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The Demon Lilith and the Biblical Tradition

Introduction

This discussion will focus on Lilith, who is arguably the most feared demon in the history of Judaism. We give some basic overview of her key features, such as the long-held view that she attacks pregnant women and their children, and also examine her appearance in the biblical tradition. Oddly for a demon who is so important in Judaism, she only appears once in the Hebrew Bible—Isaiah 34:14. We will examine this passage together and look at the even stranger rendering of the term “Lilith” in the ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint (which then became the Christian Old Testament). “Lilith” is there rendered as “donkey-centaurs.” In the discussion Matthew Goff will suggest that this wonderfully odd translation choice actually makes sense.

Dr. Matthew Goff joined the faculty of Florida State’s Religion Department in 2005. He completed an M.T.S. degree at Harvard Divinity School and finished his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2002. He studied under John Collins and wrote his dissertation on a Qumran text entitled 4QInstruction. His publications focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Judaism, and his most recent book is The Apocrypha: A Guide (Oxford, 2024). His current book project is on demons and monsters in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

Texts

Click here to access a pdf discussing the texts we’ll be using for this discussion.

 

Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Welcome everybody. So happy to see you here tonight and actually to welcome Dr. Matthew Goff back to us again. You may remember that Dr. Goff was with us back in February of 2025 and he introduced us to 4 Ezra at that time. Now we’re heading back even further into the Hebrew Bible with the prophet Isaiah. And our topic tonight is “The Demon Lilith and the Biblical Tradition.” So let me just introduce you for a moment in case you don’t remember who he is. Professor Goff joined the faculty of the Religion Department at Florida State University in 2025 after completing his MTS degree in 1997 at Harvard Divinity School and then his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2002 where he studied under John Collins. So he’s especially interested in apocalypticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism. Tonight we’re moving into another one of his favorite topics: demons and monsters.

So for those of you who don’t necessarily go hunting around for demons and monsters, I hope that you will help us figure out why they are in the Bible and why that matters to us. So welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Goff

Hi there. Glad to be here.

Shirley

All right. Well, I think we actually need to start with “Who is Lilith?” I thought a couple of decades ago that I heard that Lilith was being celebrated as a kind of strong female character who refuses to be submissive, and she’s in the Bible. What’s going on with Lilith?

Matthew

So, all good questions. And I guess the first thing I’ll say is Lilith is right behind me [on my video background]. And if you see her kind of jumping at me, let me know. But this is art in the background, where it’s Lilith zapping Adam—which, in a way, gets at what you’re talking about. I guess the first thing I’ll say is Lilith has probably been the most feared demon in the history of Judaism. And she was understood as a succubus who would seduce not just men but often husbands at night and was often feared as a killer of babies. And if you have that PowerPoint, you can see some amulets or bowls where there were techniques that Jews had and a lot of other people had to oppose them. Yes, the second slide.

The one on the left is an image that was written on an amulet. And one of the key points is that pregnant women would wear this sort of thing to protect themselves from Lilith. And on the right is an image. That’s actually an image of Lilith, very different from the kind of sexy succubus. That’s often where she’s understood today in pop culture. But the idea was that this was a technique that Jews had in antiquity to keep Lilith in particular out of a house, and often with the idea that there was a pregnant woman in the house, these were techniques too often not always to protect pregnant women.

Shirley

So let me ask you while we’re talking about this awful creature here, why was I hearing that she was so fabulous 20 years ago?

Matthew

It draws on Jewish tradition too. One of the key traditions, in a way, solves an odd exegetical problem. We know that it says very clearly when Eve is created from the side of Adam. That’s in Genesis, the end of Genesis two. But if you expand on Genesis one, there are references to male and female. And so there’s a kind of hint, let’s say, and scholars have solved this one way and a kind of more traditional exegesis another way, but there’s some reference to females in the Bible before Eve. And scholars solve this sort of thing by saying that the text was a development of different sources. But if you think of that as a unified text, then you have this odd problem that there’s some sort of reference to a female before Eve.

One traditional way the rabbis solved this was the Hebrew word was “Adam” … that Adam is created male and female. So one solution was to understand Adam as having originally a male and female side, but another tradition was that this other woman, let’s say, was Lilith. And the Hebrew and on the amulet on the left, it actually says “Adam and Eve” without Lilith. It’s connected to Adam and Eve. But the tradition—and this is what the feminists of the ’60s and the ’70s and a lot of people before them too held—was that Lilith was supposed to be Adam’s first wife, but she refused to be submissive to him and left. So you have kind of a very interesting re-imagining of Lilith by not just feminists in the ’60s, but there’s a tradition going on now like this and you see it at different periods of history, but it’s a model for women, in particular, of a biblically grounded model for a kind of femininity that’s independent of living with a man.

Shirley

Okay. So we have a tradition that tells us that Lilith was not submissive, but that’s just sort of made up to figure out how to explain Genesis, but then the real Lilith is different and she’s awful, right?

Matthew

Yeah. That’s right. So you have a kind of rehabilitation of Lilith, let’s say.

