The history of Lilith in sources

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Lilith’s story is easy to tell badly, because so many retellings mix sources from three thousand years apart. On this page I go source by source, in rough date order, so you can see what each text actually says. For the overview and a gentle first practice, start with my Lilith for beginners guide.

Mesopotamia: the huluppu tree, Lamashtu and Arslan Tash

Historical The Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld is often cited as the first Lilith story. In paraphrase, it runs like this. In the early days of the world, a tree, the huluppu (possibly a willow or poplar), is uprooted by the south wind from the banks of the Euphrates. The goddess Inanna rescues it and plants it in her garden in Uruk, hoping to make a chair and a bed from its wood. Years pass.

When the tree is grown, she finds it occupied. A snake “immune to incantations” lives at its roots. The Anzud bird, a mythical lion-headed eagle, nests with its young in its branches. In its trunk a female being has built herself a home. Inanna weeps. Her brother Gilgamesh takes his axe, kills the snake, and drives the others away. The female being leaves her dwelling and flees to the wilderness. Gilgamesh cuts the tree for Inanna’s furniture.

The female being in the trunk is called in Sumerian ki-sikil-lil-la. Ki-sikil means “young woman” or “maiden,” and lil connects her with the lilû-spirits. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford, a standard scholarly translation, renders her as “the phantom maid.” Other modern translators use phrases such as “demon-maiden” (Andrew George, in his Penguin translation) or “demon-girl” (Benjamin Foster). Most specialists now treat ki-sikil-lil-la as the Sumerian equivalent of the Akkadian ardat-lilî.

Historical Lamashtu was a fearsome female demon, described in incantations as the daughter of the sky god Anu. Texts say she attacked pregnant women, caused miscarriage, stole or harmed newborns, and brought fever and disease. Her images show a lion-headed, donkey-eared figure with bird talons, sometimes suckling a pig and a dog. People protected themselves with amulets, often clay or stone plaques, showing her being driven away. A favorite protector was Pazuzu, a demon king of the winds whose image was believed to frighten her off.

Historical One more object often appears in older books on Lilith. Two small limestone plaques from Arslan Tash, in northern Syria, were acquired in 1933 and published from 1939. They are inscribed with incantations in a Northwest Semitic script and carved with images of demons. Some early scholars dated them to the seventh century BCE and read the inscriptions as naming night-flying female demons, which they connected with Lilith. If correct, that would be one of the earliest Lilith-like references outside Mesopotamia.

The plaques are controversial. Their authenticity has been questioned, and even scholars who accept them disagree on how to read key words. I do not rely on them. If you meet a confident claim that “Lilith appears on a Syrian amulet from the seventh century BCE,” you now know it rests on a disputed object and a disputed reading.

Isaiah and the rabbis

Historical The setting of Isaiah 34:14 is worth noticing. The prophecy pictures a land emptied of people, where wild things move in. In the ancient Near East, ruins were places of danger and uncanniness. Texts from Mesopotamia and the Bible both describe abandoned cities as the haunt of jackals, owls, and spirits.

Historical The Targums are Aramaic translations and paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible, used in synagogues and study. They often expand the text. The Targum to Job, of uncertain date, renders “Sheba” in Job 1:15, the raiders who attack Job’s household, as “Lilith, queen of Zemargad” (Emerald). Later tradition linked Lilith with the Queen of Sheba. This shows that by late antiquity, some people were finding Lilith in biblical passages that do not name her.

The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Babylonia in roughly the same centuries as the incantation bowls, mentions lilit only a handful of times. Rabbi Hanina warns that a man should not sleep alone in a house, or lilit will seize him (Shabbat 151b). Another passage says a lilit has long hair (Eruvin 100b), another discusses a stillborn with lilit-like wings (Niddah 24b), and a story names a demon “son of Lilith” (Bava Batra 73a). These are passing remarks, not a mythology. The Jerusalem Talmud has no reliable mention, and the Mishnah, the earlier core of rabbinic law, none at all.

