put it mildly.
In Jewish lore, Lilith was the first wife of the Biblical Adam, was apparently made from the same soil as Adam, as opposed from one of his body parts (a rib, like Eve). She refused to ‘obey’ her arrogant and high-handed companion, and they argued a lot. Then, in a fit of pique, she stamped her feet and said God’s “ineffable” name (one that was “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”; https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/).
Now completely in God’s bad graces, she picked up and flew away, having gained the power to do that by saying the name. The scriptures don’t make clear whether she did it on purpose to achieve that result, or if it was just a happy fringe benefit, but she then became a ‘winged devil’ for all time.
God then told Adam that he must bring Lilith to heel, and if she failed to return, 100 of her children would die every single day. Since she wasn’t having carnal relations with Adam, presumably she made them with a dark archangel named Samael. More on him in a bit.
God sent three angels, Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammangelof,after Lilith. They found her in a cave busily having hundreds of children, but she refused to return to Eden, and went on to spend thousands of years kidnapping and killing babies out of revenge for the whole affair. However, she swore, in the name of God, that she wouldn’t touch any infant wearing an amulet with her name on it.
Back to the archangel Samael. His very name means Venom/Poison of God, so that’s a clue to both his personality and function among the angelic hosts. In the Book of Job, he appeared as Satan in the role of an angel of death, whom God asked to assess Job’s piety. Samael believed that Job loved God only because of his good fortune, and that if such happiness were taken away from him, he’d then curse God instead. Samael was then allowed to inflict numerous trials upon Job to test his hypothesis – killing his children and household servants, making Job break out in boils among them – and even Job’s wife wanted him to turn away from God, but Job persisted in his faith.
Samael was considered to be a messenger of death, and was the leader of all the destroying angels, meting out both punishment and torment. He even masterminded the fall of Adam and Eve. Having planted the Tree of Knowledge, which didn’t earn him any brownie points with God, he plotted his revenge by turning into a serpent and tempting Eve into sinning.
So, not a great creature for Lilith to hang out with and become intimate. Her name is Sumerian, from lilû, lilîtu, which some scholars meant ‘night bird’, but also ardat lilī, a sexually frustrated and infertile female who attacks young men. Missing Samael, one supposes. She was generally considered to be a lascivious demon of the night. It was a venerable patriarchal attitude towards women who wanted to live their own lives and enjoy sexual freedom. To drive home the point, it was said that her breasts were filled with poison instead of milk, making her a hazardous one-night stand.
She was considered such a threat that Jewish rabbis recommended that men not sleep alone in a home, as they’d fall prey to Lilith’s appetites. Her ‘monstrous’ children were the infamous incubi and succubi, those ravenous male and female demons who’d tempt humans into sexual misadventures. I imagine many a scene in homes over the centuries where one of the spouses misbehaved and claimed, “A succubus/incubus made me do it!” 😉
Lilith didn’t make a lot of guest appearances in ancient religious texts, but when she did, she was expected to wreak havoc.
In a single mention in the Hebrew Bible of a prophecy about the fate of Edom (an ancient kingdom covering the south of present-day Jordan and Israel), her retribution would consist of (Isaiah 34 (NAB) ):
(12) Her nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there; all her princes are gone. (13) Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. (14) Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the Lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest. (15)
The Latin Bible, (Isaiah (Isaias Propheta) 34.14, Vulgate), referring to Lilith as a “lamia”, states that:
“And demons shall meet with monsters, and one hairy one shall cry out to another; there the lamia has lain down and found rest for herself”.
The legend of Lilith spread from Babylon to other countries in the Mediterranean basin. She has always represented seduction, ungodliness and chaos, but in modern times she’s become a symbol for women who choose to live life on their own terms.
Of course, all this rich material has given writers a lot to mess with over the centuries. Robert Browning’s poem depicted Lilith and Eve as friendly with each other, and complicitous. Eve even admitted that she never loved Adam, while Lilith said that she always had, and rather pined for him.
Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti proposed that the snake in the Garden of Eden was Lilith’s lover, who loaned her its shape so that she could return to Eden and become the temptress of the Tree of Knowledge transgression in disguise.
In my books, I’ve equated her with Leviathan, or Tiamat, a primordial sea serpent dwelling in the watery abyss who at some point is defeated by the god Marduk. But you’ll have to read the books to find out the rest of her story 😊