The "Lilith Theory"
Was there a woman before Eve?
A long while back, I was challenged to consider the impact of "Lilith" on the Scriptures. This is a rather long'ish response, but I wanted to be as complete as possible.
The line of reasoning leading from Isaiah 24:14 to “Adam’s first wife” is given as—
Two women are created in the beginning, one in Genesis 1, the second in Genesis 2
This is shown because these two women were created in different ways, one from the dust of the Earth, the other from the “rib” of Adam
This is shown because these two women were created at different times, one on the sixth day and the other after the seventh
This is shown because the two women are created in two different places, one before the creation of the Garden, the second in the Garden
According to this theory, the first woman is mentioned in Isaiah 34:24, and her name is Lilith. This woman is also known from Babylonian mythology as a night demon, the mother of all the demons. This demon, according to some mystical (Kabbalistic) Rabbis, is the same creature as the transliteration of this unknown word in Isaiah 34:14. Since Jewish Rabbis hold there is an external, spiritual, source of evil, the snake must be some “natural” creature. The snake is Lilith, who has returned to tempt Eve and ruin the happiness of Adam (therefore the snake is sometimes illustrated with the face and hair of a woman).
Lilith is rejected of God, and a second woman created to be Adam’s wife—
First, she spoke God’s name, something that is not allowed, showing she was “uppity,” or rather would not stay in her place—so God created a second woman who was subservient to Adam
Second, she was not “of the same kind” as Adam, and so was not found to be a “suitable helper” for Adam, and hence was cast out
The existence of Lilith is supposed to show us that the Scriptures are not reliable because the entire Lilith episode is removed from the narrative to cover up the existence of this first woman. It is also supposed to show us God is misogynist because he cast out the woman who wouldn’t be subservient to Adam.
Are there two different women?
The first support for the “Lilith Theory” (LT) is there are two different creation narratives, hence there must have been two different women created. Specifically—
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27
And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Genesis 2:22
The first claim here is Adam and Eve were both created from the dust of the ground. This doesn’t hold, however, because there is no mention of how Adam and Eve were created in Genesis 1:27, nor even that they were, or were not, created in the same way. To argue they where both created from “the dust of the Earth” is to assume the mode of Adam’s creation in Genesis 2 into the creation narrative in Genesis 1, and then to assume Adam and Eve were both created in the same way in Genesis 1 just because no mode of creation is mentioned.
This is an argument from silence. To win an argument from silence, you must prove every other instance is true … if you are going to prove there are no black swans, you must prove you have examined every swan that has, does, and will exist and show they are all white. Proving an argument from silence is very, very difficult.
It is possible to infer an argument from silence is the correct solution using circumstantial evidence; what is the circumstantial evidence here? There are two lines of argument and at least two counterarguments.
The first argument is the first creation happened on the sixth day, while the second creation happened sometime after the seventh day. This is shown by the beginning of the second chapter stating that God rested on the seventh day, so everything in the second chapter happens after the seventh day.
The problem with this argument is there is no differentiation between the man, the woman, and the beasts of the field in the text. If there are two women, there are two men and two sets of animals by the same logic. In other words, if we hold there are two women created, we must also hold there are two completely different creations, one before the seventh day and one after.
This is irrational on several counts (see below on the toledot structure, etc.), not least of which is this puts God resting from his “labors” of creation before he is finished creating.
The Long Second Day
It seems impossible to fit the contents of the second chapter of Genesis into a single (the second) day. Three things must happen on this day:
The naming of the animals
Adam's sleep
God's creation of the woman
If we assume Adam is naming the kinds rather than species (which is what the text seems to indicate), then Adam would be naming anywhere from ten to a hundred kinds, something that could easily take place in a few hours.
As for Eve’s creation after Adam’s “deep sleep,” there is no indication of how long this sleep might have been. There are instances where people fall into a “deep sleep” for an hour, or for minutes (see Abraham falling into a deep sleep during the cutting of the covenant, for instance), so its entirely possible this “deep sleep” was just a few minutes.
Further, if you hold that God created the stars in a single day, it’s not much of a stretch to put the relevant parts of the second chapter into the sixth day. Again, problem solved.
The Naming of Eve
Most folks have it in their heads that Adam and Eve were both named when they were created. Specifically, we tend to think that Adam “named Eve” when she was brought to him in Genesis 2. However, in the original Hebrew, Eve is only called “the woman” until after the fall in Genesis 3, when she is actually named “Eve” by Adam.
