A nocturnal figure between desert, birthing chamber and Kabbalah.
Lilith is the most consequential nocturnal demoness of Jewish-rabbinic writing and reaches back in her form to the Akkadian wind demons Lilû and Lilītu. From the singular biblical verse in Isaiah 34:14 through several Talmud passages and the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira to the kabbalistic Adam-Lilith narrative, she transforms into the first wife of Adam, the one who refuses subordination.
In folk belief she remained a threat to women in childbed and to infants well into the modern era; in modern theology, since the 1970s, she has been re-read as a feminist counter-figure to Eve.
Type: Nocturnal demoness, counter-figure of the childbed, kabbalistic figure of the shadow side
Origin: Babylonian-Aramaic tradition, rabbinic-kabbalistic elaboration
Texts: Isaiah 34:14; Talmud; Aramaic incantation bowls; Alphabet of Ben Sira; Zohar
Period: Pre-exilic period to the present
Distribution: Babylonia, Palestine, diaspora worldwide
Defense: Kimpetzettel amulets bearing angelic names, name-magic, ritual formulas for the protection of birth
The name appears in the Tanakh only once (Isaiah 34:14). In the Talmud Lilith appears at several places as a demoness (Eruvin 100b, Niddah 24b, Shabbat 151b).
The Aramaic incantation bowls (4th to 7th c. CE) are a central source. The Alphabet of Ben Sira (8th to 10th c.) shapes the narrative figure. The Zohar (13th c.) systematises Lilith within the Kabbalah.
Mythological Context
In Jewish mysticism and occult traditions Lilith is a demonic or divine female being. She is often described as Adam’s first wife or as his demonic concubine. She embodies rebellion against patriarchal order. Lilith is a complex figure, reinterpreted as an autonomous woman.
Babylonia (Sasanian empire) as the centre of the incantation-bowl tradition; Palestine and the later rabbinic cultural area; medieval diaspora in Europe, North Africa and the Near East. Modern reception extends from Eastern Europe through Israel into English-language feminist and literary traditions.
Exceptionally rich and multilayered: a single biblical mention, rabbinic literature, Aramaic incantation bowls (a large body of inscribed texts), medieval amulets, kabbalistic texts, folk-magical handbooks, modern literary and esoteric reception. Likely the best-documented individual figure in the entire demonological history of the Mediterranean region.
Hebrew: Lilith (לילית), derived in folk etymology from layil (“night”); scholarship rather traces it back to Babylonian antecedents (lilītu).
Aramaic: Lilīt, occasionally as a class Liliyot.
Greek-Latin: Lilith (in Jewish-Hellenistic texts); the Vulgate at Isaiah 34:14: lamia.
The identification in the Vulgate with Lamia is consequential in its later effects: it brings the Jewish Lilith into immediate proximity to the Greek-Roman demonesses of the childbed. The Babylonian lilītu shares both name-root and function with Lilith, but is not a direct predecessor, rather a functional sister.
Appearance
Often depicted as a winged woman with long hair. On the Aramaic incantation bowls she is shown bound, as a figure already subdued. On medieval amulets she is shown in chains; in kabbalistic iconography she appears as a dark figure of the Sitra Achra.
Behaviour
She enters houses at night, threatens pregnant women, abducts or kills newborns. In the erotic dimension, she seduces sleepers, has intercourse with them, and brings forth infertile “night-pregnancies”. In the Kabbalah context, she is the antagonist of the Shekhina, consort of Samael, ruler of the “other side”.
Sphere of Action
Night, the bedroom, the childbed, remote places of the desert. In the kabbalistic elaboration: the entire realm of the Sitra Achra, the dark mirror of the divine world.
Mythological Origin
According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira she is Adam’s first wife, created from the same earth. She refuses subordination, pronounces the name of God and flees.
Three angels, Sanoi, Sansanoi, Semangelof, are sent after her but only achieve that she loses a hundred of her own children every day. In return she undertakes not to touch any child that wears an amulet bearing the names of the three angels.
Appearance and Symbolism
Lilith is often portrayed as beautiful and seductive, with long black hair. At times she has wings or a bird’s body. She carries herself with elegance. Some traditions show her with horns. The black rose, the owl and the moon are her symbols. Sexual force emanates from her.
The most important aspects of Lilith at a glance. The detailed treatment of name, description, defense and parallels can be found in the following sections.
Desert and night as her original habitat. In the Alphabet of Ben Sira: Adam’s first wife, who has fled. In the Kabbalah: consort of Samael, queen of the Sitra Achra.
Women in childbed and infants, above all in the first eight days after birth. Pregnant women with complications. Sleeping men in the sense of the Jewish tradition concerning nocturnal seduction. In late antiquity also travellers in the desert, since this was understood as Lilith’s habitat.
A winged woman with long hair; on Aramaic incantation bowls she is shown bound; in medieval iconography she appears in chains.
Infant death, childbed complications, miscarriage and stillbirth, nightmares, unwanted sexual experiences in sleep; in late-antique and rabbinic tradition also the loss of male seed. In kabbalistic writings, additionally, negative spiritual influence, impurity, the separation of the human being from the divine spark.
