Lilith, the first feminist or the figure of a mythopoesis?

For our introduction, let's first begin with the feminist myth, although this myth changes depending upon which feminist you are reading it from, mostly because there's no concrete evidence for the claim, so it has to be reinvented by each feminist. Currently, there are quite a few theories out there, the first being that Lilith was once a Great primordial Goddess who was repressed by a hypermasculine patriarchal society, the next was that Lilith was a divorcement from her Goddess position by making a duality out of the Goddess in which she was the "dark maiden" portion, and the final was that Lilith was a Goddess who opposed the God, and was cast out of society from that point onward.

To start off with an observation, the demons personified some force of nature in several cases, while in others, they seemed to be the sort of thing that a child draws from his nightmares. In the Mesopotamian tradition you could find Utug, the Dweller of the Desert waiting to take you away if you wandered to far; Telal, the Bull Demon; Alal, the destroyer; Namtar , Pestilence; Idpa, fever, etc. Curiously, no one ever wonders if these were once great Gods and Goddesses.

For the first theory, which "Goddess" Lilith was changes every second, (and some of the more amusing ones make her every Goddess which has ever been known to mythology), but the most common reference is that she is Innana. The strength of this theory used to rest upon what we call the Burney Relief, which features Innana being surrounded by owls, and most puzzling, being naked. Formerly, this was considered an anomaly, as it was the only nude statue of Innana, but fortunately, we soon discovered another one. The weight of the testimony of both the first and second figure made it abundantly clear that Lilith was not whom the statue was portraying, though most feminist websites are blissfully unaware of this. The identification of the statue we now know is Innana, but thought to be Lilith, was made by the renowned scholar, and now deceased, Henri Frankfort, but the identification was more than tenuous, as Thorkild Jacobsen shows. This picture had a curious problem, which was that the Goddess carried a ring and rod in upraised hands. These two symbols are "symbols of justice" by usual interpretation, but they are the most powerful symbols as well, whomever had them was extraordinairrely strong. This doesn't make sense because "Lilith" in the Epic of Gilgamesh, (the tablet is roughly contemporary), is a weakling who runs off and doesn't even own her own house. Some scholars suggested that these symbols were for the punitive power to punish parents by killing their children, but that line of reasoning has mostly been abandoned. Some newer interpretations suggest that this is a Goddess previously unknown to the area.

With that link destroyed, feminists have to rely upon making Lilith some sort of repressed universal Goddess. Unfortunately though, the theory makes no sense. For instance, they espouse that before Christianity came along the Goddess was highly venerated, but for some reason, one very stupid and almost worthless Goddess gets cut out from the picture? Isis, Ishtar, Astorthe, Allat, etc. were all prominent Goddesses leading up to the advent of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. In fact, Judaism had a stronger feminine cult than male cult until the 5th century BCE when they had contact with Persia, whose leader Darius managed to purge it from the people's minds, so effectively that he was even praised in the Old Testament scriptures for his pious nature. Why is it then that Goddesses like Isis, Ishtar, Ninlil, etc. were all unscathed by this purported "male dominence", and why were temple harlots still popular up until Herodotus day, and in fact, even up until Muhammad's day, if these male mysogynists were out "repressing" women everywhere? The theory oversteps the lines of plausibility, and into the very remotist realm of "possibility".

Winnett, writing for “The Moslem World Journal”, gives a good number of quotes that demonstrate the preferential treatment of the Goddess over the God. As an example, he shows us the form: "dkrt'lt kll s(t)rt" which is translated into, "May Allat, (The Goddess), remember every wish." In petitionings, the Goddess was clearly loved more. Winnett is not the only known scholar who says this, Andrew Crichton, "The History of Arabia", David Kay, "The Semitic Religions", and Langdon, "Semitic Mythology", all inform us that the Goddess was appealed to for help, particularly child-bearing, though the God may be as well. Thus we come into yet another problem, a Goddess was responsible for helping child-birth, not destroying it. In fact, female deities such as the wives of Hawron and Ba'l were chiefly responsible for controlling the demonesses which afflicted child-birth. Again, this completely throws the "Male patriarch" theory off its rocker, but facts won't bother ardent feminists. (Amazingly, they'll usually be the same people who whine about Christian mythology, without even recognizing their own!)

