SERMONS 

Lilith: Of Shadows and Boundaries

Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve—how Adam was created first and then Eve was fashioned from a spare rib to be the first man’s helpmate. In this story, Adam is in charge, and Eve is his obedient partner.

But there is another story—one in which the first man and the first woman were fashioned side by side at the same time from the earth. They were equals in that story. This is the story of Adam and Lilith.

Now it is true that you would be hard pressed to find Lilith’s name in the bible. But you have all, I’m sure, heard stories about Lilith. She is the apocryphal first wife of Adam, and a most intriguing figure—a heroine of self-assertiveness for feminists, a night demon for others. Accounts of Lilith are found chiefly in the Jewish oral tradition, where rabbinic interpretation promptly turned the tales about Lilith into demon stories.

In the bible there is one brief passage that refers to Lilith, and that only obliquely. In Isaiah, chapter 34, verse 14 (in the Jerusalem bible) we find these lines:

Wild cats will meet hyenas there,
the satyrs will call to each other,
there too will Lilith take cover
seeking rest.

In the Revised Standard Version, Lilith’s name does not appear; instead, she is referred to as “the night hag”:

And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas,
the satyr shall cry to his fellow,
yea, there shall the night hag alight,
and find for herself a resting place.

The King James version calls her “the screech owl.”

But the origin of the Lilith tradition comes earlier in Genesis, even before the creation of Eve is described: “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). The rabbis interpreted this to mean that man and woman were created simultaneously from the dust. Some accounts say Adam and Lilith were twins joined back to back in the beginning. However, a bit later, the creation of Adam and Eve appears sequential—Adam first, then Eve from Adam’s rib, almost as if she were God’s afterthought, so that Adam would not be lonely.

Because the rabbis assumed that every word in the bible was literally true, they understood this apparent contradiction in stories to mean that Adam must have had a first wife, whom they named Lilith, “before Eve.” So the tradition of Lilith came into being as rabbinic commentary on a single passage in Genesis, and from there spread to the Christian and Islamic traditions. You might say the rabbis invented the story out of the ether. You might say they made it up as they went along. Or you might say that in elaborating this extraordinary legend they were expressing rich psychological wisdom.

What Lilith offers us is an alternative view of the fundamental relationship between man and woman. We have grown up, most of us, on a traditional view that man is in charge and the woman is called to obedience and subservience. From this derive those now outdated traditional wedding pledges—“to love, honor, and obey” for women, “to love, honor, and cherish” for men. The alternative view Lilith suggests is somewhat hidden; it must be read between the lines. She is something of a fleeting fantasy figure, the subject of dreams, perhaps of nightmares, a source of fear and of conflict between the sexes. Lilith and Eve really highlight this, with Lilith in the role of the seductress, Eve as the helpmate.

So what happened to this first wife of Adam? As Howard Schwartz noted in his book “Lilith’s Cave,” “Lilith and Adam bickered endlessly over matters large and small, with Lilith refusing to let Adam dominate her in any way. Instead she insisted that they were equal.” And so the age-old conflict between men and women began.

In the midrash “Alphabet of Ben Sira” (ca. 7th-10th century C.E.), Lilith is portrayed as Adam’s first wife in Eden, created from dust to be equal to him. He kept ordering her around, and she fled to escape his domination. He complained to God and asked for a replacement, and so eventually God fashioned Eve from his rib.

A poem called “The Book of Lilith,” written in 1982 by two Wichita poets, Anita Skeen and Kay L. Closson, tells the story. Here is how it begins:

It is black—
there are no clouds yet, no
lies or hurt, truth or touch;
only dour dust, dust lying mountain deep,
dust in the riverbeds, dust growing
between the toes of the few slender weeds
dust circling in deepening pools
dilated, the centers growing dark
widening to drink the light
withering to pinpoints at the first
rays of the first morning.
There has not yet been
a single noise, no forms or reference
points, no cries of birth
or the shrill laments that
close around us after death . . .

And Lilith appears on this first day:
On her hands and knees by the rim
of the green pond, she looked quizzically
at the shimmering fish flickering
in and out of her eyes.

“Adam! Adam, come and see!”
These fish move like the words
between us, just out of reach,
Lilith mused
as her fingers slipped into the water.
And what do you suppose Adam thinks of all this? The poem continues:
“Adam, do come.”
Her delight was useless. He never
came when she called . . .

“Playing again. [Adam says] Is this what
you called me to see?
You’re supposed to be helping me
and here you sit splashing
the water, frightening the fish
and ignoring His commands.”
Lilith rose slowly, deliberately,
drying her hands
in sensuous movements over
Adam’s taught body.

“I respond to Eden, not to unseen
forces. I am leaving to visit places
untouched by commands. Tell Him that.
Be sure to cower when His voice enters,
requires your soul.” Turning, she fled
on a path she knew.
Adam would not follow.”

Among the legends with biblical origins, none has had a greater influence than that of Lilith down through the ages. Much of the demonic realm in Jewish folklore grew out of this legend. According to tradition, Lilith became the mirror opposite of Eve—the negative side of woman. “Lilith is assertive, seductive, and ultimately destructive; Eve is passive, faithful, and supportive,” as Howard Schwartz wrote.

According to Muslim tradition, Lilith cohabited with the devil and gave birth to the jinn. She appears as well in Babylonian and Assyrian traditions as a “maid of desolation,” a demon of waste places, or as a wind spirit, wild-haired and winged.

