Lilith?

Rollo did a show and mentioned that Christian feminists are using “Lilith” as a feminist symbol.  The feminist assumption is that Lilith in Jewish mythology was a proto-woman created before our mother Eve.  But according to feminist legend she rebelled against Adam, so God did a do-over with Eve.  Therefore, some feminists somewhere are using Lilith as a symbol of female pride and rebellion.

Rollo was asking about the real Lilith in ancient religious sources, as it is difficult to figure out what information is based on original sources and what is reinterpreted or just plain made up to fit an old character into a modern agenda.

I am familiar with Lilith from the Jewish Talmud, as we shall see the Lilith in the original Jewish sources is not actually a woman at all, but an evil destructive spirit.

Lilith is not in the Bible of Moses, but the name does appear in Isaiah 34:14, implying it is a destructive spirit.  Rashi there says לילית: שם שידה  Lilith is a name of a female demon.  The ‘goats’ in that verse are also demons.  The context is the future Divine retribution on the nations that had attacked the Jews, describing how their land will be laid waste and roamed by wild animals and demonic spirits.

Lilith appears multiple times in the Talmud, always as an evil demon.  As background, the Talmud (Gemara) is the major part of Jewish oral tradition, and was passed down for generations as a complement to the written Torah.  The Oral Torah gives the background info and fills in the details for the written. I explained about that here.

The word Lilith is not Hebrew but Babylonian, “Lili” is apparently mentioned as a demon in Gilgamesh (I have not read it).  Many Jews were exiled to Babylonian 2600 years ago with the destruction of the first Temple and there was a large Jewish community there for over 1000 years.  Babylonian names are used in the Talmud, and the Jewish calendar still uses Babylonian names for months.  This is a reminder of the first exile and redemption.  It appears likely that the Babylonian demons made it into Jewish mythology and into Isaiah.

In Jewish tradition, Lilith is known for giving vulnerable men inappropriate dreams causing ritual impurity (what is called a wet dream in modern America), or causing women to miscarry. Talmud Shabbat 151b

Lilith, unlike a normal human, has wings, and stillborn babies murdered by Lilith can have such a birth defect. Talmud Niddah 24b

Lilith had a demon son per Talmud Bava Batra 73a

There is a one interesting mention Eve compared with Lilith: Talmud Eruvin 100b says one of the curses put on Eve after the original sin was “she grows her hair long like Lilith”.  Apparently Lilith had unusually long hair, we can speculate that this was to induce inappropriate dreams in men.  Growing hair long can be a sign of mourning, this curse may connote that Eve began mourning over her sin.

The idea of Lilith being the first woman in Jewish mythology is an error, based on the two accounts of the creation of Man; see Genesis ch 1 versus ch 2.  There was only one creation of Man, but people who misinterpret could think that God made a man and an unnamed woman (Lilith) in chapter 1, then something happened to them… so God remade man and woman (this time Eve) in chapter 2.  This is a typical error of people reading the Bible according to their desired misinterpretations.  Both chapter 1 and 2 describe the same event, but from a different perspective (See Lonely Man of Faith).  Also, there are no chapter breaks in the original, they were added by later Christian printers.

There is an ancient Medrash (Genesis Rabbah 18:4) that some people say refers to Lilith.  Medrash are traditions that explain and give background to the written Bible, these were passed down orally from very ancient sources.  The written Bible itself is just a part of the history of the Jewish people.  However, that discussion is clearly about Eve even according to the mistake we discussed, as it explains the verses in Genesis chapter 2.  It is a very interesting Medrash and compares Eve before she was physically created to a dream of Adam that God made real.