P Jayakar, "The earthen drum. New Delhi: National Museum of India", tries to reconcile this because of the beleif that the perception of Mesopotamian Goddesses were influenced by India, only they split the monistic viewpoint into a dualistic one. Even so, this is an unacceptable explanation for monistic viewpoints in Sumerian/Babylonian religion such as the view of Ishtar, both "cruel to her lovers", and simultaneously venerated. Examples abound of Gods and Goddesses who were dualistic, yet still seen as beneficial to the people. In fact, many scholars have suggested that the way the people viewed Gods and Goddesses were as being outside the realm of normal morals and ethics; it simply didn't apply to them.

Likewise, Serinity Young believes in the book "An Anthology of Sacred Texts By And About Women" that nomadic warriors caused a dramatic shift towards a more warrior society, transforming the roles of Goddesses, which eventually caused a shift to patriarchal societies. However, only a brief look at the history of Sumeria reveals it was under attack constantly, and when it wasn't under attack, it was the one doing the attacking . In fact, Sumeria often had problems dealing with soldiers who were too far out to be under their control anymore, from its earliest inceptions! Irregardless, Young counters the point of feminists who believe that the Goddesses were being "written out", Young makes it clear the Goddess still had high favor amongst the people.

Now we have a real starting point for our discussion of Lilith, where did she come from? Most scholars believe the first link is from the lilitu, winged night spirits of Sumero-Babylonian myth dating from around 3500 BCE. Mistakenly assumed to mostly be succubi, they're actual role was primarily as spirits who preyed upon infants and women in childbirth. The lilitu lived in open areas such as deserts, renowned for inspiring terror, away from crowded people. Their breasts were filled with poison instead of milk, and the other portion, the ardat lili were sexually frustrated and infertile women who behaved aggresively towards young men.

Our next major clue lies in Sumeria at the 2400 BCE mark. Here, we find that Gilgamesh's Dad belongs to the male class of male demons. Nothing much can be gleaned from this, but our first major clue lies in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", and in particular, the story of Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree. This can be found in Kramer's "Sumerian Mythology", in which the the character we call Lilith appears incidentally as a "maid of desolation" who invades Queen Inanna's "holy garden" on the banks of the Euphrates. Along with the "snake who knows no charm," Lilith menacingly builds her house at the base of the queen's cherished tree. The mighty Gilgamesh rescues the queen by slaying the snake and frightening Lilith back to the "desolate places she was accustomed to haunt." (Also cf: Wolkstein and Kramer: " Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth")

Thorkild Jacobsen "The Sumerian Kinglist" gives us this footnote:

"Thus with R. Campbell Thompson, who in this lil-la sees Sumerian lil-la, Akkadian lilu, 'the demon equivalent to a male vampire. There are four demons of this class - the idlu lili, the ardat lili, the lilu, and the lilitu. The ardat lili is well known as the female vampire or succuba who visits men by night and bears [them] ghostly children: the idlu lili must be her male counterpart who can visit women and beget offspring by them, just as demigods are created'(The Epic of Gilgamesh p. 9)"

Our first real references to Lilith comes from late Babylonian times, roughly 800 to 600 BCE, in the form of an elaborate drawing depicting Pazzuzu driving Lilith out of the World. A quick look at how Lilith is depicted here shows what people thought of her. All of her characteristics were of the "abominable" animals. She had a hairy human body, a head of a lioness, with teeth and ears of a donkey, long fingers and fingernails, and the feet of a bird with sharp talons. She is often shown standing or kneeling on a donkey, nursing a pig and a dog, and holding snakes. That description isn't what any ancient culture would have called a benevolent deity. Almost all of those animals are the hated animals of the ancients. This continues in an unbroken succession in Jewish amulets, in Babylonian pottery, in Persian amulets, and in the Qumran scrolls.