And one of the things that I find so interesting about the re-imagining of Lilith in the context of feminism is that it was often, like I stressed, women in particular that were terrified of Lilith. And so I would say the idea for Lilith that I would go back to is it’s very much in the Jewish and biblical tradition to connect her to understand her origins in terms of Genesis one to three, in terms of the Bible. But she actually draws on much older traditions from Mesopotamia where there was a kind of demon, a whole category called the “Lilitu”. This is why often in Judaism, they talk about Liliths plural and that was a kind of succubus demon. And then over time she was connected to a very ferocious creature by the name of Lamashtu, who was understood as a child-killing demon.

I guess the overarching point is…we all know that birth can be a very dangerous, difficult prospect now…but if you imagine it in a pre-modern society, it’s so much worse. It’s so much worse for the woman, for the child. And one thing you see across different cultures is… I taught a seminar on demons last semester with a professor of Chinese Buddhism. And in a very different context, the same thing came up, meaning the difficulties. The risks associated with pregnancy in different cultures are often rationalized by some of the nastiest, cruelest demons who go after not just women, but pregnant women. So the whole thing kind of explains something and that’s one of the things going on with the Lilith tradition. And I kind of like the idea of women taking something that was a problem and kind of reinventing it as a positive symbol, but the history of women in relation to this thing is really interesting.

Shirley

Well, that’s really helpful to understand why this interest in the demon is really an explanation for something that’s horrific that’s going on in human experiences. That’s what this is dealing with. So it’s not just simply trying to make a horror story or something just imaginative.

Matthew

That’s exactly right.

Shirley

Okay. Let’s go into the Hebrew Bible in Isaiah. So this creature appears only once in the Hebrew Bible. What’s going on in that reference?

Matthew

Yeah. So it’s really interesting and let’s call it one of the odd questions. This is within a larger question in the Hebrew Bible where we know from other evidence at the time and other cultures at the time, there were all sorts of creatures that we could call demons like in Mesopotamia and Egypt. And there’s some hints that that was the case in Israel too. But if you look in the Bible, you find the word for demon occurs only twice in the whole text. And so meaning the whole idea of a kind of evil that’s kind of opposed to God, it’s just not there. So the relative silence of Lilith kind of fits with that. Where you’d figure the most feared demon in the history of Judaism, you’d figure it would come up more, but it doesn’t. It only comes up in Isaiah 34:14 and maybe, could I read that verse? Would that help?

Shirley

That’d be helpful.

Matthew

Okay. So it says, “Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat demons,” and the Hebrew just says, “Shareem goats.” But I’ll explain; I think that’s not a bad translation, “shall call out to each other, thereto Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.”

Shirley

Wait, say that again.

Matthew

“Thereto Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.”

And so she’s relaxing. She’s not doing anything heinous, and no baby killing, no seducing. She’s literally resting. And it’s interesting if you look in the context of the verse, the prophet Isaiah is proclaiming the destruction of a city of Edom, one of the neighboring peoples of Israel that is often quite maligned because they–at least according to the text–they were in collaboration with the Babylonians when they destroyed everything. And one trope in the Bible, you find it in Isaiah in particular, you also find it in Isaiah 13 when they imagine the destruction of Babylon. The key point is that we’re dealing with a trope about how biblical texts talk about the utter, utter destruction of a city. So they’re talking about a city and they say like, “You’re going to have a new name, and the new name is ‘no kingdom there.’” And the idea is that it’s going to be so utterly obliterated, no human will live there ever again.

It’s like ruins and the idea is strange animals will become the new denizens of the place. In the verse it says hyenas and wildcats, but we’re not entirely sure what animals they’re talking about. For us, animals and demons are very distinct categories, but they’re kind of blurred in this tradition. And you see this in a part with Lamashtu, who connects one of the antecedents to the Lila tradition and she has the body of a donkey and the feet of a bird– talons of a bird and a lion’s head. The idea is like an abnormal mixing of regular animals. So the idea of Lilith is kind of part of this strange menagerie of a post-human Edom. And so it’s a way of marking, meaning these demons and strange creatures can demarcate non-human space and that’s what’s going on in the Lilith Isaiah verse. But yeah, she’s kind of designated, but there’s nothing, no violence, no violence towards women. She’s helping define non-human space.

Shirley

Okay. That’s very helpful. I never ever would’ve figured that out by just reading the text. Never. So that’s very interesting to know that she’s filling in the vacant space where everything’s been obliterated because that’s the enemy and now Lilith is resting there. Oh my goodness. Okay. All right. Now you’ve explained in an early translation of this passage into Greek in the Septuagint that the word Lilith is translated as donkey-centaurs.

Matthew

That’s true.

Shirley

Do you think that makes any sense or why would they come up with a donkey-centaur?

Matthew

So, a very good question. And I guess…let me take a step back to make sure people understand. So the Septuagint, if people don’t know, are the ancient Greek…. There was a Jewish Mediterranean second century BC effort to translate the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. So it’s an ancient translation project. Those scriptures eventually became the Old Testament of the Christians. So it’s kind of an ancient translation of the Jewish scriptures that’s preserved by the Christians. And if you go to the Greek Orthodox tradition now, it’s still the Septuagint. And one of the questions is how did they think of translation? And it gets at the larger issue of what a translation is. For us, we have a strong sense of accuracy, you want it to be exact. Well, let me give you an example.

