Adam's Ex

I have to admit:  I’m cheating.

Having said I was going to blog about obscure stories in the Bible, my first week I wrote about the Creation -- not exactly unknown here -- and this week I’m writing about a character who isn't even in the Bible.  Well, not technically.

Although Lilith is never exactly named in the Bible, she does have an association with Adam. She‘s part of the pop theology which has accumulated around Creation these past few millenia.  Some people think she was in the Bible, and some others think she should have been.

The name Lilith is thought to derive from Lilitu, a type of female spirit or demon from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology associated with the night wind. An ancient Mesopotamian tablet depicting a nude goddess with bird’s feet and wings has been thought by some to represent Lilitu, although other scholars identify her with Ishtar or other goddesses of the region.  There’s also an incident in the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the hero rids a goddess’s huluppu tree of a snake, a zu bird and another garden pest which some translators have identified as a Lilith.

It  seems likely that Lilith entered Hebrew folklore during the Babylonian Captivity, where she was seen as a demonic spirit who preyed on women and young children.  She was frequently portrayed as a beautiful woman, sexually preying on men as they slept giving them wet dreams and enticing them to grow hair on their palms.  I made up the last part.

The only place in the Bible that comes close to mentioning Lilith is a passage in Isaiah describing the destruction of Edom.  It describes the land becoming a desolate place, inhabited by unclean beasts and supernatural terrors.  This is how a modern Jewish translation puts it:

“Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place” (Isaiah 34:14)

The King James Verison renders the word “liylith” in the original Hebrew as “screech owl”; which is perhaps appropriate given Lilith’s associations with the night and with birds of prey.  Other translations translate it as “night creature”, “night hag” or “vampire”.

Over time, Lilith developed two aspects: the slayer of newborns, and the seducer of men. The latter can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,  which contain a reference identifying  Lilith with the warnings in the Book of Proverbs against seductive women.

The former is reflected by a Hebrew tradition that an amulet bearing the names of three angels, (Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, which would make a great name for a law firm), would protect a newborn boy in the crucial eight days before his circumcision, , when he was vulnerable to evil influences.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam?

As we've seen, the Creation account in Genesis 1 suggests that Man and Woman were created at the same time, but the account in Genesis 2 states that Adam was created first and that Eve came later.  The Genesis Rabbah, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis written some time after the Babylonian Talmud, explains this apparent discrepancy by postulating a First Wife for Adam, created with him on the Sixth Day.

(Personally I don’t have a problem with assuming that the “male and female” from chapter one refers to Adam and Eve from chapter two; but these learned rabbis did; and this is how they reconciled the two texts).

In the Middle Ages, sometime between the 8th and 10th Centuries, a book titled The Alphabet of ben Sirach identified this hypothetical First Wife as Lilith.  The book was a series of acrostic proverbs modeled after those in the Apocryphal book Wisdom of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus; along with commentary.  Many scholars consider the work to be satirical due to the number of fart jokes in it.

According to the Alphabet, Lilith was Adam’s first wife; but because they had both been created from the earth, Lilith refused to take a subordinate role to her husband.  Specifically, She Wanted To Be On Top during sex, and Adam insisted that she could only be Underneath.

Lilith’s demand for equality has made her popular with modern day feminists, although I doubt that the author of The Alphabet intended her as a role-model.  She left Adam and took up a new career devouring children.  And things for Lilith kind of went downhill from there.

In Medieval Jewish and Christian folklore, Lilith became known as the mother of all manner of supernatural creatures, some demonic and monstrous, like giants and trolls; some just otherworldly, like elves and fairies. C.S. Lewis alludes to this idea in his Narnia books, when he has a character comment that although the White Witch claims to be a Daughter of Eve, she is actually descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith.  The Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald, who was one of Lewis’s inspirations, wrote a novel called Lilith in which she is portrayed both as a seducer of men and as an enemy of children, but who nevertheless receives a chance for redemption.

But back to the legend.  God had to try again making a new mate for Adam, and this time he created the woman out of Adam’s flesh so that there would be no question as to who had seniority and who was in charge.  This fits in with the way a lot of people interpret the story of the Creation of Eve; that being formed out of Adam’s rib is supposed to symbolize Eve’s inferiority to Adam.

I don’t read the story quite like that.  As I see it, the Genesis account’s depiction of Eve being created out of Adam’s rib is not a matter of who wears the pants in the family; (which at that point in the story was neither; pants came later); but rather to portray Eve as a part of Adam; “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” as Adam himself puts it.  And the story concludes with a passage later quoted by Jesus and which is frequently used as a wedding text:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.  (Genesis 2:24 NIV)

To me, that verse says nothing about which one is in charge, but rather that both form a partnership.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 provides us with a brief glimpse of the ideal of marriage.  Perhaps the bickering Adam and Lilith of legend is closer to the reality, but it’s a cynical view.

Some have claimed that Lilith was “left out” of the Bible; which is rather like complaining that Rudolph was “left out” of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  Even though the Lilitu of Sumerian myth existed before the writing of Genesis, she did not become associated with Adam until much, much later.

Some feminists have tried to rehabilitate Lilith, claiming that she was originally a goddess of childbirth and fertility, like Ishtar or Isis, who was vilified when patriarchal religions gained ascendancy.  I suppose it’s possible that the name Lilith was once associated with such a deity; but I don’t see that having anything to do with Adam.  And for all Lilith’s assertive independence that we might admire, her portrayal in legend is to my mind more misogynistic than anything in Genesis.