In fact, without exception, there is not one good reference to Lilith in the entire corpus of ancient literature. The only reference with Lilith as a feminist archetype is in a parody work, largely believed to have been written by Jews outside of maintainstream Judaism. (The Alphabet of Ben Sira). It appears to be anti-Judaism material, which chief purpose was either to sway Jews to convert to Christianity or to Islam. More than likely, it was the former and not the latter. The reason being is that Christianity of the time placed little, if any, references to the Old Testament, the New Testament was almost the exclusive study of the Scripture. Meanwhile, Muslims trace their lineage and religion through most of the great people in the Old Testament, so it's doubtful they would parody it, especially considering the consequences, though the author of it is unknown. Some Jews were trying to convince other Jews to convert to Christianity because they saw the Jewish religion as the major source of their persecution.

Eliezer Segal contends the Lilith myth is nothing but a parody, which was rather common in the Middle Ages. (Cf: David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies). Also commenting on it is Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor at South Florida State University. If you actually go and read all of the literature on Lilith in all Jewish literature, you still won't get the Lilith story that feminists espouse. When questioned on the myth of Lilith being the first feminist, he remarks, "That's no myth. That's just a story somebody made up yesterday." The real origins of the Lilith myth feminists dream about were invented by Judith Plaskow, in a book called "The Coming of Lilith".

Next, one curious piece of evidence gets brought to the front, which is a most striking oddity. Some feminist scholars have suggested that there's a tablet which has Lilith as the "hand of Innana" and as a temple harlot who gets the men gathering into place. This sent my B.S. meter ticking, as it seems rather odd that after reading a few dozen books on ancient mythology and visiting some very high quality webpages that this fragment went totally unnoticed. Even more curious than that, well-researched feminists never quoted this piece of evidence either, even when making their "Lilith as first feminist" theory, which relies heavily upon Sumeria. An argument from silence, no doubt, but it's striking when no hard evidence is being presented. After that, and still even worse, what the tablet "said" changed as I started looking for websites with the information on it. Sometimes, it was one tablet which had "hand of Innana", others said it was "right hand of Innana", others still said there were "several tablets", yet not one of them listed a source. This is curiuos because in all the literature of ancient Sumeria, I only know of three disputed references to Lilith.

Finally, I found Merlin Stone's, "When God Was A Woman", which seems to be the source for this quote. Stone only says that it was a fragment, and that it mentions Lilith as the hand of Innana and as the temple prostitute. Unfortunately, Stone doesn't give a reference either, nor show the fragment in question. Again, another striking oddity. The closest I found was the Epic of Gilgamesh as translated by Kramer, who suggests the phrase "ki-sikil-lil-la-ke," means "Lila's maiden, beloved, companion, or maid." (I assume this is also the origin of Merlin Stone's mistaken suggestion that Lilith was the "maiden" of Inanna. A maiden was a virgin, and nothing about calling someone a maiden of a Goddess indicates them as being a Goddess themselves, but temple harlots surely were not, and a temple harlot fetched twice as much money if she were not a virgin). This translation is actually a bit curious, I'm guessing he focused on the lil-la, though he could have just said the word "ki" at the beginning indicates the Earth Goddess of the same name. The actual translation of this is somewhat questionable, as under the entry on Lilith in the "Anchor Bible Dictionary" (Lowell K. Handy):

"Two sources of information previously used to define Lilith are both suspect. Kramer translated ki-sikil-lil-la-ke as "Lilith" in a Sumerian Gilgamesh fragment. The text relates an incident where this female takes up lodging in a tree trunk which has a Zu-bird perched in the branches and a snake living in the roots. This text was used to interpret a sculpture of a woman with bird talons for feet as being a depiction of Lilith. From the beginning this interpretation was questioned so that after some debate neither the female in the story, nor the figure are assumed to be Lilith." (Vol. 4, p. 324)

(Emphasis added). Ellen M. Umansky (for The Encyclopaedia of Religion) on Lilith:

As the name of a demon, Lilit is etymologically related to the Sumerian lil ("wind") and not, as some once supposed, to the Hebrew laylah ("night"). Yet like the Sumerian wind demon and her later Babylonian counterpart, Lilitu, a succuba who seduces men in their sleep, Lilith is active at night, seizing men and forcing them to copulate with her. Although as child slayer Lilith bears greatest resemblance to the Babylonian demon Lamashtu, Lamashtu eventually became confused in the popular imagination with the succuba Lilitu.