Incantation bowls and divorce writs

Historical Here is how an incantation bowl worked. A client, often a householder, went to a specialist who could write. The specialist took an ordinary clay bowl and wrote a spell on its inner surface in ink, usually starting at the center and spiraling outward. The text named the client, usually by their mother’s name (“so-and-so, son of so-and-so,” where the second name is the mother’s), and the people and things to be protected.

The spell might adjure demons by divine names, quote biblical verses, tell a short mythic story (called a historiola) about a past victory over demons, or use legal formulas such as a divorce writ. Some bowls were written by specialists of very high skill. Others contain errors or imitation writing, which suggests either less-trained writers or clients who valued the look of writing more than its content.

One of the most striking features of the bowls is the use of legal language. Some bowls frame the spell as a get, a bill of divorce, issued to Lilith. In Jewish law, a get formally ends a marriage and sends the wife away. Applying that form to a demon expresses a vivid idea: the lilith is an unwanted intruder in the household, a kind of false spouse, and she is being lawfully dismissed.

Montgomery’s 1913 edition includes a bowl (his Text 8) written for the house of a man named Geyonai and his wife Rasnoi. The same bowl mentions Joshua bar Perahia’s ban and a divorce writ “from heaven,” and a picture of a lilith decorates the bowl.

Ben Sira: the three angels and the medieval story

Later tradition In the Ben Sira story, three angels are sent after Lilith. The three angels are usually transliterated as Senoy (or Sanvi), Sansenoy (or Sansanvi), and Semangelof. Spellings vary widely in manuscripts and amulets. Their names do not appear in the Bible. Their meanings are uncertain. Some scholars think they may come from Greek or other non-Hebrew words that were reshaped over time.

The angels’ role in the story is not mainly to punish Lilith. It is to create the legal basis for an amulet. Lilith’s oath, sworn by God’s name, binds her. The amulet reminds her of it. In this sense, the Ben Sira episode reads like an origin story invented to explain a protective custom already in use.

From the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the first-wife story spread through later Jewish and Christian tradition:

• Amulets. The angels’ names and the “Lilith’s oath” motif became standard on Jewish birth amulets in Europe and the Middle East.
• Ashkenazi pietists and mystics. Medieval Jewish scholars in the Rhineland and elsewhere knew and used the story. Kabbalists in Spain wove it together with other traditions about Lilith.
• Christian Hebraists. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars studying Hebrew literature encountered the story. The Talmudic lexicon of the German Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf the Elder, completed by his son and published in 1639, helped bring the first-wife legend to a wider European audience. Some of these scholars presented it fairly. Others used it to mock Jewish tradition as superstitious.
• Art. Christian artists often painted the Eden serpent with a woman’s head; whether any of them meant Lilith is doubtful.

Kabbalah after the Zohar

Later tradition A few decades before the Zohar, a Castilian Kabbalist named Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen wrote a short work usually called the Treatise on the Left Emanation, around the 1260s or 1270s. He and his brother Jacob belonged to a circle of Kabbalists especially interested in the origin of evil.

The treatise describes a set of emanations on the “left side,” a demonic counterpart to the holy emanations. In it, Samael and Lilith are described as born together, joined as one being, in a way that mirrors Adam and Eve, who in some traditions were created joined. The treatise also distinguishes an elder Lilith, partner of Samael, from a younger Lilith, partner of Asmodeus.

In the sixteenth century, the town of Safed in the Galilee became a great center of Kabbalah. Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria, among others, developed new systems that drew on the Zohar. In their thought and that of their students, Lilith remains a central figure of the other side, connected with the husks, the kelipot.

Later Kabbalistic books, such as Emek ha-Melekh (“Valley of the King,” 1648), contain elaborate material on Lilith, her consort, and her hosts. Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess summarizes many of these passages for English speakers. They are dense, often disturbing, and written for a learned Jewish audience.

Alongside the books, household customs continued. In some Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, folklorists record customs such as a circle drawn around the bed of a woman in childbirth. Protective inscriptions might also be placed on the walls to keep Lilith and the evil eye away. Customs like these varied by region and period. Some survive in memory and some in practice.

