Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Lilith appears in the Bible exactly once, as a single word in a single verse. Yet that one word has been translated as a monster, an owl, a night hag and a proper name, and each choice changed how readers pictured her. You will also often read that she was cut out of Genesis. In this lesson you will read the verse in its setting, see how translators handled it, meet her in the Dead Sea Scrolls and find out where the “cut from Genesis” idea really comes from.

One verse in a ruined land

Historical Isaiah 34 is a prophecy of judgment against Edom, a kingdom southeast of Judah. Its land turns to pitch and thorns, and wild creatures move into its ruins. Many scholars date this part of Isaiah to the sixth or fifth century BCE. In the middle of a list of animals, verse 14 says that a lilit will rest there and find a place of repose. That is all: one word, in a list of creatures that haunt ruins. In the ancient Near East, abandoned cities were uncanny places, the home of jackals, owls and spirits.

The other creatures in the verse

Historical Lilit is not alone in Isaiah 34:14. The verse also names wild animals, often translated as wildcats and hyenas, and the se’irim, literally “hairy ones”. The se’irim may be wild goats or goat-like demons, and translators disagree here too. The whole chapter paints a land so ruined that only wild and eerie creatures live there.

Read that way, the lilit is part of a picture of desolation. She is not the subject of the verse, and nothing is said about her history. That restraint is worth noticing, because so much has been built on so little.

How translators handled one word

Historical Translators had to choose, and their choices shaped how readers imagined her.

• The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, has no separate word for her and uses “donkey-centaurs” for the creatures in this verse.
• Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, around 390 to 405 CE, chose lamia, the child-devouring monster of Greek and Roman lore.
• The King James Version of 1611 has “screech owl”.
• The Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917 has “the night-monster”.
• Modern versions spread out: “night hag” in the Revised Standard Version (1952), “Lilith” in the New Revised Standard Version (1989), “night creature” in many others.

The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, copied in the second century BCE, even has a plural form, liliyyot.

The Songs of the Sage

Historical The Dead Sea Scrolls, found near Qumran from 1947, date from about the third century BCE to the first century CE. Two fragmentary copies of a work now called the Songs of the Sage (4Q510 and 4Q511), from around the late first century BCE, show a teacher proclaiming God’s majesty to frighten evil spirits away. In paraphrase, the list includes destroying angels, demons, Lilith, howlers and desert creatures. Here Lilith is a named hostile spirit, driven off by praise.

Was she cut from Genesis?

Later tradition There is no evidence that Lilith was removed from the Bible. Genesis has two accounts of the making of humans: “male and female” in Genesis 1:27, and the woman built from the man’s side in Genesis 2. Ancient readers noticed the difference. A midrash, Genesis Rabbah (about the fifth century CE), speaks of a “first Eve” but does not name her Lilith. The first-wife story is a later, creative answer to this puzzle, as we will see in lesson 4.

How the scrolls were found

Historical In 1947 Bedouin shepherds found the first scrolls in a cave near Qumran, by the Dead Sea. Over the next decade, eleven caves gave up fragments of around nine hundred manuscripts. The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the best preserved and is displayed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. You can now look at high-resolution images of many scrolls online for free, through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library and the Israel Museum.

The Songs of the Sage matter because they show Lilith named in a Jewish text before the Talmud, as one of a crowd of harmful spirits. Again, she is a kind of spirit to be driven off, not a character with a story.

Questions beginners ask

Why does my Bible say “screech owl”? Because the King James translators chose that word in 1611. Every translation is a choice.

Was Lilith in the original Hebrew Bible? The word lilit is there once. Her story is not.

Did the church remove her? There is no evidence that any text about Lilith was ever cut from the Bible.

Who wrote the Songs of the Sage? The author is unknown. The text belongs to the community that kept the scrolls, whose identity scholars still discuss.

Myths to drop:

• “Isaiah describes Adam’s first wife.” The verse only places a lilit in the ruins of Edom.
• “Church councils erased Lilith.” No council record or manuscript evidence supports this.
• “Lilith means ‘night’ for certain.” That is one possible link, and scholars debate the word’s origin.

