Hebrew Myths (10 page)

(
b
) Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world;
¹⁰⁰
but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam—being already like a twenty-year-old man—felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: ‘Every creature but I has a proper mate!’, and prayed God would remedy this injustice.
¹⁰¹

(
c
) God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam’s union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain’s sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind. Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon’s judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem.
¹⁰²

(
d
) Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. ‘Why must I lie beneath you?’ she asked. ‘I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.’ Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

Adam complained to God: ‘I have been deserted by my helpmeet.’ God at once sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof to fetch Lilith back. They found her beside the Red Sea, a region abounding in lascivious demons, to whom she bore
lilim
at the rate of more than one hundred a day. ‘Return to Adam without delay,’ the angels
said, ‘or we will drown you!’ Lilith asked: ‘How can I return to Adam and live like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?’ ‘It will be death to refuse!’ they answered. ‘How can I die,’ Lilith asked again, ‘when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day. None the less, if ever I see your three names or likenesses displayed in an amulet above a newborn child, I promise to spare it.’ To this they agreed; but God punished Lilith by making one hundred of her demon children perish daily;
¹⁰³
and if she could not destroy a human infant, because of the angelic amulet, she would spitefully turn against her own.
¹⁰⁴

(
e
) Some say that Lilith ruled as queen in Zmargad, and again in Sheba; and was the demoness who destroyed Job’s sons.
¹⁰⁵
Yet she escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall. Lilith and Naamah not only strangle infants but also seduce dreaming men, any one of whom, sleeping alone, may become their victim.
¹⁰⁶

(
f
) Undismayed by His failure to give Adam a suitable helpmeet, God tried again, and let him watch while he built up a woman’s anatomy: using bones, tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such disgust that even when this woman, the First Eve, stood there in her full beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance. God knew that He had failed once more, and took the First Eve away. Where she went, nobody knows for certain.
¹⁰⁷

(
g
) God tried a third time, and acted more circumspectly. Having taken a rib from Adam’s side in his sleep, He formed it into a woman; then plaited her hair and adorned her, like a bride, with twenty-four pieces of jewellery, before waking him. Adam was entranced.
¹⁰⁸

(
h
) Some say that God created Eve not from Adam’s rib, but from a tail ending in a sting which had been part of his body. God cut this off, and the stump—now a useless coccyx—is still carried by Adam’s descendants.
¹⁰⁹

(
i
) Others say that God’s original thought had been to create two human beings, male and female; but instead He designed a single one with a male face looking forward, and a female face looking back. Again He changed His mind, removed Adam’s backward-looking face, and built a woman’s body for it.
¹¹⁰

(
j
) Still others hold that Adam was originally created as an androgyne of male and female bodies joined back to back. Since this posture made locomotion difficult, and conversation awkward, God
divided the androgyne and gave each half a new rear. These separate beings He placed in Eden, forbidding them to couple.
¹¹¹

***

1
. The tradition that man’s first sexual intercourse was with animals, not women, may be due to the widely spread practice of bestiality among herdsmen of the Middle East, which is still condoned by custom, although figuring three times in the Pentateuch as a capital crime. In the Akkadian
Gilgamesh Epic
, Enkidu is said to have lived with gazelles and jostled other wild beasts at the watering place, until civilized by Aruru’s priestess. Having enjoyed her embraces for six days and seven nights, he wished to rejoin the wild beasts but, to his surprise, they fled from him. Enkidu then knew that he had gained understanding, and the priestess said: ‘Thou art wise, Enkidu, like unto a god!’

2
. Primeval man was held by the Babylonians to have been androgynous. Thus the
Gilgamesh Epic
gives Enkidu androgynous features: ‘the hair of his head like a woman’s, with locks that sprout like those of Nisaba, the Grain-goddess.’ The Hebrew tradition evidently derives from Greek sources, because both terms used in a Tannaitic midrash to describe the bisexual Adam are Greek:
androgynos
, ‘man-woman’, and
diprosopon
, ‘two-faced’. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher and commentator on the Bible, contemporary with Jesus, held that man was at first bisexual; so did the Gnostics. This belief is clearly borrowed from Plato. Yet the myth of two bodies placed back to back may well have been founded on observation of Siamese twins, which are sometimes joined in this awkward manner. The two-faced Adam appears to be a fancy derived from coins or statues of Janus, the Roman New Year god.

