Demonic · Infernal Court · c. 400 BCE
Night spirit — the sources' own term: Akkadian lilû, lilītu, ardat lilî; Latin incubus; Arabic qarin
Lilith
Also called Lilit, Lamashtu (parallel), The Screech Owl
A night-demon of Mesopotamian ancestry. The famous story that she was Adam's first wife comes from a satirical medieval text and has no basis in Genesis at all.
Narrow source base
The word *lilit* appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah's list of desert creatures inhabiting a ruin, alongside owls and jackals; translations render it variously as 'screech owl' or 'night creature'. The developed figure comes from Mesopotamian *lilitu* demons and, above all, from the *Alphabet of Ben Sira*, a medieval work of uncertain and possibly satirical intent, which invents the story of a first wife created equal to Adam who refuses to lie beneath him and departs. Incantation bowls and amulets show she was feared as a threat to newborns long before that story existed.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Hebrew *lilit*. Klein's etymological dictionary records it as a hapax — one occurrence in the whole Bible, at Isaiah 34:14 — and gives two senses for it, a female demon and the night owl. The derivation usually offered is from Akkadian *lilitu*, a class of night spirit, and this corpus reports that as the standard proposal rather than asserting it, since the lexicons reachable here do not carry it. The resemblance to Hebrew *laylah*, 'night', is the folk etymology and not the root, however well it fits what she is said to do.
Where it was actually worshipped
None; known from incantation bowls and protective amulets rather than shrines.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- lilith / screech owl
- Rank
- Queen
- Order
- Infernal Court
- Base of operations
- None; known from incantation bowls and protective amulets rather than shrines.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Jewish, Folk & Demonological
- Placed in
- The Infernal CourtThe Ten Shells
Traits
- Domain
- Night, childbirth, seduction, the ruined places
- Traditional form
- A winged woman, or a screech owl
Stats
Known connections
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Lilith, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- social1
- transformation1
- malefic2
social
- Procures Loveno text cited
transformation
- Changes Shapeno text cited
malefic
- Causes Sicknessno text cited
- Tormentsno text cited
2 marks
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 claims
What is it blamed for?
Harms attributed to this figure by a named text. An attribution is not a diagnosis, and where a claim carries a grading it is about how well it rests on the passage it cites.
Death in Childbirth
c. 900–100 BCENamed once, among the desert creatures inhabiting the ruins of Edom — the entire scriptural basis for a figure who becomes central to later childbirth amulet practice.
Night Terrors
c. 1800-600 BCENamed in incantation as a night spirit that comes to sleepers, particularly to the unmarried and to women in childbed.
Incantation bowls buried inverted under the floor of the house, and amulets naming the three angels.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Lilith, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 2,263 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as lilith / screech owl, Lilith
- Rank: given as Desert creature; Princess of succubi
Named once among the creatures that possess a ruined land.
“The screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
Made an enemy of newborn children and the chief of the succubi.
“Lilith. Wierus et plusieurs autres démonomanes font de le prince ou la princesse des démons succubes.”Lilith. Wier and several other demonomanes make of her the prince, or the princess, of the succubus demons. — translated for ColossiansOne
Connections
What is it connected to?
Identified with Samael
Paired as consorts at the head of the qliphoth in later Kabbalistic writing.
Derived from Lamashtu
The child-threatening demoness of the incantation bowls, inherited through the Mesopotamian lilitu.
Identified with Hecate
Both recast by early-modern demonology as the presiding figure of witchcraft.
Identified with The Ghul
Night-predators of waste places that prey on the isolated.
Identified with The Ardat Lili
The standard proposal, on the shared lil- element and on what both are said to do at night. Recorded as the proposal it is: the corpus cannot source the derivation, and says so on Lilith's etymology.
Identified with Jezebel
Both are women whose names became categories applied to other women.
Identified with The Familiar Spirit
Both belong to the practical magic of bowls, amulets and mediums rather than to any literary demonology.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Recovered in the twentieth century as a figure of refusal rather than menace, largely on the strength of the Alphabet of Ben Sira — a text of uncertain and possibly satirical intent, and the only place the first-wife story appears.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Lilith?
Is Lilith the same as Samael?
What rank is Lilith?
How else is Lilith spelled?
What is Lilith said to do?
How old is Lilith?
Nearest in the corpus
If Lilith is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Asmoday
King · Goetic Spirit
Commands seventy-two legions, one for every spirit in the book. He is the Asmodeus of Tobit, who killed Sarah's seven husbands and was driven into Upper Egypt by Raphael, and behind that the Avestan Aeshma-daeva, the demon of wrath — one of very few Goetic spirits with an ancestry that can be traced.
Astaroth
Duke · Goetic Spirit
The Canaanite goddess Astarte, three thousand years on, made a male duke of hell with her name intact. The Goetia has him discourse willingly on the fall of the spirits, and warns the operator to hold a ring to his face against the stench of his breath.
Beelzebub
Prince · Infernal Court
'Lord of the Flies' — a Philistine god of Ekron whose name was almost certainly deformed as a Hebrew insult, then inherited by Christian demonology as the second power of hell.
Belial
King · Goetic Spirit
In the Hebrew Bible beliya'al is not a name but a word meaning worthlessness; by 2 Corinthians it is a person, and by the Goetia a king in a chariot of fire handing out senatorships. The text says he was created next after Lucifer and fell among the first, and will not answer truly without gifts.
The Spirits of Affliction
Group of Named Spirits · Deliverance tradition
The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.
Bael
King · Goetic Spirit
First of the seventy-two and, by the Goetia's own account, chief among them — a three-headed thing on spider's legs, ruling in the east and granting invisibility. The name is the Canaanite storm god Baal, three thousand years and one demotion later.
The books behind Lilith
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Dictionnaire Infernal
Jacques Collin de Plancy · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863 · French
Read Dictionnaire Infernal in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Collin de Plancy · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.