Lilith

The scriptural foundation is a single word in a passage of Isaiah describing the ruin of Edom, where wild animals meet, goat-demons call to one another, and a creature called lilit finds a resting place. What that word denoted is uncertain; ancient translators rendered it variously, and modern translations range from a night bird to a night hag to the proper name Lilith. Around it stands a much larger body of material that is not scriptural at all. Cuneiform sources know a class of demons whose names are formed from a similar root and who are associated with wind, with the night, and with harm to women in childbirth and to infants, and Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls from Mesopotamia in the first millennium, buried upside down under the floors of houses, name Lilith in the singular and the plural among the spirits to be bound and expelled.

The Babylonian Talmud mentions her only briefly, as a long-haired winged being one should not sleep alone in a house with. The figure that most people now recognise, with a biography and a motive, appears in a medieval work called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a text whose tone is satirical and whose purpose is debated, and whose account was then taken up in later kabbalistic literature and given a serious cosmological role as the consort of the demonic side of the divine order.

In the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Adam's first wife is created from the earth as he was, and the trouble begins at once: she will not lie beneath him, arguing that they were made from the same substance and are therefore equal. When he insists, she pronounces the ineffable name of God, rises into the air, and leaves. God sends three angels after her, named in the text, who find her at the sea and tell her she must return or a hundred of her children will die each day; she refuses, and instead swears that wherever she sees the names of those three angels she will leave the child alone. That last clause is the working part of the story, because it is the explanation for a widespread protective practice: amulets naming the three angels were hung in birth chambers and over cradles across the Jewish world for centuries, and survive in large numbers.

None of this is in Genesis, which knows only one woman made for the first man, and the story is not part of Jewish liturgy or law. Its modern career is a separate matter again. From the nineteenth century onward, writers and artists outside the tradition took up the figure as a symbol of dangerous female autonomy, and from the 1970s Jewish feminist writers deliberately reread the refusal as the point of the story rather than as its scandal, giving the name to a magazine and to a substantial body of new midrash. The atlas records this as reception rather than as recovery: the medieval text presents the refusal as the beginning of a demonic career, and reading it otherwise is a modern act, openly acknowledged as such by most of those who do it.