Lilith

Lilith stands at the apex of the war between the sexes. Sexual domination, it would seem, is as old as the human race.

The story has been basically this since the Middle Ages: Jewish Kabbalah tells us that Adam's first wife was called Lilith. She refused to be subservient to Adam in sex, as she felt that God had created them equal, as it says in Genesis, "And God created them, man and woman".

She fled from the Garden, and into a cave. Three "angels" brought her back to the Garden, but she refused to be "cooperative". A deal was struck between her and the angels that allowed her to leave the Garden forever. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamish has a slightly different version, placing Lilith still in the Garden even after Eve had been created.

This legend has grown over time, but the basic outline can be seen in the Christian Bible, Torah, Kabbalah and the Epic of Gilgamish.

In Genesis, the creation story is written in two seemingly contradictory versions. One paragraph talks about how El took a rib from Adam to make Eve, showing that Adam was made first. But then another paragraph reads "man and woman He created them", and set them in the Garden. This paragraph seems to imply that Adam and Eve were made at the same time. The stories make a little more sense if there was another woman before Eve. Adam's first wife, Lilith. Some have tried to explain the to versions of the creation story as merely two different drafts that were merged together. But the extreme differences cannot be denied. How could scholars that supposedly all knew the same story write down such different versions?

Subscribers of the Lilith story have always used Oxam's Razor: the simplest story is usually the truth. The concept of Lilith explains the differences a lot easier than saying that a bunch of scholars forgot the oral history that they had grown up with, or that El made Adam and Eve equal but not equal, or something like that.

After Lilith escaped the Garden, a demon made her a much better offer than Adam had. So Lilith became the mother of all demons on Earth. In Hebrew, "lilith" means "dark maid", which is what she is called in the Epic of Gilgamish. One of the terms of her release in the Apocrapha and Kabalah was that her half-demon children would die in large numbers. She was therefore blamed for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome because she was jealous of "human" children.

Please go to the links below for more information on this legend.