The word, if I just say “sorry” in German, it’s “tutmerlide”, but that literally means, “it does me pain”. And if I bump into you and I say, “It does me pain,” you’d stare at me. You know what I mean? The literal translation isn’t necessarily the best one, meaning the point is to actually translate the meaning of the one verse as best you can. So “I’m sorry” is not a literal translation of tutmerlide, but it works. And so what I think is going on in there is the translator suspected that they might not understand what Lilith is. So they use an analogous… It’s kind of like an exercise in kind of comparative mythology. They took something from the Greek tradition that they thought would be analogous. And so a donkey-centaur or onocentaris is like…we all know what a centaur is. We all know that a centaur is normally half animal, half horse, half human.

A donkey-centaur is part-human, part-donkey, I guess a little lower on the centaur hierarchy. I guess I’d rather be a horse than a donkey. And I’d go back to the point that these demons are often associated with animals and it’s kind of like these hybrid creatures. And we don’t really know much about them, but there’s one and this is on the PowerPoint if you have it.

And it was one of my grad students that pointed this out to me. It’s something called the Nile Mosaic. [Not that slide, not that one, the next one. And then let’s show the full screen of that and then we’ll go to the next one. So this was from a mosaic from a floor in a place in Palestrina in Italy from the first century BC. And let’s call it Roman orientalism, a kind of understanding with elites in a Roman context, imagining the exotic landscape of Egypt. I don’t know how clearly you see, but if you look at the bottom, you see a lot of people enjoying themselves, enjoying the river. They’re feasting, they’re worshiping, they’re hunting. But if you go up, actually the landscape gets more barren and the creatures are different and you can actually see that in the Greek, there’s the name of the animal and some of them are actual animals like a rhinoceros or a giraffe. But if you go up to the top, the edge, you find a donkey-centaur.

And so what’s really interesting is you can see here at this edge; it’s not just like giraffes or something. Like, you see there’s a large snake that’s grabbing birds out of the air, and you can see that there are people hunting, and you can see that the hunters are black men, which is a point I’ll come back to. But the donkey-centaur—if you look at the image on the right—she’s that four-legged creature with the monkey. We’re all kind of staring at her like the monkey, but the key point is that she’s a donkey-centaur. But they’re actually in Greek; they’re using the feminine term “onocentaura.” So I guess we could say “donkey-centauress.” And you can see that it has a female human head with long hair on the body of a kind of a four-legged creature.

So in this depiction of the donkey-centaur, it’s a mixed creature both in terms of species and gender. And that very much connects to the figure of Lilith, not how we often understand her. The Talmud imagines her as this kind of woman with wild, disheveled hair and wings, but I’d go back to the point that Lamashtu was very much connected to part of the Lilith tradition and Lamashtu was very much understood as having the body of a donkey. So I would say that there’s some sort of echo of an older conception that draws from Mesopotamian tradition about Lilith. But the other point, and that’s kind of why a donkey-centaur. They could have chosen lots of strange animals. The other point I’d mention is like when you look at the landscape as a whole, if we could go back.

I think what’s going on is if you look at the bottom of it, this is the part of the Nile where most people live. And I think if you go up, you’re actually going south, meaning on the Nile and you’re going into more and more distant lands and you’ll notice that at the edge of the landscape… one important idea in the Hellenistic period was you had strange creatures at the periphery of the world, meaning they didn’t think of the globe. They didn’t have a sense of the globe the way we did. And you go south from Egypt, they would be what they called Ethiopia, which is where we get the country Ethiopia. It’s not exactly the country, the map that we have. So this donkey centaur was understood as an Ethiopian creature and that meant it was kind of at the edge of the known world in the way they were thinking.

And what’s interesting there is they understood the peripheries as not just a bad place, but a place where unusual, interesting things would happen. In Homers, the Iliad, all the gods love to feast in Ethiopia, meaning there’s always food there and that’s why there’s more vitality, there’s more life on the edges of the world because that’s where there’s more some text states because there’s more sun there. So they say that the Ethiopians are taller and live longer than any other people on earth. And so this is, I think, quite important in terms of why this translation choice, meaning I suspect the translator understood that the core point of that Isaiah 34 text, this idea that this city that somewhere in the trans Levant now be the country of Jordan, that is going to become this non-human space. So they use an image like an animal that would evoke the periphery of the world.

It’s like this one city, it’s like it’s now on the edge of the world. The strange creatures evoke a fringe capacity, if you will. They’re using a conception of the periphery to talk about the abandonment or the utter devastation of this Edom. So it’s a peripheral thing. So it’s a mythic thing, but it’s also a kind of a geographic thing, Shirley.

 Shirley

I think that’s really helpful for us to, because I never, again, would’ve thought about the fact that we’re talking about a peripheral part of the world…these animals, these strange animals represent that far away and they’re filling in the void. So that’s helpful. I think I sort of need to still feel like going back to the idea of Lilith as the baby killer or the horrible creature there. What do we do with that? Does that mean that she has taken over this barren space because it’s so bad or is there a remedy for people who are suffering childbirth?

Matthew

Yeah, I know exactly. Yeah, it’s a very good question and I think the answer to your question is in the figure of Lamashtu. And Lamashtu, who was in ancient Mesopotamia, would just terrified women. Let me give you one example. Have any of you ever seen the movie The Exorcist from the ’70s? It begins in ancient Iraq–the same context we’re talking about–and the horrible demon in that movie is actually drawn from ancient Mesopotamian demonology, a figure named Pazuzu. And Pazuzu was…actually pregnant women…that ferocious demon in the Exorcist…pregnant women would actually wear an amulet of that demon named Pazuzu. Why? To ward away Lamashtu. And the point Lamashtu would live in was thought to roam in non-human areas like the steps, the swamps, the mountains, but then she would always be kind of on the lookout. And when a baby was born, she’d go into a human area and sometimes they would talk about her as strangling. Sometimes there was a lot of fear that she would disguise as a wet nurse and that her breasts would emit poison rather than actual breast milk.