This story can be traced from its biblical reference to recounting in the Talmud, and from there to the version found in the Midrash and retold in medieval folklore, echoing down through Hasidic tales. Schwartz collected many of the Jewish demon stories in his book, “Lilith’s Cave,” published in 1988 by Oxford University Press.

As told in the Haggadah, Midrash, Pseudepigrapha, and early Kabbalah, the story goes like this: Lilith and Adam were created from the dust, and she insisted on full equality. Adam kept ordering her around (you know, “Bring me an apple”; “Get your own damn apple,” etc.) and Lilith got fed upand fled, vanishing in the air. Adam complained to God that she had deserted him, so God sent three angels to bring her back. These angels were Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangeleaf. They found her in the Red Sea, and threatened her; if she didn’t go back to Adam, she would give birth to a hundred demon children daily, and all of them would die. But she preferred even this awful punishment to life with Adam. So it is said she takes her revenge by injuring babies—baby boys during the first night of their life, while baby girls are exposed to her wicked designs until they are twenty days old.

It was said that the only way to ward off this evil is to attach an amulet engraved with the name of the angels: “Sanvi, Sansanvi, Semangeleaf, Adam and Eve, barring Lilith.” Such amulets became a familiar feature of Jewish life, and are used even today in some Orthodox circles.

At night Lilith would slip into the beds of men sleeping alone, seducing them in their sleep, and bearing the demon babies. This, of course, is the source of “wet dreams.”

Down through the centuries, Lilith reappears with a thousand names, among them Obizuth, Agrat bat Mahalath, and the Queen of Sheba. In the middle ages, her story merged with the legend of Asmodeus, the King of Demons, and Lilith became identified as his queen.

Lilith also made her way into astrological literature as “the dark moon Lilith,” representing that which is mysterious or obscure in human nature. Betsy Prioleau, a professor at Manhattan College, in her book “Seductress,” says “Since Aphrodite, it’s been all downhill for the sex goddess. . . . With Lilith, we can track her mythic decline.” She calls Lilith “a big, splashy goddess woman who sneered at female subordination.”

“Why should I lie beneath you,” Lilith asked Adam, “when I am your equal since both of us were created from dust?”

Prioleau’s book tracks what its subtitle calls “Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love,” through goddess traditions and real life examples like Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Lois Montez, the “suicide siren” La Belle Otero, Mae West, and others. Perhaps you have heard Mae West’s famous statement: “I was pure as the driven snow—until I drifted.”

Prioleau predicts that “a seductress comeback is afoot, both imaginatively and literally.” As she notes, powervamps are everywhere in fiction, films, comic books, and on television—and life is catching up with fantasy as women are “recovering their seductive birthright [and] taking their sexual power with them to the top, to boardrooms, playing fields, and concert halls.”

Accounts of Lilith mostly portray her as a frightening demon, a seductive witch and child-killer. But there is another way to understand the story. Lilith can be cited positively for her self-reliance and demand for equality. Moreover, as Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf assert in their book “Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul,” Eve and Lilith were mythological sisters representing two sides of the personality, as “shadow sisters.” They say that “Some sibling pairs develop by pushing against each other in opposite directions until they seem, as adults, to carry the projection of the other for one another.” Eve and Lilith—or Psyche and Orual, say—“hold mirror reflections for each other; one is artistic, the other athletic; one is smart, the other beautiful; one is accomodating and well behaved, the other rebels and acts out. This kind of splitting can trigger terrible envy beween sibs, causing one to reject the other or to idealize the other and reject herself.”

Though she had traditionally been seen as a she-demon, from a Jungian perspective Lilith can represent a woman’s “capacity to say no, her desire for equality and independence, and her natural, wild instincts, which may return with healing.” She surely represents that positive spirit for those who publish the Jewish feminist journal named for Lilith. And perhaps you have heard of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the Jungian therapist who conducted workshops on “women who run with the wolves,” based on such archetypes as Lilith.

The shadow side of the personality will always express itself somehow in life, and the more conscious we can be of our shadow side, the more fully we can express our full being, that is, to become a whole person. The meek woman can surely benefit from becoming aware of her shadow “wild woman” and finding ways to express that—in, of course, “socially acceptable ways.”

Some of you will perhaps recall that television’s Dr. Frasier Crane’s first wife was Lilith. Do you recall that extraordinary episode in which Lilith suddenly appears at Frasier’s studio, looking for solace after her next husband has left her—for another man. Frasier offers to take her out to dinner and she shows up wearing an amazingly seductive dress—“Oh, mama,” he murmurs. But Frasier resists the temptation, but the next morning discovers to his chagrin that she has spent the night with his brother Niles, who has also been wounded in relationship. A feast for Jungian analysis.

Now it should be noted that this shadow concept applies equally to men. As Zweig and Wolf point out, “Brothers, too, may appear to be opposite, yet they are complementarily linked at a deeper level: Like Jesus and Judas, Abel and Cain, Osiris and Set, one creates, the other destroys; one becomes godlike, the other devilish.”

In the realm of folklore, there are no boundaries, as stories make their way from one tradition to another, to express universal truths. These universal stories express our fears and anxieties, our desires and our fantasies. Through telling stories we acknowledge that life is an ongoing struggle between good and evil, and we affirm our faith in the face of that struggle.

And we must always remember that biblical accounts are story and not scripture. We must read these stories, as stories susceptible to varied interpretations, not doctrines that are fixed and unchanging. The story is always open to reinterpretation, and there is always more than meets the eye whenever we revisit the stories.