Kimpetzettel amulet bearing the three angelic names Sanoi, Sansanoi, Semangelof. Ritual protective formulas in Kabbalah and folk magic. Aramaic incantation bowls placed beneath thresholds. Mesusa (a small parchment scroll affixed to the doorpost) on the doorframe.
Rituals of Defense
The central protective practice is the Kimpetzettel amulet bearing the names of the three angels Sanoi, Sansanoi and Semangelof, transmitted in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (10th c.) and in use until modern times in Eastern European Jewish families. The amulet was hung above the bed of the woman in childbed and the infant.
The Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Babylonia (5th to 8th c.) form the archaeologically attested earlier stage: in a clay bowl placed upon the floor, Lilith was bound by a banishing formula scratched into the clay. Accompanying these were protective prayers, fumigations with juniper, and protective circles drawn around the childbed.
Cult and Veneration
Lilith was not venerated in orthodox Judaism, yet she was acknowledged in kabbalistic circles. In modern Satanism she is central. Rituals emphasise autonomy and rebellion. She is understood as protectress of women who say no. Her invocation is taken to imply the assumption of responsibility.
Predecessors and Relatives
The Akkadian Lilītu, and in particular the ardat-lilî, are the direct linguistic and functional predecessors; the Hebrew laylah (“night”) is only secondarily associated with the name. The Egyptian Bes complex and the Mesopotamian Lamashtu supply the functional profile of the protector and the threatener of women in childbed. The Greek Lamia is also comparable.
Christian Reception
In medieval Christian theology Lilith becomes the incarnation of the succubus. Jerome renders her in the Vulgate as lamia; scholastic demonology knows her as a nocturnal, sexual threat.
The witch-theology of the early modern period connects witchcraft with the Lilith motif: the witch as a Lilith-like threatener of the childbed belongs to the standard repertoire of the witch trials.
Kabbalistic Tradition: In the Zohar (13th c.) and in the Kabbalah of Luria (16th c.) Lilith becomes queen of the demons, consort of Samael, mother of all evil spirits. She is given a theological function: she embodies the unredeemed feminine Shekhina and the threat to the divine plan of creation.
Modern Reception
In the second wave of feminism, from the 1970s onward, Lilith is reinterpreted as a counter-figure to the subordinated Eve. Lilith Magazine (1976), Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai (1990) and the Lilith Fair (1997) make her an icon of the Jewish-American women’s movement.
In popular and genre literature (Neil Gaiman, World of Darkness, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) she appears as a seductive, dangerous and at the same time empowered figure.
Afterlife and Reception: In modern feminist spirituality Lilith is an iconic figure. She appears in popular culture, literature and music as a symbol of freedom. In Judaica she is reinterpreted. In fantasy she is goddess of night and force. Her ambivalence makes her potent and contested.
The best-known narrative about Lilith, according to which she was Adam’s first wife, derives not from the Bible but from a single medieval source: the Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous text that probably arose between the 8th and the 10th century.
This text is of an unusual character, partly learned, partly satirical, and its theological authority was already disputed within the Jewish tradition.
According to the story told there, God created Adam and Lilith together from the earth. A dispute arose because Lilith was unwilling to subordinate herself to Adam.
She argued that both had been created from the same earth and were therefore equal. When the dispute could not be settled, Lilith pronounced the secret name of God and fled.
God sent out three angels, whose names the text gives, to bring her back. They found Lilith by the sea, but she refused to return. As a penalty, the narrative says, many of her children were to die every day.
Lilith for her part announced that she would harm newborn children, but promised not to harm any child that wore an amulet bearing the names of the three angels.
This narrative joins two older strands: on the one hand the already ancient conception of Lilith as a female demon who threatens children, on the other the exegetical question why the biblical creation account in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 appears to contain two different presentations of the creation of man and woman.
The text solves this exegetical problem by assuming a first, failed creation of the woman. It is important that this popular narrative is only medieval and does not form the starting point of the Lilith conception.
The conception of Lilith is far older than medieval Judaism. Scholarship traces it back into Mesopotamian religion. There exists in that context a group of demon names that are linguistically related to Lilith, including the female demon Lilitu and related figures such as Lilu and Ardat lili.
These beings were associated with night, with storm, with unfulfilled sexuality and with the endangerment of pregnant women and children. A direct and unbroken line from these figures to the Jewish Lilith cannot, however, be established without gaps, and the precise relationship continues to be discussed in scholarship.
In the Hebrew Bible the name Lilith occurs only a single time, in a passage of the Book of Isaiah.
There, in a description of the devastation of Edom, a series of uncanny animals and beings is enumerated as inhabitants of the desolate landscape, and among them appears the Hebrew word that many translations render as Lilith.
The interpretation is difficult already here: some translations understand it as the proper name of a nocturnal demon, others as the designation of a nocturnal animal. The passage shows in any case that the word existed in biblical Hebrew and was connected with desolation and with night.
