![]() ![]() The angels then told her that they would not force her to go back to Adam as long as she agreed to leave the child alone when she saw an amulet inscribed with the angels’ names and forms. According to one version of the tale, she told them that she could not return to her first husband because she had already slept with the “Great Demon.” She told the angels that she was created only to sicken newborn babies and that she had dominion over males until the eighth day (when the boy is circumcised) and over females until the twelfth day after birth. At Adam’s request, God sent three angels to bring Lilith back, but she refused. Lilith said, “We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.” Lilith then pronounced God’s name and flew away into the air. They immediately began to fight over who would be on top during sexual intercourse. As Scholem (1974) remarks, this tale “sets out to explain the already widespread custom of writing amulets against Lilith.” God created Lilith from the earth after the creation of Adam. Lilith’s image as a dangerous demon persists in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, where she becomes the first wife of Adam (Stern Yassif 1984). Another text says that this lilith “destroys and kills and tears and strangles and eats boys and girls” (Montgomery, 193). One of the bowls accuses “ Hablas the lilith, granddaughter of Zarni the lilith” of “striking boys and girls” (Montgomery, 168). It is no wonder, therefore, that some of the writers of the bowl-incantations employed the language of divorce to rid people of the liliths. Thus one prominent characteristic of the liliths is that they attack people in the sexual and reproductive realm of life. One text describes the liliths “who appear to human beings, to men in the likeness of women and to women in the likeness of men, and they lie with all human beings at night and during the day” (Montgomery 117). The bowl-texts accuse the liliths of haunting people in dreams at night or visions of the day. The liliths appear in lists of evil spirits that often refer to the “male and female liliths,” reflecting the ancient conception that these evil demons could appear in either male or female form. ![]() The bowls’ purpose was usually to exorcise demons from the house or from the body of the clients named on the bowls, or to turn back malevolent magic that others had practiced against the clients. ![]() A drawing of a bound lilith or other demon often appears in the center of the bowl. These are ordinary earthenware bowls that ritual specialists or laypeople from the Jewish, Mandaean, Christian, and pagan communities, who lived in close proximity in the cities of Babylonia, inscribed with incantations in their own dialects of Aramaic. The liliths are known particularly from the Aramaic incantation bowls from Sassanian and early Islamic Iraq and Iran (roughly 400–800 C.E.). Scurlock writes, “The lilû-demons and their female counterparts the lilitu or ardat lilî-demons were hungry for victims because they had once been human they were the spirits of young men and women who had themselves died young.” These demons “slipped through windows into people’s houses looking for victims to take the place of husbands and wives whom they themselves never had.” Another, related demoness was Lamashtu, who threatened new-born babies and “had a disagreeable taste for human flesh and blood.” The figures of Lamashtu and the lilû and lilitu demons eventually converged to form one type of evil figure that seduced men and women and attacked children (Hutter). The Bible mentions the Lilith only once, as a dweller in waste places (Isaiah 34:14), but the characterization of the Lilith or the lili (in the singular or plural) as a seducer or slayer of children has a long pre-history in ancient Babylonian religion. ![]() As an individual Lilith is first known from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a provocative and often misogynist satirical Hebrew work of the eighth century CE, but the liliths as a category of demons, along with the male lilis, have existed for several thousand years. ![]()
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