Lilith is a figure in Jewish mythology, developed earliest in the Babylonian Talmud. In some Jewish folklore, such as the satiric Alphabet of Sirach, she appears as Adam’s first wife. The figure of Lilith may relate in part to a historically earlier class of female demons in ancient Mesopotamian religion.
About Lilith in brief
Lilith is a figure in Jewish mythology, developed earliest in the Babylonian Talmud. In some Jewish folklore, such as the satiric Alphabet of Sirach, she appears as Adam’s first wife. The figure of Lilith may relate in part to a historically earlier class of female demons in ancient Mesopotamian religion. Little information has survived relating to the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian view of this class of demons. In the Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q510-511, the term first occurs in a list of monsters. Jewish magical inscriptions on bowls and amulets from the 6th century AD onwards identify Lilith as a female demon and provide the first visual depictions of her. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Enkiduluppu’s garden in the Netherworld, a tree grows in Uruk, whose wood she plans to use to build a new throne. After ten years of growth, she finds a serpent at its base, and destroys its house and runs for the forest. Identification of ki-sikil-lil-la-ke is said to have killed the snake, and then killed the zu zu bird, and made a house in its trunk, in which a young bird lived in its crown, and that a young girl lived in the base of the tree. In Ingamesh the serpent kills the young bird, but the young girl lives in the tree, and the serpent is killed too, and a young boy is born in the forest, and it is said that the child is the son of the serpent, and not the mother of the snake.
The serpent is then killed and the young child is taken away by its mother. The story of the young boy and his mother is told in the book of Genesis 1: 27. In this version of the Genesis story, the serpent was killed by Adam, but not by the woman. The woman was not killed by the man, but by the serpent himself, and she was later killed by her husband. In other versions of Genesis, the woman was killed when she refused to become subservient to him and then would not return to the Garden of Eden after she had coupled with the archangel Samael. This story is not part of the Epic of Gil gamesh, but is a later Assyrian translation of the latter part of GilgamesH. The term lilith or lilit is used in the Hebrew-language texts in Isaiah 34: 14, either in singular or plural form according to variations in the earliest manuscripts. Some scholars, like Lowell K. Handy, agree that Lilith derives from Mesopotamic demons but argue against finding evidence of the Hebrew Lilith in many of the epigraphical and artifactual sources frequently cited as such. \”: 174. While researchers almost universally agree that a connection exists, recent scholarship has disputed the relevance of two sources previously used to connect the Jewish lilith to anAkkadian lilītu — the Gilgamesch appendix and the Arslan Tash amulet.
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This page is based on the article Lilith published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