Sadly, we don’t see much of Eve’s character in Genesis.  She gets the spotlight in one story:  the story of her Temptation; and she doesn't come off very well in it.  We don’t really know what she was like apart for her apparent willingness to believe talking snakes, and she quickly recedes into the background. Which is a pity, because I’d like to know more about her.

Brash, ballsy, bad-girl Lilith grabs our attention, but I can’t help but feel that her story diminishes both Eve and Adam.  I guess I prefer to think of Adam and Eve as the First Couple.

And Adam certainly has enough screw-ups to his name without having him be a jerk to his ex on top of everything.

The Two Creations

Sometimes the Bible is dismissed as “Just a Collection of Myths”; an assessment which to my mind shows a shallow understanding of both the Bible and of Myth.  But if we’re going to level the charge of Mythology against any part of Scripture, then surely the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, in which we see God personally shaping the World, are the most Myth-like.  Here we have God forming Order out of Chaos; erecting the Sky; raising the Continents; and bending down to get his hands dirty forming the first man out of the dust of the earth and breathing into him the breath of Life.  Cosmic stuff.

Now wait, you are saying, didn't I say that these were going to be the ones we didn't hear in Sunday School?  Well, yes.  But as Julie Andrews tells us, we should “start at the beginning; A very good place to start.”  And if we’re going to be talking about the Bible, it’s hard to get much earlier than Genesis.  And instead of going into the whole Charles Darwin vs. Bishop Ussher thing, I wanted to just touch a bit on one aspect of the beginning of Genesis that we maybe sometimes overlook.

Most  people have probably heard the passage “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth” and know that according to Genesis God created the world in six days; but they might not know that there are two different Creation accounts in Genesis.  The first is the familiar Six-Day story found in Genesis chapter 1, (plus a couple concluding verses which somehow got put in Chapter 2).  The second, beginning in Genesis 2:4 and continuing through the rest of the chapter, describes the Garden of Eden and describes how God created first Adam and then Eve.

But why are there two Creation accounts?  I can think of a couple explanations.

Tradition holds that the first five books of the Bible; the Pentatuech, or Torah; were written by Moses.  In the 19th Century, Biblical scholars developed the theory that these books were actually compiled at a much later date from several different sources, each with a different agenda and a different point of view.  This has become known as the Documentary Hypothesis or the JEDP Theory after the four sources that are believed to have been used in assembling the Books of Moses as we know them today.  Most biblical scholars accept the Documentary Hypothesis, or some version of it; although some Literalists like to stick with Tradition because that’s what we do.  Others simply shrug and quote 2 Peter 1:21 “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke form God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”   From that point of view, Scripture is still Scripture no matter who actually wrote it down.

According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the multiple versions of the Creation Account make perfect sense.  The Redactor, (the guy who compiled the disparate sources into the Torah), had two different versions of the same story and wasn't sure which one to throw out; so he included both.

But another possibility occurs to me, not necessarily incompatible with the first.  Scriptures often employ a literary device where something is described, and then described again in a slightly different way.  We see this a lot in the Psalms, most frequently in the form of the first half of a verse making a statement and then the second half restating it; for example: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.“ (Psalm 119:105)  Both statements are saying the same thing, but the rephrasing gives us a slightly different connotation from the first, giving us a sort of stereoptic view of the concept.

So perhaps the Creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are doing the same thing:  providing two different views of the same event.  The first looks at the Big Picture, and places it in the context of a Six-Day-plus-Sabbath structure.  The second, focuses on a couple important features of Creation:  the Garden of Eden, and the Origin of Mankind.

Except there’s one fairly big discrepancy there.  The Genesis chapter 1 account strongly suggests that God created the first Man and the first Woman at the same time, on the sixth day:  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27 NIV).  Sounds pretty clear to me.

But the Genesis 2 account has God creating Adam first, and then, thinking it over, decided that Adam needed a companion.  To remedy this situation, he created the first woman, Eve.

There are two ways of looking at this passage.  Traditionally, it’s been interpreted to mean that  Man has precedence over Woman because he has seniority.  But I think it’s just as valid to say this story is about how Man needs companionship.  Eve is not just a secondary creation, an afterthought on God’s part; she is actually created out of Adam’s body and therefore, it seems to me, she has a greater claim to equality with Adam than if she had simply been Adam 2.0.  But we’re getting away from the point.

So how do we reconcile this story of Eve created out of Adam’s rib with the Genesis 1 account where Male and Female were created at the same time?

The easiest solution is to say that both stories are myths and we shouldn't expect them to be consistent because they never really happened.  But really, what’s the fun of that?

Another way is to say that the author of the Genesis 1 account fiddled things around in order to get everything to fit neatly into his Week-of-Creation outline.  Raised as I was in a tradition adhering to the Inerrancy of Scripture, I can’t say I’m crazy about that interpretation; but it seems plausible.

Going to the other extreme we have the interpretation that the story in Gen. 2: 7-25 all took place on the same day; the Sixth Day of Creation.  That was what I remember being taught in Sunday School.  But when you look at it, we have (1.) God creating Adam; (2.) God establishing the Garden of Eden for Adam to live in; (3.) God brings all the animals he’s created to Adam, who gives them all names; (4.) God puts Adam into a deep sleep and creates Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs; (5.) Adam and Eve meet, get to know each other, and presumably invent sex.  And keep in mind this all happens after God has already created every animal that creepeth upon the Earth.  That’s a lot to pack into one busy afternoon.  Yeah, God’s good at multi-tasking, but still, it’s enough to make a man consider the theistic notion that the Days of Creation represented geological epochs rather than 24-hour days.

Then there’s the theory that Adam actually had two wives, one created with him on the 6th day, and a second one, Eve, created out of his rib.  But that’s a story we‘ll get to another time.