3
. Divergences between the Creation myths of
Genesis
I and II, which allow Lilith to be presumed as Adam’s first mate, result from a careless weaving together of an early Judaean and a late priestly tradition. The older version contains the rib incident. Lilith typifies the Anath-worshipping
Canaanite women, who were permitted pre-nuptial promiscuity. Time after time the prophets denounced Israelite women for following Canaanite practices; at first, apparently, with the priests’ approval—since their habit of dedicating to God the fees thus earned is expressly forbidden in
Deuteronomy
XXIII. 18. Lilith’s flight to the Red Sea recalls the ancient Hebrew view that water attracts demons. ‘Tortured and rebellious demons’ also found safe harbourage in Egypt. Thus Asmodeus, who had strangled Sarah’s first six husbands, fled ‘to the uttermost parts of Egypt’ (
Tobit
VIII. 3), when Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish on their wedding night.

4
. Lilith’s bargain with the angels has its ritual counterpart in an apotropaic rite once performed in many Jewish communities. To protect the newborn child against Lilith—and especially a male, until he could be permanently safeguarded by circumcision—a ring was drawn with natron, or charcoal, on the wall of the birthroom, and inside it were written the words: ‘Adam and Eve. Out, Lilith!’ Also the names Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof (meanings uncertain) were inscribed on the door. If Lilith nevertheless succeeded in approaching the child and fondling him, he would laugh in his sleep. To avert danger, it was held wise to strike the sleeping child’s lips with one finger—whereupon Lilith would vanish.

5.
‘Lilith’ is usually derived from the Babylonian-Assyrian word
lilitu
, ‘a female demon, or wind-spirit’—one of a triad mentioned in Babylonian spells. But she appears earlier as ‘Lillake’ on a 2000
B.C.
Sumerian tablet from Ur containing the tale of
Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree
. There she is a demoness dwelling in the trunk of a willow-tree tended by the Goddess Inanna (Anath) on the banks of the Euphrates. Popular Hebrew etymology seems to have derived ‘Lilith’ from
layil
, ‘night’; and she therefore often appears as a hairy night-monster, as she also does in Arabian folklore. Solomon suspected the Queen of Sheba of being Lilith, because she had hairy legs. His judgement on the two harlots is recorded in 1
Kings
III. 16 ff. According to
Isaiah
XXXIV. 14–15, Lilith dwells among the desolate ruins in the Edomite Desert where satyrs (
se‘ir
), reems, pelicans, owls, jackals, ostriches, arrow-snakes and kites keep her company.

6
. Lilith’s children are called
lilim
. In the
Targum Yerushalmi
, the priestly blessing of
Numbers
VI. 26 becomes: ‘The Lord bless thee in all thy doings, and preserve thee from the Lilim!’ The fourth-century
A.D.
commentator Hieronymus identified Lilith with the Greek Lamia, a Libyan queen deserted by Zeus, whom his wife Hera robbed of her children. She took revenge by robbing other women of theirs.

7
. The Lamiae, who seduced sleeping men, sucked their blood and ate their flesh, as Lilith and her fellow-demonesses did, were also known as
Empusae
, ‘forcers-in’; or
Mormolyceia
, ‘frightening wolves’; and described as ‘Children of Hecate’. A Hellenistic relief shows a naked Lamia straddling a traveller asleep on his back. It is characteristic of civilizations where
women are treated as chattels that they must adopt the recumbent posture during intercourse, which Lilith refused. That Greek witches who worshipped Hecate favoured the superior posture, we know from Apuleius; and it occurs in early Sumerian representations of the sexual act, though not in the Hittite. Malinowski writes that Melanesian girls ridicule what they call ‘the missionary position’, which demands that they should lie passive and recumbent.