Later tradition In Jewish Kabbalah. Kelipot (singular kelipah) means “husks” or “shells.” This is later tradition. In medieval Kabbalah, and especially in the teaching of Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed, the kelipot are the shells of impurity that surround and trap sparks of divine light. In Lurianic thought, creation involved a cosmic catastrophe, the “breaking of the vessels,” which scattered holy sparks into the world of the husks. Human beings, through the commandments and prayer, help lift the sparks and restore the world. The goal is to free the light from the husk, not to dwell in the husk.

Timeline of Lilith sources

Here is the whole story in date order, from ancient evidence to modern practice and scholarship.

Ancient evidence

• Third and second millennia BCE. Sumerian and Akkadian incantations and medical texts mention lilû, lilītu, and ardat-lilî spirits. Lamashtu appears in incantations and on amulets as a demon threatening mothers and infants.
• c. 1800 to 1750 BCE. The Burney Relief (Queen of the Night) is made in southern Mesopotamia. Linked with Lilith only from 1937.
• Early second millennium BCE (Old Babylonian copies). The Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, with the “phantom maid” (ki-sikil-lil-la) in Inanna’s tree.
• First millennium BCE. Tablet XII of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh translates the second half of the Sumerian poem (without the tree scene).
• Sixth or fifth century BCE (debated). Isaiah 34, with lilit in verse 14.
• Second century BCE. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran preserves the plural form liliyyot.
• Late first century BCE. The Songs of the Sage (4Q510 to 511), listing Lilith among spirits to be frightened away.
• c. 390 to 405 CE. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate renders lilit as lamia.
• c. fifth century CE. Genesis Rabbah, with the “first Eve” tradition (22:7; not named Lilith).
• c. fifth to seventh centuries CE. Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia, including divorce writs against liliths.
• c. sixth to seventh centuries CE. The Babylonian Talmud is completed, with brief references to lilit (Shabbat 151b, Eruvin 100b, Niddah 24b, Bava Batra 73a).

Later tradition

• c. eighth to tenth centuries CE. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, with the first surviving first-wife story and the three angels.
• c. 1260s to 1270s. Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen’s Treatise on the Left Emanation, Castile.
• c. 1280s onward. The Zohar, attributed by most scholars to Moses de León and his circle, Castile.
• Sixteenth century. Lurianic Kabbalah in Safed develops the teaching of the kelipot (husks).
• 1639. The Talmudic lexicon of Johannes Buxtorf the Elder, completed by his son, spreads the first-wife legend among Christian people.
• 1701. Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh printed in Amsterdam, spreading a standard birth amulet design.
• 1808. Goethe, Faust, Part One, with Lilith at Walpurgis Night.
• 1866 to 1868, reworked 1872 to 1873. Rossetti, Lady Lilith; sonnet first published 1868, later “Body’s Beauty.”
• 1883. Robert Browning, “Adam, Lilith, and Eve.”
• 1887. John Collier, Lilith.
• 1895. George MacDonald, Lilith.
• 1898. Georg Waldemath reports a supposed second moon, later called the Dark Moon.
• 1913. James A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur.
• 1927. Asteroid 1181 Lilith discovered (named after Lili Boulanger).
• 1930s. Kramer and Gadd translate ki-sikil-lil-la as “Lilith”; Kraeling, followed by Frankfort, links the Burney Relief with Lilith (1937).

Modern practice and scholarship

• 1941. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
• 1967. Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (later enlarged editions).
• 1972. Judith Plaskow’s “The Coming of Lilith,” written at Grailville; Lilly Rivlin’s Ms. article.
• 1974. Plaskow’s piece reprinted in Religion and Sexism.
• 1976. Lilith magazine founded.
• 1977. Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden, a key text for modern qliphothic occultism.
• 1980. Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith, die erste Eva (English 1992).
• 1990. Stern and Mirsky, Rabbinic Fantasies, with Norman Bronznick’s English Alphabet of Ben Sira.
• 1997 to 1999, 2010. Lilith Fair.
• 1998. Which Lilith? anthology.
• 2003. The British Museum acquires the Burney Relief and names it the Queen of the Night.
• Twenty-first century. Lilith becomes a widespread figure in modern witchcraft, astrology, and pop culture.

Where to go next

If you want to begin a practice, read my deity ethics page first, then the beginner’s practice on the Lilith pillar page.