And let’s take that back to this Isaiah text. We know from antiquity, like I said, even though there’s no violence against children in that text, we know from other translations…so, Jerome in the Latin translation made a very interesting translation choice. He translated the word Lilith as Lamia. Lamia was a ferocious child killing demon in a Greek context, understood as a half woman, half snake. And so Jerome (and there’s other earlier antecedents for this too) very much understood the term Lilith in terms of a child killing demon, even though–and this is the point–there’s none of that heinous activity in the text itself. So, this would suggest to me that by that point, there’s some knowledge of the Lilith term associated with the child killing. And in that sense, if we interpret that through the lens of Lamashtu…so the Isaiah verse says she’s resting…I kind of hate to ask, but what is she resting from? Meaning in the Lamashtu, she’s roaming, she’s in these spaces, but then will leave into the human area to attack women. And so maybe there was. I can’t prove it to you, Shirley, but I wonder if some of these earlier translators like Jerome understood Lilith in the destroyed Edom as her home base, but she’d kind of wander out and was understood to attack women.

Shirley

Okay. Well, this is a sobering subject, but I guess it was a sobering situation. I think that’s the whole point of all this. So, we see that Lilith gets to rest from her hard work of doing these nasty things. And so your point about this passage is not only showing us the world of antiquity, but that why it got translated from Lilith to donkey centaur was actually the understanding of the translation in the correct way. So take us back to what’s going on in Isaiah. Why are we even talking about this whole issue? It had to do with Edom being destroyed and what does the baby killer have to do with that?

Matthew

So, they were using traditions about how to talk about non-human space and it seems the text understood Lilith as signifying that non-human space. I can’t prove it to you that in the original text of Isaiah, but clearly in the history of its translation, it was understood as where a child-killing demon would be in residence in a non-human context, whether she’d go into human areas and do this.

And let me also mention, we have a version of this Isaiah 34 text from Kumron where we actually have Liliths, Liliyotts–Liliths in the plural, not the singular–very much connecting to the older Mesopotamian tradition that we’re talking about. A category of demons and not one particularly important female demon…which might explain the plural that we were talking about–the donkey-centaur. But it’s actually translated oddly as donkey-centaurs in that Septuagint version. So maybe they just had a slightly different version of the text. But yeah, it goes back to thinking how they tried to signify a city becoming non-human space, Shirley. 

Shirley

Okay. That just takes us into really understanding Isaiah better, the way that Isaiah was talking to people. So, it is about time for us to turn over the mic for everybody else. So I hope you have some good questions to be asking now. Then I hope we will get into a little bit more about Isaiah because you are an Old Testament scholar and I think you could probably help us to put this in a larger context with Isaiah.

But let me just say that I also want to make sure that everybody knows about our Bible and Beyond Substack publication now. It’s really easy to find us. You can go to bibleandbeyond.substack.com.

And during these past few weeks, we’ve added more content to get us going here and what’s happening in the new scholarship on all things related to Bible and Beyond. So come and join us there. When you go to Substack, you can find that you can subscribe to somebody for free or just pay to support them because you want to help them. That’s the way Substack works. Okay, let me turn it over to you. If you’ve got questions… I think Joy and Linda and Maureen are ready to go. So Joy, go ahead.

Matthew

Yeah. Lilith is sparking questions. I think I saw Joy’s hand first, so go ahead, Joy.

Joy

Okay. So I’ve never ever read Isaiah 34 and it was very interesting to go through and read Isaiah 34 and the sequel, the one that comes after it, Isaiah 35, which is always celebrated. It’s all about the restoration of Israel or Zion. I don’t remember what the location is called. So they are really diametrically…this is the one that got destroyed. But what I don’t like about it, and I guess this is because this is an old Jewish tradition, is that God is directing both of them, both the destruction of Edom and the restoration of Israel. I also want to say that I really had this horrible feeling because the destruction of Edom really, really made me think of Gaza.

Matthew

Yeah. And I think it makes me feel queasy too, but I’m sure I would guess that a lot of Israelis have wide public support there. And I guarantee you that what we’re talking about Isaiah 34, but also chapter 13 in Isaiah is about divinely mandated destruction of cities. And I’m sure these are being marshaled for exegetical support.

Shirley

Just very sobering to hear. Joy, thank you for sharing 34 and the two chapters together, that was very helpful too.

Okay. Linda and then Maureen.

Linda

Yeah. So you mentioned that in the Hebrew scriptures, there are only two mentions of demons. I’m wondering about now, the New Testament, where the demons are everywhere and there are all kinds of mentions of them. Do you have any ideas about how we went from only twice mentioned in all those hundreds of years to now in every gospel?