I found an apocryphal source, an unofficial Medrash called Alphabet of Ben Sira.  This is not a source in the Jewish canon, though Ben Sira and his book is mentioned in the Talmud (Eruvin 65, see Tosafot).  Ben Sira wrote that after the sin, Adam split up with Eve, and “he was encountered by a Lilith named Piznai who, taken by his beauty, lay with him and bore male and female demons.”  This implies there was more than one Lilith and they are demon, not human.  Again, this is an outside unofficial source, not a source within the accepted scope for scripture.  The surprise here is that a demon could mate with a human, such a thing is never found in canonical Jewish sources.  This invention is likely due to Babylonian or Greek influence on the author, those cultures have instances of deities and humans interbreeding.  The Talmud (Eruvin 18) also mentions the period when Adam split up with Eve and that he repented, fasted and abstained from his wife for 130 years.  The Gemara brings a tradition that during those 130 years Adam gave birth to dark spirits, demons, and Lilin (this may be a form of Lilith).  Our sages state that his accidental nocturnal emissions gave rise to these spirits.  Recall that Lilith herself is said to induce these emissions by appearing in the dreams of sleeping men.

I am getting far afield, but there is also mention of Lilith in the mystical Zohar.  Zohar is the main sourcebook of mystical information.  There is some debate as to the actual origin and age of Zohar, but it appears to be an ancient oral tradition passed down by Jewish mystics (Kabbalists) until it was written down relatively recently.  Nowadays a lot of people, even Madonna, get into Kabbalah and Zohar without understanding the basics of the Bible.  This is not a good idea.  The Bible is compared to the main course and Jewish mysticism to the dessert.  You can’t have dessert until you digest the dinner.

The Zohar describes the mechanics of how spiritual forces work in the physical world.  To analogize, the Bible (Torah) is the user’s guide to life for human beings.  The Zohar is more like a technical manual or an engineering schematic of the universe.  I am almost totally unfamiliar with Zohar, but apparently Lilith is described as related to the forces of spiritual contamination that cause spilling seed, and she tries to murder infants or cause stillbirth and birth defects.  Lilith may also have, according to some mystical sources, appeared to King Solomon and agreed to split the baby in that famous case of two women arguing over one baby (1 Kings 3:16-28).

All of the mentions in the Talmud and Jewish sources show Lilith was a demon, not a human woman.  They also indicate she was destructive, used temptation to cause impurity, and was implicated in causing stillbirths and birth defects.  You could say that God has a certain sense of humor; it seems rather appropriate that radical pro-abortion feminists use Lilith as a celebrated symbol without understanding the original Lilith.  But she was not a woman, or a feminist, she caused damage to humanity and especially to babies.  Interesting.

This is not the first example of a Biblical character or theme being misappropriated by a modern cause.  The Bible has power and near universal recognition, so aligning your group with something in the Bible gives you some clout.

Another contemporary example is the rainbow which is used by certain groups.  The rainbow is a reminder of the flood in the days of Noah, but seeing a rainbow is not a good omen.  The appearance of a rainbow actually portends that if not for the promise God made to Noah not, then there would be a flood now to cleanse the earth.  It is sign something is wrong.  A completely righteous generation would not need to see rainbows as a reminder.  Again, once you know the deeper meaning of the rainbow, the chosen symbol is accidentally quite appropriate to the group.

There is a whole field of Jewish demonology.  Rambam (Maimonides), one of the heavy hitters in Jewish law about 1000 years ago, dismisses demons as hocus pocus.  He was a medical doctor and a known rationalist, and some of his contemporaries criticized him for relying on Greek rationalism.

However, many other Jewish authorities explain that demons were and are very real.  However, we don’t see them today due to the concept of spiritual balance.  When the forces of purity are stronger, as they were 2000 years ago when Jews had the Temple and a deeper connection to spirituality, then the opposing forces of impurity were given more freedom to influence men.  The demons could roam and influence men.  This balance is needed to allow for free will: if the power and allure of holiness in this world was great then men would obviously choose that, but without making their own decision.  God made opposing forces so men can make a meaningful choice between good and evil.  This is a key concept in the Jewish philosophy of free will.

In our generation, the spiritual is relatively weak and hidden, so the opposing powers are also mostly hidden.  The balance allows for free will and human choices to be free of Divine coercion.  There are stories of ancient and even not so ancient Rabbis of great stature feeling disturbances in the spiritual balance and acting to rectify them.  These stories could be the source of the idea of feeling a disturbance in the force…