Adam is not “Adam’s” proper name. Adam is the name of the human species; you can see this in the wording of Genesis 1:27, which switches between the singular and plural in different places. While “Adam” is taken as the first man’s proper name throughout the Scriptures, it’s not his proper name.
We can see this more clearly in the naming of the animals, the context in which “the naming of the woman” takes place. Did God bring each individual robin to Adam, and he named this one “Bob,” while he named that one “Mary?” No. The naming here is of kinds, which means cats, birds, oxen, etc., not of individual animals (we might pull the naming down to the species level, or some pre-fall species level, of which there may have been fewer than what we see today … it’s hard to tell from the text).
Regardless of the way we see this naming, Adam was not giving these animals personal names, but rather describing some sort of “kind.” In the same way, when Adam first sees Eve, he calls her “the woman,” or rather a person of the kind “woman.” He then gives her a personal name after the fall (he also gives himself a personal name in this process, but that name is not used in the scriptures).
The Problem of Lilith's Sin
If Lilith was “cast out” before the passage in Genesis 2 where Eve is created, then she must have been cast out for some sort of sin. If she was cast out for some sort of sin, then human sin would already exist before the fall described in the third chapter (see below on the humanness of Lilith). Since humansin is always related to death, this means there must have been death beforethe Fall, which then makes it hard to see how any of the scriptural arguments that Adam’s fall not only caused humankind (‘Adam’) to encounter death, but all of creation.
The bottom line is the theory of “two women” doesn’t hold. So regardless of which view you take, there are good answers to the problems posed by the two different accounts, and serious problems with trying to split up the two creation accounts so there are two women but only one man and one set of animals.
Isaiah 34:14 and Lilith
According to LT, the “first wife of Adam” is mentioned in Isaiah 34.14—
And wild animals shall meet with hyenas; the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; indeed, there the night bird settles and finds for herself a resting place.
The Hebrew word used in Isaiah 34:14 only appears once in the entire scriptures, and in fact only once in any Hebrew literature other than this passage and commentaries on this passage. In cases like this, some scholars will sometimes transliterate the unknown word into a name, rather than diving into the context to discover the meaning. This is, for instance, what has happened with the word baptism, which has a meaning, but has been transliterated to create a shorthand reference for that meaning.
Going beyond the meaning of the single word, context matters. When you take the text out of context, you’re left with a con. The context doesn’t indicate a person, but rather an animal of some sort. Consider this list of figures being discussed—
Streams (9)
Soil (9)
Land (9)
Hawk (11)
Porcupine (11)
Owl (11)
Raven (11)
Nobles (12)
Princes (12)
Thorns (13)
Nettles (13)
Thistles (13)
Wild animals (14)
Hyenas (14)
Goat (14)
The word "Lilith" (14, shown in Hebrew below)
Owl (15)
Hawks (15)
In its own context, לִּילִ֔ית must be an animal rather than a demon or “Adam’s first wife.”
First, this is further shown by the next passage, which says—
Seek and read from the book of the LORD: Not one of these shall be missing; none shall be without her mate. (Isaiah 34:15)
Which means that if לִּילִ֔ית is to be translated as a female demon, she must also have her mate, and her mate is … Adam.
Second, we know this is an animal because the translators of the Septuagint translated לִּילִ֔ית as onokentauros, or goats—perhaps centaurs, but certainly not as the first wife of Adam, nor even the snake in the Garden. I think it might just be that a group of Rabbis living long before Christ, translating the Tanakh for Ptolemy II Philadelphus around 285–247 years before Christ, might know a thing or two about Hebrew—and might take some care in doing the translation.
Third, we know this is an animal because there are plural versions of this word in some manuscripts. In particular, the Dead Sea Scrolls have this word in the plural. Should we take it, then, that there are potentially multiple “Liliths?”
The “Fall of Lilith”
According to LT, there are two reasons Lilith was cast out by God.
First, according to the Rabbis, she “spoke the name of God,” which is not permitted.
The idea that “speaking the name of God” is a sin can be found no earlier than the Second Temple. “Speaking the name of God” is not a sin mentioned anyplace else in the scriptures; it is not even included among the 613 commandments given to Israel by God in the wilderness.
Counter to this, the name of God is used throughout the Scriptures in its full form. For instance, many, many people in the Scriptures “called on the name of the Lord,” which meant … they were speaking the name of God, in full.