Matthew

That is a great question, and it’s very clear. So meaning one of the interpretive questions about the Hebrew Bible is like, sometimes people will explain that absence through an appeal to monotheism. We don’t have a lot of non-biblical evidence for ancient Israel, but some of the stuff we have suggests that ordinary people did believe in demons and used amulets to protect from them. So meaning it’s kind of false…. At one level, it’s a false silence, meaning the silence is only there if you’re only looking at the Old Testament text. If you broaden out the evidence, I think it was there. And then the interesting interpretive question is not so much like did they believe in demons or not in ancient Israel, but rather that the people putting together the Hebrew Bible were not interested in demons, which strikes me as a very interesting question.

So I get the wonderful dichotomy you’re getting, I’m not sure there might have been more demons in the background. There might be more continuity than the biblical dichotomy suggests, but it’s certainly true that demons are very, very important in the New Testament.

And I’d also say one of the other things, you definitely see a change and let me emphasize one key thing because “Satan” is a powerful figure in the New Testament, but the term is just a regular Hebrew term. It’s like 20 times in the Hebrew Bible, but in most cases it’s the ordinary term for “enemy” or “opponent.” It’s not like some kind of supernatural being, except for a couple cases, meaning it’s an antecedent of the…. You see the tradition developing and one of the answers to the question is the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s in the Dead Sea Scrolls where we find the emergence of an angel, not a fallen angel, but an angel by the name of Belial and he’s appointed to encourage people to sin and not like a fallen angel thing. But so the idea that there’s definitely more interest in why the righteous are sinning and they’re appealing to broader supernatural forces to this. This is a development in the Hellenistic age and I think a lot of it has to do with anxieties and tensions going on then.

But I think the key point there is righteousness, and doing the right thing is understood to be a struggle that God has forces in play to make it … It’s not supposed to be easy, I guess, is the point. And so it’s not necessarily an opposition of God, and the evil forces are working for God, and it’s a larger question, but I think there’s something like that going on in the New Testament too. So was it Maureen?

Shirley

Maureen is next. Yes.

Maureen

Okay. Sometimes when I’m hearing stuff that’s brand new to me like tonight…I know the name Lilith, everything else was new…and I try to see if I can have some kind of overarching sense of how it fits in, but that may tend to oversimplify. But I’m hearing all of these stories, which sound like a Grim’s fairy tale kind of a thing. There were real people on the planet at that time and they were having suffering because of how hard human life was and especially if they caught the idea that the pregnant woman produced more people and pregnancy was so at that time, I mean, if it’s difficult now, it was difficult, then. And so trying to find some reason, some rationale for this to happen. And then when you said that in an obliterated place, I’m looking at my notes, no more humans there and these strange creatures go there. In my mind I’m thinking, okay, this evil that presents does not come out of the human situation. It comes out of a place where people, good and bad and whatever, can’t be. So to me, that gives me a hope that what’s being presented as the few demons involved in all of her cohorts and stuff, they don’t have a source in human life. And so that to me is comforting because I’m trying to find my own rationale today for suffering.

Is that accurate?

Matthew

I appreciate that. Yeah. I’d really underscore your core point, Maureen. There’s a whole tradition in the West of understanding pre-modern societies as filled with superstitions. They’re backward. It’s all a sign of the lack of development of these people. But what I’d emphasize is these traditions explain something, and you’re exactly right. These traditions explained the difficulty of something so central to the continuity of the species that cries out for explanation.

The other point, which we could say a whole lot about, and you see this in the New Testament too, is that demons get associated with disease. It’s such a common thing, and there’s really an elaborate conception of which demons do which disease, and you can actually get a sense of ancient medical thinking from this. And so they’re trying to make sense of the difficulties of experience. And here I’d emphasize that the term evil, like in Hebrew, can often mean—it doesn’t mean in the Old Testament a kind of capital “E”-evil like opposed, but it can mean in a way its culture too, that’s a sense of something bad. “Bad” can have the sense of something that’s evil in this moral sense, but also something that’s unfortunate that you don’t like. Proverbs 25 talks about what to do with a toothache, and they actually use this word for tooth, this word like “raya.” The tooth isn’t evil. It’s a bad tooth, meaning there’s a language of misfortune and the difficulties of life they’re trying to explain. So I think you’re spot on, Maureen.

Maureen

Okay. Thank you.

Matthew

So Karen, go ahead.

Karen

Yeah. I’m sort of piggybacking off of what was just said. I’m way back at the beginning thinking about Jewish tradition–which came first or how they’re connected, the notion of Lilith as the unsubmissive wife of Adam who left and the notion that she does bad things or causes harm to children and women sort of explaining why bad things happen to good people in a way. I wonder how those two things are connected. Did one come first or the other? And it sure does feel a lot like woman bashing.

Matthew

This is why I think it’s great that feminists rehabilitated her. I guess the key point I’d emphasize is I think it’s very much a Jewish thing to interpret, make sense of our experience through exegetical means, like turning to the way things are by understanding what’s going on in the book of Genesis. And so what I say in my demon’s book is this Lilith stuff is actually continuing much older traditions from Mesopotamia. It’s interesting the Talmud–the core text and Judaism and those incantation bowls you looked at–they’re all produced in Babylonia, meaning it’s a continuity of that culture in many ways. So the exegesis kind of obscures what I think is the real connection. But there’s a kind of continuity, there’s like a regional continuity about how to deal with these things. But the exegetical thing opens up all sorts of new opportunities and there are all these wonderful Jewish stories trying to connect the very things that you’re talking about, Karen. Like in the sense that…so that yes, there’s some stories about Lilith being like, so she was independent and didn’t want to be with Adam, but then some of the stories are emphasized that she doesn’t like when Eve enters the picture in the sense that like sometimes the child-killing is understood in terms of a jealousy against Eve. There’s an exegetical element to this. Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting Lilith in the Garden stories. Peggy.