Right there we have found our clue. There can be no doubt of the Babylonian origin of this word. The god of Nippur was known as En-lil, " lord of spirits " (see BeBrroxie, VII., 2, § 2), and the Assyrian Ulu, lilutu had the signification "sprites." The Semitic lilatu, " night," may be compared, and the female "Lilith" is named in the cuneiform inscriptions as an attendant of 4. Other ones are Namtar, the deity of plagues (see Hebrew Beayr.oxra, VIL, 2, § 8).

The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead by J. Gordon Melton tells us that Lilith was originally a Sumerian storm demon, part of a group of vampires, but was adapted to the Hebrew mythology as Adam's first wife. Interestingly though, the role of Lilith in the Kabballah wasn't as a woman, she was a parthenogenic hermaphrodite. (There goes the "World's first feminist" theory again...)

So... what happened? The old interpretation of Lilith refers to a group of spirits, the lilutu, who wondered about. When cultures started to cross-integrate with each other, their legends and apocryphal tales started to merge, as explained by Dinah and Carol Mack in "A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits", Lilith borrowed demonic traits from ancient child slayers such as the Arabian Um Es Sibyan and the vindictive Greek Lamia, a serpent goddess also renowned as a succubus.

The idea of Lilith was starting to get popular in romantic literature, and it lead to an honest, though wrongful, conclusion about the antiquity of Lilith. Even in Babylonian pottery inscriptions by which Lilith is referenced to in the plural, i.e. class of demons. Next, Lilith wasn't a temple whore in the amulets of protection, her main thing seems to be killing children. I'm not currently aware of any amulets designed for men against Lilith. Depictions of Lilth on these amulets, when they appear at all, show an insect headed creature covered with hair or spines, a flipper for a tail, and a pair of tentacles for arms. It's hard to be sure, these were carved crudely onto cheap silver with a heated knife.

Barbara Walker believes that the lily or lilu, (lotus) was the Great Mother's flower - yoni, whose title formed Lilith's name. Unfortunately, the worst part of any Barbara Walker book is when she starts talking about etymology and linguistics.

One Sumerian tablet refers to Erech/Urak, Inanna's city, as the city of "courtesans and prostitutes". Deities in these days tended to be locally assigned, that is to say that they were regional, each city having a patron God or Goddess. There, one of the duties of Innana's priestesses, considered incarnations of the goddess, was to make love to strangers. The other class of female spirits which the late Lilith derived is the Ardat Lili, Ardatu being a term that described young women. That makes them succubi. It is also interesting to note that the Sumerian word for "wantonness" was "Lulu." The word for "luxuriousness" was "Lalu." Also, the very word for "evil" was "Limnu." This has an obvious relation to the word Lili (and Ardat Lili specifically); not just in the similarity of pronunciation and spelling, but also in the very definition of the words.

The last point which will be addressed is that "Lilith" is obviously bad Hebrew. The actual name of Lilith would be properly translate as LYLVT, though in this cause the Vau acts as a vowel, giving us an "o" sound, or LYLOTh. If you know Hebrew, "-oth" is a feminine plural suffix, 'ith' makes it masculine. We note that by this proper translation we are left with a plural word instead of a singular one, which is similar to "the liloth", which is translated as "the spirits". Babylonian pottery refers to what we now call "Lilith" in the plural version, though Lamashtu was singular, as does Persian amulets as far as I know, but Hebrew made it a singular woman, Lilith. What they did was take the liloth, the ardat lili, and most importantly, a Babylonian demoness known as Lamashtu, and combined them into a composite character we now call "Lilith".

What more needs to be said from here? Lilith was just a classic example of what happens when imaginative bias creeps into the historical method and composes itself into a curious form of exegetic mythopoesis that defies all laws of common sense and history.