How did “saying the name of God” become a sin? When the Rabbis were putting “fences” around the Mosaic Law, they decided that “taking God’s name in vain” meant “speaking the name of God as in a spell or incantation.” To prevent anyone from using God’s name in this way, they decided no-one should ever speak the name of God, ever. This then developed into an entire tradition that speaking the name of God was a sin regardless of the context, except by the High Priest, standing in the Holy of Holies, at the moment of a particular sacrifice.
This was carried forward by the omitting of the diacritic marks representing vowels in the Hebrew text. When Hebrew was in the process of being “lost” as a spoken language, the Masaretes, a Jewish sect, decided to create a version of the scriptures using marks indicating the vowels (Hebrew doesn’t have vowels, the reader just has to “know” what the word is from the consonants alone). Because the Masaretes believed speaking the name of God was a sin, they left the vowel marks out of every instance of the name of God—much like modern Jews will write “G-d” rather than “God.”
Ultimately, the proper pronunciation of YHWH was lost … so we say “Yahweh,” or “Jehovah,” or some other word because we fill in the vowels.
Lilith would not have been cast out for speaking the name of God because speaking the name of God was never a sin. It’s not even closely related to the commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Second, LT claims Lilith was not created from Adam, and hence was not “compatible with Adam.” In other places, this claim is expounded to “Lilith is not human.”
This relies on a faulty reading of Genesis 1:27, which is discussed above. There is no indication of how the first humans were created in Genesis 1:27; importing Adam’s creation from Genesis 2 to describe both Adam’s and Eve’s creation in Genesis 1 is wrong.
Even taking it that Adam and Eve were created separately means Lilith was somehow “not compatible with Adam” doesn’t work. The male and female of every other animal were created individually, and yet Adam still named them as “kinds,” and recognized they were of the same species. The male and female of every other kind of animal, although created individually, were able to procreate. The text in Genesis 1:27 even says man and woman are both “Adam,” or of the same species, and they are told to have children … so saying this first woman was “not compatible” with Adam is easily countered from the scriptures.
Bottom Line
The scriptures are not unreliable because the existence of a woman named “Lilith,” the first wife of Adam, was “covered up.” There is no evidence of “two women” that treats the scriptural record consistently. The transliteration of Isaiah 34:14 cannot support the idea of a “she demon” that is somehow related to the first wife of Adam. The reasons for the “fall of Lilith” make no sense.
God is not misogynist, either.
First, different roles do not imply different personal value. The king is no more valuable than even his poorest subject—this, in fact, is only true in Jewish thought in the ancient world, and in Christian thought in the modern world. All other thought systems, including reductionistic materialism grounded in Darwinism, hold the woman is somehow “less human” than the man. While Judaism and Christianity hold that women and men can (and do in many cases) hold different roles, they both also hold men and women are of equal worth.
Other places in the Scriptures are of interest … for instance, think of the opportunity Jesus missed when the woman with an issue of blood touched the hem of his robe! He could have said “do you not remember Lilith, who was turned into a snake by God when she presumed and got out of her place as a woman?” Or think of the conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well … Jesus missed several great opportunities to put a woman in her place!
Second, Adam’s naming of “the woman,” and later naming his wife specifically “Eve,” indicate Adam considered Eve his equal, based on implications in the original Hebrew.
Then what are we to do with Eve being “Adam’s helper?” Doesn’t this mean Eve is somehow “lesser” than Adam? If you search through the scriptures, you will find the Hebrew word translated “helper” is used of one other person more often than any other. That person is … God. Does God being a “helper” imply that he is somehow lesser than the humans he is helping? No, it only means that God is playing the role of a helper in some situations and not in others. Being a helper is a role, not a claim of worth or value.
Then what are we to do with Paul and his argument that sin came through the woman first? Well … if you read the scriptures … it turns out that sin did come through the woman first. This doesn’t mean she is somehow of lesser worth than a man, only that her role was somehow modified in her sinning first. We might have expected as much from the consequences (not curses) of the fall described in Genesis 3.
Of course, Adam suffered consequences, as well … so Eve is not alone in having her role changed because of the fall.
None of the arguments for Lilith stand.
Even if you could support one of the arguments, the second fails. Even if you could support two of the arguments, the third fails. There is no evidence for Lilith in the scriptures, no evidence of Adam having a first wife, and the mythical evidence available isn’t even self-consistent or logical.
There is no “Lilith.”