Peggy

Okay. I’m speaking up for Diana in the chat. She had a question and then a comment. She basically asked, “could the picture from the Roman household be influenced by Hebrew scripture?”  It is basically the first question, and I’ll find the remark before we get to it.

Matthew

Oh, this is a good question. So I would guess not. Meaning, what we know about it, it was something that would’ve been in the equivalent of a mansion today. So someone at an elite level would’ve had this. There are mosaics and synagogues, and so there’s a similar art style that is especially Jewish, but there’s no telltale smoking gun of a kind of Jewish or scriptural influence on that. But it’s a good question. I like it. 

Peggy

I’ve got a couple more. So then still from Diana, another comment, “From what I read, demons came in from the Persian influence. Any comment about that?”

Matthew

Yeah. And the answer is it’s a multi-stream thing and the ancient Persian stuff mingles in many ways with the Babylonian stuff and you find an overlap of their traditions. The most explicit case for the Persian stuff–and here I’d emphasize that in our world, Iran is a Muslim country; it has been for a long time. But for 3,000 years or so, they very much had their own traditions, their own religious traditions called Zoroastrianism and they had their own demons. And the most explicit case of where her point is right is in the Book of Tobit where you have the demon Asmodeus, which is a whole big thing in the Persian demonological tradition. So she’s right. But one of the fun things about working with demons is just this really interesting cultural overlap and exchange. But yeah, the Persians are part of the mix too.

Peggy

I think that’d be true about anything, but demons is a good analogy.

Honor’s got an interesting point here. It’s interesting that in “The Chosen” series, before Mary Magdalene was healed by Jesus, she was known as Lilith. Perhaps the scriptwriters have pulled this concept out of the Jewish tradition.

Matthew

I didn’t know that. My family keeps telling me to watch “The Chosen.” I haven’t yet. This comment might actually make me do that. But yeah, meaning the whole…I’m guessing there the idea is they’re trying to understand her as a changed, reformed woman, I suppose. But that’s very interesting. It’s a very interesting change in the story. I like that.

Peggy

And I want to comment, Honor, I think you’ve got two people interested in watching “The Chosen” now, so thank you. I want to comment on my comment because I didn’t hear you mention yet that you all have the opportunity to become Patreon supporters and it’s easy to do and the link is in the chat.

Shirley

Thank you, Peggy. Now we’re going to Martha.

Martha

Okay. I also saw that show where Mary Magdalene had been called Lilith and they emphasized in that series–and I don’t know how accurate the scholarship is–but I heard it was that Jesus says, she had lived with the quote, “I have called thee by thy name thou art mine.” And so because of her name, she was leaving behind the demonic name and becoming a different name, a different nature. I think that would be really interesting.

Matthew

Cool. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I’d have to watch a show, but your instincts sound right.

Martha

My question was, and I’m sorry if you covered this because I came in late, could the demons have been related to Nephilim and their offspring? They’d beware giants, but there might’ve been leftover sort of things floating around.

Matthew

Yes, yes. I’m going to have a chapter on this. So the Nephilim get connected. So we know them from Genesis 6.

Shirley

Excuse me, could you explain the Nephilim? Not everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Matthew

Okay. The Nephilim, it’s a strange ambiguous term in Genesis 6 and it’s really ambiguous as to what it means. You have the strange story there about angels coming down to earth, sleeping with women and having kids with them. And then this strange episode is somehow related to the rise of evil that leads to the flood. But who the Nephilim are is not actually said. It’s completely unclear. It literally means the fallen ones. Sometimes some interpreters understood it as referring to the angelic fathers, some traditions referring to the sons, and that’s what you get in the Septuagint. They actually translate the Hebrew Nephilim with Gigantes, giants, which draw from a Greek mythological tradition and where they rebelled against the divine order. But what’s interesting about the Enochic tradition, this is a very important scriptural tradition that was important in ancient Judaism that is no longer part of our scriptural tradition. It’s only part of the scriptural tradition today in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition because the book of Enoch is in their scripture, but there you actually have the Nephilim who are very much understood as the giants. They’re horrible, but what’s key for what the Book of Enoch says, an ancient Jewish text, we have it in the Dead Sea Scrolls, actually cited in the New Testament, in the letter of Epistle of Jude. And there it says that their bodies were destroyed, but their spirits remain on earth and the spirits actually become demons. This is why one of the key really interesting terms for demons in the Dead Sea scrolls is Ruche Mamsarim, the spirits of the bastards. And bastards literally means a product of an illicit union. And so this is why I think it’s so interesting that it’s really common among evangelicals to call Nephilimis a byword for demons when there’s nothing like that at all in the Bible.