A worked example

Imagine three readers in three centuries opening Isaiah 34:14. A monk around 450 reads Jerome’s Latin and sees a lamia, a monster that devours children. An English family in 1650 reads the King James Version and pictures a screech owl in the ruins. A student in 1995 reads the New Revised Standard Version and finds the name Lilith, with all its modern meanings. The Hebrew word never changed. Each reader met a different creature because a translator made a choice. That is why I always ask, “Which translation?” before I accept what “the Bible says”.

The verse in its chapter

Historical Isaiah 34 is a poem of judgment against Edom, a kingdom to the south-east of Judah. Its picture is of a land so ruined that only wild creatures live there. In the King James Version, the verses around our word read like a list of desert animals: “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.

There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow.” Whatever the lilit is, she sits among owls, wild beasts and goat-like beings, as one more sign that people have gone.

Who wrote the chapter, and when, is itself debated. Many scholars think chapters 34 and 35 were written later than the eighth-century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, perhaps in the sixth century BCE or after. That does not change the verse, but it is a good reminder that even “Isaiah” is a layered book.

A worked example, step by step: comparing translations

Choose four English versions of Isaiah 34:14 that you can find free online, for example the King James Version (1611), the Revised Standard Version (1952), the New Revised Standard Version (1989) and a recent Jewish translation. Write the word each one uses for lilit in a column. You might find “screech owl”, “night hag”, “Lilith” and “night-demon” or similar.

Now ask three questions for each. Did the translator choose an animal, a spirit or a name? Is there a footnote? When was it made? In a quarter of an hour you will see, with your own eyes, why one Hebrew word has carried so many meanings, and why no single English word settles the question.

A beginner’s guide to the scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are about nine hundred manuscripts, many in fragments, found in caves near Qumran between 1947 and 1956. Most date from roughly the third century BCE to the first century CE. They include the oldest surviving copies of biblical books, among them the Great Isaiah Scroll, as well as hymns, rules and prayers.

The text often called the Songs of the Sage is a protective hymn in which a speaker lists spirits to be frightened away, liliths among them. It shows that by this time the word could name a kind of demon, not only a creature of the ruins.

More questions beginners ask

Why did the King James translators choose “screech owl”? They worked in a tradition that often read lilit as a night bird. A night creature fits the ruins and the sound of the word, which resembles the Hebrew for night.

Is the Great Isaiah Scroll different from my Bible here? Slightly. At this verse the scroll has a form usually read as a plural, “liliths”, where later Hebrew manuscripts have the singular. Small differences like this are one reason scholars compare manuscripts so carefully.

Try this

Find Isaiah 34:14 in two different Bible translations, online or on a shelf. Write down the word each uses for lilit. What picture does each word put in your head: a bird, a monster, a woman?

Journal prompts: What does it change for me that Lilith’s only Bible verse is so short? Which translation choice surprised me most, and why? Where else have I seen a big story built on a single word?

Recap

The only biblical mention of Lilith is the word lilit in Isaiah 34:14, among creatures haunting the ruins of Edom. Translators rendered it as donkey-centaurs, lamia, screech owl, night-monster, night hag, night creature or Lilith. The Dead Sea Scrolls’ Songs of the Sage name Lilith among hostile spirits driven away by praise. Lilith was never cut from Genesis: the two creation accounts raised a puzzle that later interpreters answered, first with an unnamed “first Eve” and much later with the Lilith story.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Bowls, amulets and Ben Sira. For the full timeline, read Lilith’s history and return to the Lilith page.

Further reading: Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39 (Anchor Yale Bible, 2000) explains the chapter in context. James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (2nd ed., Eerdmans, 2010) is a good introduction. The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library (deadseascrolls.org.il) lets you see the fragments.

Sources

• Isaiah 34:14, King James Version (1611).
• The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1917).
• Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London: Penguin), Songs of the Sage, 4Q510 and 4Q511.
• Genesis Rabbah 22:7.

Go deeper: the Lilith pages on this site

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