Bowls, amulets and Ben Sira

Your goal in this lesson: to see how ordinary families protected themselves from liliths, and where the famous first-wife story really comes from.

Spells in a soup bowl

Historical Incantation bowls are ordinary earthenware bowls with a spell written in ink on the inside, usually spiraling from the center to the rim. Most come from Mesopotamia in the Sasanian period, many from about the fifth to seventh centuries CE, and they are written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac, Mandaic and other scripts. Bowls were often buried upside down under the floors of houses. James Montgomery published many from the excavations at Nippur in 1913.

A client went to a specialist who could write. The spell named the client, usually by their mother’s name, and everything to be protected: spouse, children, house and goods. What the bowls say about liliths:

• They come in both genders: “male liliths and female liliths”.
• They threaten the household, and above all pregnant women and newborns.
• Some appear at night, in dreams or in the form of a spouse.

A divorce for a demon

Historical Some bowls frame the spell as a get, a Jewish bill of divorce, issued to Lilith. In Jewish law a get ends a marriage and sends the wife away. Applied to a demon, it expresses a vivid idea: the lilith is a false spouse in the house, and she is being lawfully dismissed.

The Talmud

Historical The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in the same region and roughly the same centuries, mentions lilit only a few times. A man should not sleep alone in a house, or lilit will seize him (Shabbat 151b). A lilit has long hair (Eruvin 100b). These are passing remarks, not a mythology.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira

Later tradition The Alphabet of Ben Sira is an anonymous Hebrew and Aramaic work, usually dated between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. It borrows the name of a real sage of the second century BCE but has nothing to do with him. Many scholars read it as satirical.

In paraphrase, its story runs like this. God made Lilith from the earth, as Adam had been made. They quarreled at once: Adam insisted she lie beneath him, and Lilith said they were equal, since both came from the earth. She spoke the divine name and flew away. God sent three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, to bring her back. She refused, but swore that wherever she saw their names on an amulet, she would not harm a newborn.

Read in context, this is an origin story for a protective custom already in use, not ancient sacred myth.

The three angels on amulets

Later tradition Amulets with the three angels’ names became widespread in Jewish communities in the medieval and early modern periods, hung in the room of a woman giving birth. A printed design in Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, first printed in Amsterdam in 1701, helped standardize them. These belong to a living tradition, and they are not tools for a modern Lilith practice.

Try this

Today’s exercise: retell the Ben Sira story in five sentences, in your own words. Then add one sentence that says when and why it was written. Notice how that last sentence changes the way the story feels.

Quick recap

• Incantation bowls protected Sasanian households against liliths.
• Some bowls served liliths a divorce writ.
• The Talmud mentions lilit only in passing.
• The first-wife story comes from the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Kabbalah and the Zohar.

Need a refresher? Go back to Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls or see the whole course.

Sources

• James A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Philadelphia, 1913).
• Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b, Eruvin 100b, Niddah 24b, Bava Batra 73a.
• David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky (eds.), Rabbinic Fantasies (1990), with Norman Bronznick’s translation of the Alphabet of Ben Sira.

Go deeper: the Lilith pages on this site

Mark as done