One Word in Isaiah, and the Bowls Beneath the Floor

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.