8. Naamah
, ‘pleasant’, is explained as meaning that ‘the demoness sang pleasant songs to idols’.
Zmargad
suggest
smaragdos
, the semi-precious aquamarine; and may therefore be her submarine dwelling. A demon named Smaragos occurs in the
Homeric Epigrams
.

9.
Eve’s creation by God from Adam’s rib—a myth establishing male supremacy and disguising Eve’s divinity—lacks parallels in Mediterranean or early Middle-Eastern myth. The story perhaps derives iconotropically from an ancient relief, or painting, which showed the naked Goddess Anath poised in the air, watching her lover Mot murder his twin Aliyan; Mot (mistaken by the mythographer for Yahweh) was driving a curved dagger under Aliyan’s fifth rib, not removing a sixth one. The familiar story is helped by a hidden pun on
tsela
, the Hebrew for ‘rib’: Eve, though designed to be Adam’s helpmeet, proved to be a
tsela
, a ‘stumbling’, or ‘misfortune’. Eve’s formation from Adam’s tail is an even more damaging myth; perhaps suggested by the birth of a child with a vestigial tail instead of a coccyx—a not infrequent occurrence.

10
. The story of Lilith’s escape to the East and of Adam’s subsequent marriage to Eve may, however, record an early historical incident: nomad herdsmen, admitted into Lilith’s Canaanite queendom as guests (see 16.
1
), suddenly seize power and, when the royal household thereupon flees, occupy a second queendom which owes allegiance to the Hittite Goddess Heba.

The meaning of ‘Eve’ is disputed.
Hawwah
is explained in
Genesis
III. 20 as ‘mother of all living’; but this may well be a Hebraicized form of the divine name Heba, Hebat, Khebat or Khiba. This goddess, wife of the Hittite Storm-god, is shown riding a lion in a rock-sculpture at Hattusas—which equates her with Anath—and appears as a form of Ishtar in Hurrian texts. She was worshipped at Jerusalem (see 27.
6
). Her Greek name was Hebe, Heracles’s goddess-wife.

(
a
) Having formed Man from dust, God planted a paradisal garden eastward of Eden and stocked it with trees, whose fruit were blazing jewels, among them the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The river that flowed through Eden afterwards divided into four streams. Pishon waters the Land of Havilah where gold, carbuncle and onyx are found; Gihon waters Cush; Tigris runs beyond Assyria; and Euphrates is the fourth. God set Adam here, and permitted him to attend the Divine Assembly.
¹¹²

(
b
) After Adam’s expulsion, God appointed the Cherubim, also called ‘the Flame of Whirling Swords’, to guard Eden.
¹¹³

(
c
) It is disputed where this terrestrial Paradise lies: whether in a desert,
¹¹⁴
or on the Mountain of God;
¹¹⁵
and whether westward or northward, rather than eastward, of Israel. A certain king of Judah once set himself to discover it. He ascended Mount Lebiah, from the summit of which could be heard the sound of whirling swords on the far bank of a river. Having lowered a number of his courtiers into the valley, he told them: ‘Follow the sound!’ But none came back.
¹¹⁶

(
d
) Eden has seven gates,
¹¹⁷
and the outermost opens from the Cave of Machpelah at Hebron. Adam came upon it while burying Eve’s body there. As he dug, a divine fragrance greeted his nostrils. He dug deeper, hoping to regain his lost abode, but a deafening voice cried ‘Halt!’
¹¹⁸
Adam lies buried in the same cave; his spirit still guards the gate of Eden,
¹¹⁹
through which shines a celestial light.
¹²⁰
The fragrance of Eden once so pervaded the neighbouring field, that Isaac chose it as a place of prayer.
¹²¹
For some twenty generations, it also clung to the garments of skin which God gave Adam, and which were handed down to his male descendants in the elder line.