Entertainment / Literature / Lilith: Lilith is alternatively depicted as the first wife of Adam before Eve's creation or a female mother of medieval demons. The lilitu or lilitim, the daughters of Lilith, appear in biblical texts such as Isaiah 34:14 (in the NIV, lilitim is translated vaguely as 'night creatures.') Isaiah alludes to Lilith and her daughters as part of his description of the Lord's day of vengeance. Lilith and her daughters developed originally from Babylonian mythology, where an early version of Lilith appears in both The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1800 BCE) and probably in the Sumerian Terra-Cotta 'Lilith Relief' (c. 2000 BCE). In Chaldean mythology, in Jewish Midrashic and Talmudic texts, and in the medieval Zohar, Lilith is described as a slayer of infants and women in pregnancy and childbirth and as a seductress of virtuous men. A number of apotropaic magical amulets survive depicting Lilith. They date from 200 BCE to about 1700 CE, and they were apparently designed to ward off her destructive powers. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Hebrew text, draws on much older traditions in which Lilith is Adam's first wife. God creates her from the dust of the earth along with Adam, but Lilith refuses to submit to Adam's authority or to allow him to take a dominant sexual position with her. Accordingly, she flies away from him. In other medieval legends, she mates with demons in the land of Nod, and thus gives birth to the malignant lilitim or lilitu, the evil daughters of Lilith mentioned above.
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