# Is Lilith in the Bible? One Verse at Most, Isaiah 34:14

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/who-is-lilith-in-the-bible/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2025-05-02
Updated: 2026-11-05

Lilith appears in the Bible once at most, as a night creature in the ruins of Edom, and only some translations call her by name. In Isaiah 34:14 the King James Version says "screech owl". The story that she was Adam's first wife comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a Jewish tale written centuries after the Bible.

Scripture mentions the word in passing, in a single line of a poem about a ruined land, and then moves on. The night creature rests among the thorns for one verse, while the desert flowers for the whole of the next chapter, which begins, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose" (Isaiah 35:1).

## Where is Lilith mentioned in the Bible?

Only in Isaiah 34:14, in a prophecy against Edom on "the day of the Lord's vengeance" (Isaiah 34:8). Edom's cities will fall empty, the prophet says, and wild things will move in: "thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls" (Isaiah 34:13). Then comes the verse:

> "The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest." (Isaiah 34:14)

The Hebrew word behind "screech owl" is *lilit*, and because it is found nowhere else in the Bible, translators have had little to go on and have made different choices:

| Bible | Isaiah 34:14 says | Footnote on BibleGateway |
| --- | --- | --- |
| King James (1611) | screech owl | None |
| American Standard (1901) | night-monster | Hebrew Lilith |
| NRSV Updated Edition | Lilith | None |
| New American Bible, Revised | the lilith | A female demon thought to roam the desert |
| English Standard Version | night bird | Identity uncertain |
| New International Version | night creatures | None |
| New Living Translation | night creatures | Hebrew Lilith, possibly a mythical demon |
| Latin Vulgate | *lamia* | None |
| Luther Bible (1545) | *der Kobold* (a goblin) | None |
| Reina-Valera 1960 | *la lechuza* (owl) | None |

BibleGateway shows no note for the King James, though the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) says its margin reads "night monster". Some translators heard in the word the name of a night demon known to Israel's neighbours, set among the satyrs and wild beasts of a cursed land, and others heard an animal. Jerome wrote *lamia*, a Latin word for a witch "said to suck children's blood", though the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary takes it in this verse as "A species of owl". Luther, for his part, chose a goblin. All the verse itself tells us is that something rests in the ruins and finds "a place of rest". It gives her no story, no husband and no history.

## Was Lilith a demon before the Bible?

The name is older than Isaiah, as the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) explains: "Of the three Assyrian demons Lilu, Lilit, and Ardat Lilit, the second is referred to in Isa. xxxiv. 14." Rebecca Lesses, writing for the Jewish Women's Archive, draws on the scholar J. A. Scurlock to describe these Mesopotamian spirits, which "were hungry for victims because they had once been human; they were the spirits of young men and women who had themselves died young." Over time they merged with other demons into one figure, feared as a seducer and as a danger to children.

People went on fearing these spirits long afterwards. Aramaic incantation bowls from Iraq and Iran, made roughly between 400 and 800 AD for Jewish, Mandaean, Christian and pagan clients alike, name "male and female liliths" among the spirits they drive out. The Babylonian Talmud mentions a lilith only a few times, once to warn, "It is forbidden to sleep in a house alone, and whoever sleeps in a house alone, a lilith seizes him" (Shabbat 151b), and elsewhere it pictures her with wings (Niddah 24b) and long hair (Eruvin 100b). In these texts she is a demon of the night, and she is still no one's wife.

## Was Lilith Adam's first wife?

The Bible never says she was. The story comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which Lesses calls "a provocative and often misogynist satirical Hebrew work". Scholars date it to the Middle Ages, between the eighth and the tenth century.

In the tale, God makes Lilith from the earth, as he made Adam. The two quarrel at once, and Lilith says, "We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth." She speaks God's name and flies away, and when three angels are sent to bring her back, she refuses. She was created, she says, to sicken newborn babies, but she agrees to leave alone any child protected by an amulet bearing the angels' names. The historian Gershom Scholem saw the whole tale as an explanation for something people already did: it "sets out to explain the already widespread custom of writing amulets against Lilith."