More significant than the single biblical passage are the extra-biblical testimonies of antiquity. In the texts of Qumran Lilith appears in a text of demon-aversion.
From this it follows that the conception of a demon named Lilith was familiar in the Jewish world of antiquity, long before the medieval narrative of the first wife of Adam arose. The Lilith of antiquity is first and foremost a demon, not a myth of the primal woman.
One of the most important and most concrete groups of sources for the ancient and late-antique conception of Lilith are the so-called Babylonian incantation bowls. They are clay bowls, mostly from the 5th to the 7th century CE, found in the territory of present-day Iraq.
On their inside, incantation texts are written in spiral arrangement, often in Aramaic, with the drawn figure of a bound or fettered demon frequently at the centre.
Lilith, in the texts often in the plural as a whole class of Lilith demonesses, belongs to the beings most frequently named on these bowls. The texts aim to keep Lilith away from a house, from a particular person or from a family.
They describe Lilith as a being that enters houses, afflicts men and women, disturbs marriages and threatens above all pregnant women, women in childbed and infants. The bowls were buried upside-down beneath the floor or in the corners of houses, so as to capture the demon, as it were, within them.
In addition there are amulets, often of metal, bearing similar protective texts. These objects are particularly valuable in the history of religion because they document not learned theology but the lived fear and protective practice of people.
They show that for the people of late antiquity Lilith was a real threat to the household and above all to the lives of children.
The literary narrative of the first wife of Adam later built upon this already existing image of the demoness who endangers children. Material culture thereby preserves an older stratum of the conception than the well-known texts do.
A distinctive and consequential elaboration of Lilith arose in medieval Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah. In the kabbalistic texts, above all in the Zohar, the principal work of this current that arose in the 13th century, Lilith becomes a cosmic figure of considerable weight.
She is no longer merely a single household demon, but a power within the so-called Sitra Achra, the other side, the dark counter-world to the world of divine holiness.
In this mystical system Lilith becomes the consort of Samael, a principal demonic figure, and thereby, as it were, queen of the demonic side. She forms a negative counter-image to the Shekhina, the divine presence, which in the Kabbalah is often conceived as feminine.
The kabbalistic doctrine developed complex conceptions of how Lilith acts, how she gains power from human misconduct, and what role she plays in the drama of exile and redemption.
This elevation of Lilith into a cosmic power is remarkable in the history of religion. From a popular adversary in protective ritual she becomes a theologically reflected figure, embedded within an encompassing system of divine and counter-divine forces.
At the same time the older conception remained alive: even the kabbalistic Lilith remains associated with the endangerment of children, with nocturnal threat and with disordered sexuality.
The mystical tradition did not replace the older motifs but set them within a larger theological frame. Scholarship, in particular Gershom Scholem in his foundational works on the Kabbalah, has described this development in detail.
In the 19th and especially the 20th century Lilith underwent a reinterpretation that leads far from her original meaning as a demoness. Romanticism and 19th-century literature discovered Lilith as a figure of the seductive, dangerous woman.
She appears, for example, in Goethe in a brief scene of Faust, in which she is named as the first wife of Adam, and in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who dedicated a poem and a painting to her and presented her as the embodiment of a cool, beguiling beauty.
A fundamentally different turn was taken in the reception from the 1970s onward in feminist contexts. Here the very point that made Lilith into a demoness in the medieval narrative, her refusal to subordinate herself to Adam, was reinterpreted in a positive sense.
Lilith was reinterpreted as a symbolic figure of female self-determination and of resistance against patriarchal orders. In this reading it is not Lilith who is the problem, but the order against which she revolts.
From the perspective of the history of religion this modern reception is an instructive case. It shows how a transmitted figure can, through reinterpretation, acquire an almost contrary meaning. It is important to keep the levels apart.
The historical Lilith of the ancient incantation bowls and the medieval texts is a feared demon, above all an adversary of the lives of children, and in the Kabbalah a cosmic counter-power.
The modern Lilith as a symbol of emancipation is a productive new creation that appeals to the old texts but poses different questions to them. Both belong to the reception history of the figure, but must not be confused with one another.
A selection of central works on Lilith:
The protective practice described here is a religious-studies account of historical traditions. iWell Guard takes up this cultural-historical line of portable protective objects and represents a contemporary form of it. More about iWell Guard →
Lilith is a female demoness of Jewish mysticism who in later tradition is regarded as Adam’s first wife, before Eve. She left Adam because she did not wish to subordinate herself to him, and became queen of the malevolent beings.
Lilith first appears in the Babylonian incantation formulas of the Mesopotamians (as lilītu); her Jewish form is found in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (around the 10th c.) and in the Zohar literature of the Kabbalah.
The classical protective amulets against Lilith are the amulets for women in childbed and for newborns bearing the names of the three angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof.
Lilith’s symbols are the owl (in modern depictions), the crescent moon, long loose hair and a pomegranate. In modern feminist theology Lilith is re-read as an emancipatory figure who refuses to be subordinated.
Against its influence, cross-cultural tradition names these protective means:
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