The Lovely (but very dangerous) Lilith!
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith (oil on canvas), 1866 (altered 1872-1873).
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post above!)
During my nearly thirty years on the UCLA English Department faculty, I held “Office Hours” every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, 1:00 – 3:00. It was a time when my students could drop by to discuss their classes, assignments or simply sit and talk about life.
I loved those “Office Hours”!
So, when we launched the NEW Logos Bible Study website, I wanted to build in “Office Hours” for my current Logos students, every Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 AM – Noon. It’s a personal time allowing us to get to know each other.
Several students drop by each week on Zoom, and this Thursday, our discussion led to a question about “Lilith,” a cryptic character in Scripture, only mentioned once in Isaiah, associated with the fall of the nation Edom, a traditional enemy of Israel:
Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts,
Satyrs shall call to one another;
there shall Lilith repose,
and find for herself a place to rest.
There the screech owl shall nest and lay eggs,
hatch them out and gather them in her shadow;
there shall the kites assemble,
each with its mate.
(Isaiah 34: 14-15)
Lilith is a very cryptic figure, indeed! So, just who is she?
Perhaps the earliest appearance of Lilith is in Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem, dating from c. 2100 B.C. The poem proper includes Tablets I-XI, with Tablet XII added as a sort of “prequel” to the epic around 600 B.C. In Tablet XII, Gilgamesh’s side-kick Enkidu, drops through a hole in the ground and explores the underworld (much as Odysseus does in Book XI of the Odyssey). There in the underworld, Enkidu finds a huluppu tree growing in the garden of Inanna, a Mesopotamian goddess. At the base of the tree coils a deadly serpent and in the tree’s leaves a Zu-bird raises it’s young, while an evil spirit lurks darkly, mysteriously, in its trunk. When Gilgamesh comes to Enkidu’s rescue, he kills the serpent, the Zu-bird darts away and the evil spirit in a fury destroys the tree and vanishes into the forest.
The evil spirit is Lilith.
There is only the faintest connection (if any) between the Epic of Gilgamesh and ancient Hebrew literature, although as we noted, Lilith does appear as a demonic figure in some manuscripts of Isaiah 34. Somewhat later, in the 1st-century B.C., one set of Dead Sea Scroll fragments found in Cave 4 at Qumran (4Q510a-511b) titled, “The Songs of the Sage for Protection against Evil Spirits,” mentions Lilith. Here’s what it says: “And I, the Instructor, proclaim [God’s] glorious splendor so as to frighten and to te[rrify] all the spirits of the destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers . . . and those which fall upon men without warning to lead them astray from a spirit of understanding.”
Later Rabbinic literature such as the Alphabet of ben Sira (c. 800-1000 A.D.) develops a far darker portrayal of Lilith as Adam’s first wife, suggested by the dual creation stories in Genesis 1 & 2. According to this story, Lilith was formed from the very same clay as Adam, her equal; thus, she refused to be sexually submissive to him, demanding to be “on top.” After a fierce argument, Lilith flies away, spawns one hundred little demons and vows to kill the children of Adam and his second wife, Eve. In later times, on dark, stormy nights, mothers were known to lull their anxious children to sleep, easing their minds about a monster lurking beneath the bed by softly singing “lullabies,” a word perhaps derived from the Hebrew lilith-abi, “Lilith begone!” In Jewish tradition, mothers often tie a red string or ribbon (a nachora bendel) around their baby’s wrist to ward off Lilith, who might creep into the nursery to snatch their infant.
By the nineteenth century, Lilith had transcended her ancient religious context and moved into Western European folklore in Goethe’s brilliant 1808 play Faust, where Lilith is introduced as Adam’s first wife, a beautiful—but extremely dangerous—witch and seductress. Faust takes the bait.
Richard Westall. Faust and Lilith (oil on canvas), 1831.
Royal Academy, London.
[The entire dance takes place against a background of debauchery, as Satan watches Faust and Lilith, approvingly.Notice in the foreground beneath Lilith’s feet, the snakes, salamanders and a snail, as well as the bat-like wing of Lilith’s veil!]
In a more demure manner, the English poet John Keats also invokes Lilith’s seductive charms in his ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) and in his 1819 narrative poem, “Lamia” (the Latin translation of “Lilith”). Through the works of Goethe, Westall and Keats, Lilith grew to embody a host of Victorian sexual anxieties through her transformation from a demon to a seductress.
Nowhere is that transformation better mirrored than in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s creative obsession with Lady Lilith (1866; altered, 1872-1873), the painting that leads this blog. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais (along with William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Wooner) formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, a dramatic reform movement of English painters, poets and art critics in sharp opposition to the staid conventions of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy of Art. Luxuriating in color and detail and steeped in romanticized Medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelites burst on the scene, accompanied with praise by the critic John Ruskin. The Victorian artistic establishment condemned the PRBs medievalism as backward looking; its attention to detail as ugly and jarring to the eye; and its sensuality as blasphemous.
Rossetti’s Lady Lilith portrays a narcissistic Lilith contemplating her own beauty in a hand-held mirror, completely absorbed by her own sensual image, luxurious auburn hair swept erotically to the side. The white roses in the painting suggest a cold, sensuous love (white roses “blush” in the presence of true love); the poppies in the bottom right suggest opioid sleep and forgetfulness; while the foxgloves near the mirror suggest insincerity. The red ribbon on Lilith’s left wrist recalls the red string or ribbon a mother would tie around her infant’s wrist to ward off “Lilith,” but to no avail here: Lilith has snatched away the protective ribbon.
Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany his Lady Lilith painting:
“Lady Lilith”
(or “Body’s Beauty”)
Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom she’d scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! As that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
(1868)