Lilith is a female night demon of Jewish tradition whose roots run back to the lilû and lilītu wind and night spirits of Mesopotamian incantations. The Hebrew Bible names her only once, in Isaiah 34:14, and the famous story of Lilith as Adam's first wife does not appear until the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Hebrew text written somewhere between about 700 and 1000 CE.
That gap matters. Lilith is often presented as a single ancient character with a fixed story, but the written record shows a name and a class of demons that change shape over roughly three thousand years. Knowing which layer comes from where is the only way to read her honestly, whether you are a believer or a skeptic.
Where does Lilith come from?
Lilith's most likely ancestors are the lilû, lilītu and ardat-lilî, a group of Mesopotamian demons named in Akkadian incantation texts. They were associated with wind, storms and the night, and the Assyriologist J. A. Scurlock describes them as the restless spirits of young men and women who had died before they could marry or have children. In the incantations they slip into houses through windows looking for victims.
The link to the later Hebrew lîlît is widely accepted as plausible, because the names are close and the roles overlap. It is still an inference rather than a proven line of descent. The Akkadian texts describe a category of demons, not a named individual with a biography, and nothing in them tells the story most people now associate with Lilith.
Is Lilith in the Epic of Gilgamesh?
Probably not, although she was long thought to be. The Sumerian poem known as "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld" opens with the goddess Inanna tending a huluppu tree that she wants to make into furniture. Three unwelcome tenants move in: a snake at its roots, the Anzu (Imdugud) bird in its crown and, in the trunk, a figure called ki-sikil-lil-la-ke. Gilgamesh drives them out and cuts down the tree.
In the 1930s the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer and C. J. Gadd translated ki-sikil-lil-la-ke as "Lilith," and that reading spread through popular books for decades. Modern scholarship generally treats the phrase as the Sumerian equivalent of the Akkadian ardat-lilî, with renderings such as "phantom maid" or "demon-maiden." In other words, it describes a type of spirit related to the lilītu, not the Lilith of later Jewish legend. For the poem's place in the wider tradition, see the 4biddenknowledge guide to the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Is the Burney Relief a picture of Lilith?
Almost certainly not. The Burney Relief, also called the Queen of the Night, is a fired-clay plaque from the Old Babylonian period, about 1800 to 1750 BCE, showing a nude winged woman with bird talons, a horned crown and a rod-and-ring in each hand, standing on two lions and flanked by owls. It is the image most often reproduced as "Lilith" online.
The Lilith label dates to the late 1930s. Emil Kraeling proposed it in 1937, and Henri Frankfort, writing about the plaque in the same period, cited that identification, pointing to the wings, bird feet and owls and to the ki-sikil-lil-la-ke of the Gilgamesh poem. Later specialists moved away from it. Thorkild Jacobsen argued that a figure receiving this kind of high-quality cult image must be a goddess rather than a demon, and identified her as Inanna (Ishtar). The British Museum, which acquired the plaque in 2003, discusses several candidates and leans toward Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, though no securely identified image of Ereshkigal survives to confirm it. The common ground among these scholars is that a demon of the lilītu class is the least likely subject.
What does the Bible say about Lilith?
The Hebrew Bible mentions Lilith once. Isaiah 34:14 describes the land of Edom after divine judgment as a ruin inhabited by wild animals, and among them is lîlît, who settles there and finds a place to rest. The word does not appear anywhere in Genesis.
Translators have handled it very differently. The Latin Vulgate rendered it lamia, a night monster of classical folklore. The Geneva Bible and the King James Version both have "screech owl." The current New International Version reads "night creatures," the English Standard Version "night bird," while the New Revised Standard Version and the New American Bible Revised Edition keep the name, "Lilith" and "the lilith." The choice reflects whether the translator read the word as an animal or as a named demon. Either way, Isaiah offers no backstory: no Adam, no Eden, no rebellion.
Where does the "first wife of Adam" story come from?
The first-wife story comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a Hebrew collection of tales usually dated between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. Many scholars read the work as satirical. In the passage, the son of a king falls ill, and Ben Sira writes an amulet bearing the names of three angels. He explains why: after God created Adam, he formed a woman from the earth, as he had Adam, and called her Lilith. The two quarrelled at once. Adam insisted on lying on top; Lilith refused to lie below him and answered that they were equal, because both had been created from the earth. When Adam would not yield, she pronounced the Ineffable Name of God and flew away.
God sent three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, to bring her back. She refused to return and claimed power over newborns, but swore she would have no power over any child protected by an amulet bearing the angels' names or forms.
The textual hook behind the story is real and much older. Genesis contains two creation accounts. Genesis 1:27 says God created humankind "male and female," apparently at the same moment, while Genesis 2:22 describes the woman being built from Adam's rib after he is already alive and alone. Readers who noticed the difference asked whether the woman of Genesis 1 was someone other than Eve, and the Alphabet of Ben Sira answers by naming her Lilith. The tension between the two chapters is ancient; the Lilith answer to it is medieval.
How did Lilith develop in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Talmud and the incantation bowls?
Between Isaiah and Ben Sira, Lilith appears as a demon, not a wife. The earliest clear reference after Isaiah is in the Songs of the Sage, two manuscripts from Qumran catalogued as 4Q510 and 4Q511 and dated to roughly 40 to 10 BCE. A sage recites praises meant to frighten off "spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers and desert dwellers." The scrolls themselves are covered in the 4biddenknowledge guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and readers interested in how the Qumran community thought about evil spirits will find related material in the guide to the Book of Enoch and the Watchers.