So the first-wife story grew out of fear for children at birth, and that fear was real. In homes where many babies died, we can understand why parents hung up amulets and told a story to explain them. But the story is folklore, and it was never part of the Hebrew Bible that Jews and Christians share.

## Are Eve and Lilith the same person?

They are two different women in the legend, and the Bible knows only one. Many readers find room for Lilith between the first two chapters of Genesis. In a single line Genesis 1 says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27), and then Genesis 2 tells the same creation slowly: the man alone, the animals named, the deep sleep, and the woman made from his rib, "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (Genesis 2:23). And later legend did set her before Eve: in the Zohar, Lesses writes, Lilith came to Adam "before the creation of Eve".

Jesus, though, reads the two chapters as one story about one couple, and when he is asked about divorce he puts them side by side in a single answer: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?" (Matthew 19:4–5). His first words come from Genesis 1 and the rest from Genesis 2, with no room between them for another wife. Adam names his wife Eve "because she was the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20), and there is more on that name in [why Adam named the woman Eve](https://christianpure.com/learn/eve-name-after-fall/).

## Is Lilith Lucifer's wife or a fallen angel?

In Scripture she is neither, for the Bible never gives Satan or Lucifer a wife and never calls Lilith an angel.

The idea that she had a demonic husband came late, out of Jewish mysticism. In the thirteenth-century "Treatise on the Left Emanation", Lesses writes, Lilith "became the female consort of Samael", a figure earlier midrash had made the tempter behind the serpent in Eden and the angel of death. The Zohar developed the pairing, and the Jewish Encyclopedia calls her "the bride of Samael". Stories today that call her Lucifer's wife seem to have put the better-known name in Samael's place. The names Satan and Lucifer have a history of their own, which we tell in [whether Lucifer and Satan are the same](https://christianpure.com/learn/biblical-origins-lucifer-satan/).

Her own legend does not make her a fallen angel either. Christian teaching holds that the devil and the demons were angels "created naturally good by God", who "became evil by their own doing", in the words the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes. Ben Sira's Lilith, though, was made from the earth, like Adam, and whatever else the tale makes of her, it never says she fell from heaven. There is more on how the devil differs from the demons in [devil vs. demon](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-devils-demons/).

## Why is Lilith so well known today?

Mostly through modern culture: in 1972 Lilly Rivlin wrote about Lilith for the feminist magazine *Ms.*, and in 1976 a Jewish feminist magazine took the name *Lilith*, inspired by her claim of equality with Adam. Later the Lilith Fair music festival carried the name further, and Christian fiction knows her too: in C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Mr Beaver says the White Witch is descended from Lilith.

Many people first meet her in a song, a novel or a game and assume she must come from the Bible. In fact she comes from old Mesopotamian demons, one Hebrew word, a few lines of the Talmud and a medieval tale.

What the Bible does tell us is that the woman God made is Eve, "the mother of all living", and every one of us is her child. And the prophet who saw a night creature resting in the ruins of Edom wrote, in the very next breath, of a road home through the desert: "And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away" (Isaiah 35:10).

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## Related reading

- [Are Lucifer and Satan the same?](https://christianpure.com/learn/biblical-origins-lucifer-satan/)
- [Where is Satan now?](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-mysteries-where-does-satan-live-where-is-satan-now/)
- [Why did Adam name the woman Eve?](https://christianpure.com/learn/eve-name-after-fall/)
- [What do Adam and Eve represent?](https://christianpure.com/learn/adam-eve-creation-story/)
- [How long was Adam alone before Eve?](https://christianpure.com/learn/adams-lonely-days/)
- [Angels vs demons](https://christianpure.com/learn/angels-vs-demons-spiritual-realm/)

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