Who Was Adam's First Wife?

According to Hebrew folklore, Eve was not the first wife of Adam. The first wife of Adam was named Lilith. Lilith was an evil spirit and an enemy to newborn children. This Jewish belief led to the development of multiple customs which were designed to protect new and expecting mothers and their babies from Lilith and her wrath.

The name Lilith is pronounced li leaf, a singular feminine noun. There probably is common origin with ancient Hebrew word Laylah or Layil and the Arabic word Laila which are both Semitic words for “night” (Gaines, 2001). This shared origin with the word night makes a lot of sense when we talk about the things associated with Lilith in the Bible later, but the name’s association with night. Now there is a lot of Hebrew word share a common origin with the words of the neighboring Mesopotamian languages like Sumerian and Akkadian (Koltuv, 1986). The word is incredibly similar and likely related to an Akkadian word Lilitu or the Sumerian one Lili/Lil short for Ki-sikil-lil-la-ke.

In both languages/religions, the word was used to refer to a female night demon with the oldest mention of this demon going all the way back to the third millennium BCE (McDonald, 2009). In the ancient Sumerian story of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld. In the story there is a short story where the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna plants a tree in a garden with the hopes of cutting it down and using its wood to create a throne and bed for herself. However, after 10 years of growth she returned to the garden to find that three creatures had taken residence in the tree; a snake in the roots, a Zu Bird building a nest for her eggs in the canopy, and the Lil creating a house or lair in the trees trunk. The hero Gilgamesh is tasked with kicking out the creatures. He kills the snake while the Zu Bird and Lilith escape into the mountains and wilderness (Trattner, 2013). Mesopotamian folklore and traditions tell us a lot more about the Lilitu and Lil.

Firstly, they were understood to be supernatural creatures, as opposed to natural ones like animals. There were anthropomorphic female demons. Both were associated with the wind and storms while having poison instead of milk. They are often referred to as the ones without husbands.

It was often claimed that these female spirits such as demons would visit men in their sleep through the window at night, and after finding an unfortunate male victim, typically younger unmarried men, they would seduce him and/or kill him much like the medieval succubus demon of Europe. These demons were likely to explain the natural phenomena of nocturnal emissions or wet dreams in the ancient world.

References

Gaines, J. H. (2001). Lilith: Seductress, heroine or murderer. Bible Review, 17, 12-20.

Koltuv, B. B. (1986). The book of Lilith. Nicolas-Hays, Inc.

McDonald, B. E. (2009). In Possession of the Night: Lilith as Goddess, Demon, Vampire. In Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture (pp. 173-182). BRILL.

Trattner, K. (2013). From Lamaštu to Lilith. Personifications of female evil in Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology. Disputatio philosophica: International journal on philosophy and religion, 15(1), 109-118.

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