History

Adam's Other Wife

According to Hebrew myth, Eve was not Adam's first wife. That distinction, such as it was, belonged to one by the name of Lilith. Everybody agrees that Adam and Lilith did not get along, mainly because of sex. The tale goes that when Adam wanted to lie with her, Lilith took offense at the prone position he demanded. "Why must I lie beneath you?" she asked. "I am your equal."

Adam, having none of it, tried to force his will upon her. Outraged, Lilith invoked the name of God, rose into the air and disappeared.

Adam whined to God that his helpmate had left him. God, gamely hiding the fact that Adam was beginning to get on his nerves, dispatched three angels to find Lilith and bring her back. As some storytellers have it, she refused, choosing instead a life of lecherous pleasure by the Red Sea, where she bore demon children at the rate of 100 a day. As this version of the myth would have it, God was angered by her refusal to return to Adam and punished her by making 100 of her children die daily.

Others claim that Lilith became a queen, and God let her live in peace. She is simply the victim of bad press concocted by misogynistic Greek men who took offense at her uppity refusal to submit to Adam and mistranslated the creation story from its original language.

Lilith doesn't appear in Genesis, and the only biblical reference to this mystery woman is a single line in Isaiah that mentions her as a female demon. A Canaanite demon called Lilitu, who tormented men, may have inspired the Hebrew Lilith. This demon has been traced back even further to Babylonian mythology.

The Lilith demon was later depicted as a slayer of infants and women in pregnancy and childbirth. She came out at night and drank human blood. Sound familiar? Lilith may have been the first vampire, predating Count Dracula by thousands of years. Regardless, Lilith's departure left Adam spouseless and in need of a companion. So God created Eve. But Adam's relationship with Eve proved to have its own problems, especially after the snake convinced her to take an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and Adam took a bite.