The Babylonian Talmud uses the word lilit five times. Shabbat 151b records Rabbi Hanina's warning that a man should not sleep alone in a house, because a lilith may seize him. Niddah 24b discusses a miscarried fetus with the likeness of a lilith, which the commentary links to wings. Eruvin 100b says that a woman grows her hair long "like a lilith." Gittin 69b mentions a remedy called the "arrow of Lilith," and Bava Batra 73a-b tells a story about Hormin, son of Lilith. None of these passages calls her Adam's wife.
In daily religious life, Lilith appears most often on Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian and early Islamic Mesopotamia, roughly 400 to 800 CE. The bowls, inscribed with spells, were buried under houses to trap or bind demons. Many adjure "liliths," male and female, to leave a household alone, showing that "lilith" could still name a whole class of demons, as the lilītu had in Mesopotamia.
How did Kabbalah, art and modern culture reshape Lilith?
In medieval Kabbalah, Lilith becomes a figure of cosmic scale. The Treatise on the Left Emanation, written by Isaac ha-Kohen in Castile around 1260, pairs her with Samael as the female and male powers of the demonic realm, mirroring Adam and Eve. The Zohar, composed in Spain in the late thirteenth century, describes her roaming at night to seduce men, and later Kabbalistic writers treat her as Samael's consort.
European art and literature then made her a romantic and symbolic figure. In Goethe's Faust, Part One (1808), she appears in the Walpurgis Night scene, where Mephistopheles identifies her as Adam's first wife and warns Faust about her hair. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Lady Lilith in 1866 to 1868, reworking it in 1872 to 1873, as a woman combing her long hair, and paired it with a sonnet later titled "Body's Beauty." It hangs in the Delaware Art Museum.
From the 1970s onward, feminists reclaimed her refusal to submit. The Jewish feminist magazine Lilith was founded in 1976 under Susan Weidman Schneider, and Sarah McLachlan's all-women touring festival Lilith Fair ran from 1997 to 1999. In these readings, the woman who would not lie below Adam becomes a symbol of autonomy rather than a demon.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson has not published a dedicated study of Lilith, so no position on her should be attributed to him. What he has set out in detail is his broader framework for Genesis.
In his reading of the Eden story, Carson argues that Genesis 2 and 3 are a compressed memory of older Sumerian accounts. He identifies Eden with E.DIN, a settlement in southern Mesopotamia; reads Adam as a worker engineered by the Anunnaki; and interprets the serpent as Enki sharing knowledge with humanity against the wishes of Enlil. On the 4biddenknowledge podcast episode on the Anunnaki and Adam and Eve, he describes the garden as a genetic laboratory and Adam and Eve as products of deliberate engineering. He also holds that the Bible as it stands was edited from older source texts, and connects the plural Elohim of Genesis with the Anunnaki, a position laid out in the guide to who the Elohim were. These are his interpretations, not scholarly consensus.
The Lilith material is a useful test case for how traditions are layered. The lilītu demons are genuinely Mesopotamian. The two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are genuinely ancient and genuinely in tension. But the story that resolves that tension with a rebellious first wife is a medieval Hebrew composition, not a recovered Sumerian tablet. Anyone weighing Carson's argument that Genesis compresses older Mesopotamian memories should weigh the Lilith story by the same standard: the demon class is old, the biblical mention is ancient, and the first-wife narrative is more than two thousand years younger than the Sumerian Gilgamesh poems.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy Carson works through Genesis passage by passage on the Bible Study series on 4BK TV, including the two creation accounts that the first-wife legend grew out of. His full case for an Anunnaki reading of Eden is set out in the Garden of Eden and the Anunnaki explained, and the podcast episode linked above covers the same ground in conversation. For the wider Sumerian background, including the gods, texts and debates behind the ancient-astronaut reading, start at the Anunnaki topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lilith mentioned in the Bible?
Yes, but only once, in Isaiah 34:14, where the Hebrew word lîlît appears among creatures that inhabit the ruins of Edom. Translations vary between "screech owl" (King James, Geneva), "night creatures" (NIV) and "Lilith" (NRSV, NABRE). She is not mentioned in Genesis.
Was Lilith really Adam's first wife?
No ancient source says so. The idea first appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Hebrew text dated between about 700 and 1000 CE, which many scholars regard as satirical. It builds on the real difference between the creation accounts in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22, but the Lilith explanation is a medieval addition.
Is Lilith Sumerian?
Her probable ancestors are Mesopotamian: the lilû, lilītu and ardat-lilî demons of Akkadian incantations, with a Sumerian counterpart in the ki-sikil-lil-la-ke of the Gilgamesh poem. These were a class of night spirits, not a single named goddess, and the direct link to the Hebrew Lilith is likely but not proven.
Who is depicted on the Burney Relief?
The Old Babylonian plaque known as the Queen of the Night is often called Lilith, but specialists have largely abandoned that identification. Thorkild Jacobsen argued for Inanna (Ishtar), and the British Museum, which owns it, favours Ereshkigal while acknowledging the question is open.
What are Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof?
They are the three angels whom God sends after Lilith in the Alphabet of Ben Sira. Lilith swears she will not harm any infant protected by an amulet bearing their names, which is why the names appear on later Jewish childbirth amulets.
Sources and further reading
- Rebecca Lesses, "Lilith," in the Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia.
- Isaiah 34:14 in the King James Version, the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version.
- Joseph L. Angel, The Songs of the Sage: 4Q510, 4Q511 (Dead Sea Scrolls Editions 2, Brill, 2022).
- The Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith passage, translated by Norman Bronznick with David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, in Rabbinic Fantasies (1990).
- Thorkild Jacobsen, "Pictures and Pictorial Language (The Burney Relief)," in Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East (1987).
- The British Museum, "The Queen of the Night" relief, collection notes.
- Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (third edition, 1990).
- Samuel Noah Kramer, Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree (1938).