Actually, I think it’s kind of a naturalization of a tradition you very much get in the Enochic tradition. And so to your point. Let me put it this way, we have a list of demons from the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the list is both Lilith and the spirits, the spirits of the bastards, meaning one thing–and I say this in the book–in a way I don’t like the term demon, meaning it’s one term for demon.  In ancient Mesopotamia, they had 40 different terms, meaning it’s a whole ecology. There’s different kinds. Some are really nasty. Some are playful and you need different means of dealing with them. It’s like a whole thing. It’s like I can call something an animal, but the kind of animal makes a big difference to what we’re talking about in that sense. And we know that Lilith was one of these and the spirits of the bastards were too. So yeah, they’re all kinds of subcategories in the larger category demon, let’s say.

Martha

So it makes sense if there are many kinds of angels. There should be just as many kinds of demons.

Matthew

I think that’s exactly right. It’s a whole ecology, but we don’t have the full evidence for it in our…. But yes, I like that.

Shirley

Before we go on to Helen, I’m just watching, we have like five minutes left, but I want to say that since we’ve had nonstop questions and they’re outstanding questions and everyone seems to be interested, let’s agree to go on at least five minutes late, but we probably shouldn’t take any more questions after Sujan just because these have all been so good. But I’m just going to say we’re going to go at least through Sujan’s questions.

Matthew

Yeah. People like demons. This happens when I teach them too.  So Helen, go ahead, Helen.

Helen

Okay. Can you hear me?

Matthew

Yes.

Helen

You said that the demons really sort of populated themselves in the Greco-Roman era and that was parallel with the development of the apocalyptic mode of thinking.

And I’ve often thought of the apocalyptic mode as when you’ve tried kings and you’ve tried priests and all kinds of other human agency, they don’t work. So you look for a solution from outside of yourself, which is the Messiah or the Savior. And I see the same kind of trend going on with demons as well because demons are something that’s outside of ourselves beyond our own human agency. And I wondered if there’s any research about that. And also is The Art by Lyn Hodnett?

Matthew

Oh, I can’t remember her name.

Helen

I think it’s Lyn Hodnett.

Matthew

So it’s been a while, I’ll look at…. So you very well could be right. I like that. And I like your insight. I mentioned that there’s definitely a change and expansion. I nuanced it, but I also emphasized early in our discussion that there’s a rise in a kind of demonic thinking in the Hellenistic period. And Helen, you’re exactly right. We also see a rise in apocalyptism there. And what’s key there is not just a rise in end-time thinking, the key emphasis in the Apocalyptic tradition is you need higher revelation to understand the world around you. And meaning if there’s something in your world that…I think you’re really getting at something important…where there’s something in your experience that doesn’t fully make sense, like why are the righteous losing? Why are the wicked prospering? When you look at something like the Book of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, the present moment is horrible. But if you understand it in this wider revelation that the text gives you, everything is actually going according to plan and you just need to wait it out a little bit longer.

And I think you’re right, the instincts about how meaning…and in more difficult times, like in more times of crisis…. You very much see it in our own day in the sense of where there’s a lot of more…particularly in the evangelical tradition and the rise of Christian nationalism.

There’s definitely in moments of crisis where there’s a willingness to entertain a kind of, we could call it conspiracy theories. This lends itself to where there’s a framework–often very dualistic–that’s clarifying and demons do a great job in that. The other point I’d emphasize is it makes your difficulties more significant. It’s not just you and your own problems. It’s not just like there’s a broader framework. It’s grand battles of good and evil and it makes your enemy….

Helen

It’s a better narrative.

Matthew

That’s it exactly. It makes your enemy more significant in a sense. It’s not just that you don’t like that person or something. We saw back then and we see now the power of a kind of demonic thinking.  One last thing and then we’ll go to the next question. It’s so interesting, I’m assuming many of you have watched the movie The Exorcist, which is such an interesting film–a kind of Catholic horror film–but when you look…and it was made in the early ’70s. And there’s very much a sense that demons are a kind of medieval holdover in the Catholic church, that the Catholics are kind of embarrassed about, but it’s technically there. And that’s the sense of how it’s presented in the modern world. You go 25 or 35 years forward in the evangelical…demons are not just some medieval vestige in large sections of…I live in the South…in large sections of our country, this kind of way of thinking it’s bigger than ever. Katie.

Katie

I would love to have a clearer idea of where the Lilith tradition originated, the time and place. So, if it only shows up once in the Bible in Isaiah, but then there are stories associated with Adam and Eve or just Adam, obviously there were stories about Lilith going around and so where is she first referenced or how do we know? 

Matthew

The term like the answer, it’s interesting. The biblical tradition doesn’t say much about it, but Abraham starts in Mesopotamia or the word for east in the biblical Hebrew can also mean ancient. There’s an understanding that they’re kind of looking East for their origins. And so I think the answer to your question is in Mesopotamia and there was a category of demon called Lil, L-I-L. And this is where we get the term. The Lil demons were not…. They brought disease. They were often understood as seducing men or women.

It’s interesting because in the bowls, you actually find male and female Liliths and that’s what you find in ancient Mesopotamia. But it’s a whole other category than Lilith as she’s often understood, but it’s where we get the name and a lot of the same functionality. It’s a very strange idea, but one thing they believed in ancient Mesopotamia, if a person died unmarried without having a child, you would become one of these demons. A woman would become a Lilitu, a man will become a Lil. And so they’re kind of…let’s call them unhappy ghosts. And the idea is that they want to kind of… It’s not just like a lust thing, they want to break up family harmonies. This is why they’re often seducing husbands, not just men.

So the answer to your question is they’re adapting older Mesopotamian traditions. And that’s what you find in the Talmud and the incantation bowls which are produced in the same region. So the answer is Mesopotamia.

Sujan

I have some questions regarding what you were talking about in the beginning, that you were teaching a course with another professor and the same types of figures in Chinese Buddhism. Is that why Kwan Yin became so important as a protector of the family and women and childbirth? Is that one reason?

Matthew

Oh, so now I’d have to go back…but yeah, it’s interesting. I can’t remember the Chinese term for it, but one of the things…. I really enjoyed that class. One of my colleagues is a professor of Chinese Buddhism and a Buddhist monk. And because it’s interesting, I taught a version of this class 15 years ago with another colleague who does Tibetan Buddhism and my Chinese colleague would often be like, “Hey, we have demons too.” And I can’t remember the Chinese term, but it might be that. One of the interesting things you find in the Buddhist tradition is they’re dealing with the same kind of issues–the difficulty of childbirth–but it’s handled in the context of a different religious system.

The figure is…. Because Buddhism starts in India, there was one of these fierce child-killing demons, who was named Hariti. But when what happened and then maybe it’s the Kwan Yin, I can’t remember, but what happens in Buddhism is the demons themselves convert and then this child-killing demon then becomes this patron of mothers. And so this idea that the figure that was particularly this viscerally anti-female thing then becomes a source of protection for women. I’d have to look it up, but Hariti gets assimilated into the Buddhist context and there’s a Chinese term for it and I can’t remember it, but you very well could be right. You very well could be. Yeah.

Sujan

You have lots of those figures in Tibetan Buddhism. And also you mentioned some of these demonesses stories that poisoning their breasts to kill babies. Is that also related to the story of Putana and Krishna in the Indian tradition where this demoness poisoned her breath and tries to suckle the avatar?

Matthew

So one of the things we often struggled with in this course is what to do with these similarities–exactly the sort of thing you’re talking about–similarities in very, very different contexts. And in some cases, like with this Lilith and Lamashtu thing, we can make a pretty good case that there’s cultural exchange and overlap and continuity. But in other cases, I’m not really sure that’s the case.

I would explain the similar…. So I don’t have a teacher’s manual to know for sure, but my hunch is the explanation for…. It’s phenomenological. It’s not that these ideas are necessarily traveling. Everyone in their own context would know the difficulties of birth. That’s often in many different cultures, that’s often very much a woman-led context. And so I think the demonology gets connected specifically to that female context. And that’s how I would understand the breast milk thing. It’s not necessarily a connection. It’s rather, I would say that different cultures are dealing with the same problems and they’re explaining it in similar ways, but it’s like…

Sujan

An archetype.

Matthew

Yeah. But we struggled with this the whole class. It’s a really good question. It’s a really good question.

Peggy

Just a quick thing. This has been great, but if you want to end with a smile and a couple more modern relative things, look in the chat. Pat Nester and–I forgot who the other one was–Maureen have a couple modern examples of how it’s crept into our modern days.

Matthew

Oh, I didn’t … Oh, I’ll look at it. Oh, the devil maybe. Yeah. Exactly.

Peggy

And Lilith from Frasier.

Matthew

Frasier, that was probably intentional because it’s been a while since I’ve seen that, but she was a difficult personality as I recall.

Peggy

Yes, a kind of shrew. That’s all I wanted to say.

Matthew

Yeah. And I appreciate that. It’s a whole other thing we could go to, but Lilith still dominates in our … She’s in video games, and she’s in TV shows, and it’s in heavy metal. It’s important for feminists, but it’s important for … Lilith keeps cropping up. The more you look for her, the more you find her, actually. And maybe I’ll end on this note, but one of the things I learned from teaching my Demons class is that many people were signed up because they wanted to learn more about Lilith. That’s when a number of people just really stopped looking at their phones and were actually listening. So yeah, it’s a really interesting subject!

Shirley

Well, we sure do thank you for coming to talk to us about Lilith, even if some of us didn’t even know Lilith before. Could you tell us the name of your book and how we can find it?

Matthew

Yeah. So I’m still working on it, but hopefully in a year or so, I’ll submit it. The title is Compelling Demons. And that means there’s a double meaning there, meaning “compelling demons” is often the sense of you’re trying to overpower them in exorcisms; you’re trying to fight them, like you’re trying to compel them to do your will, but “compelling” can also have this sense that there’s a kind of appeal, an interest. And that’s kind of one of the things that you see in the tradition. And the focus will be on what I’m calling the nastiest creatures in the biblical tradition. So Lilith, Asmodeus, Antichrist, Satan—they’ll all have their own chapters. So that’s also from something I learned from my … When I started talking about specific figures, they definitely perked up.

Shirley

So interesting that we want to find answers to questions, but we are also intrigued in where these things came from. Oh my goodness. Thank you.

Matthew

Thank you.

Shirley

I’m going to close us out here. This was the May 2026 Bible and Beyond Discussion titled “The Demon Lith and the Biblical Tradition” with our wonderful guest scholar, Dr. Matthew Goff. Thank you so much for being with us for our monthly Bible and Beyond Discussion, everybody. I will say that these Discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of some early Christian texts or issues. And in the second half hour, participants have a chance to ask their own questions. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern time, and we will next month. But now let me tell you what’s happening next month. It happens that we are celebrating our eighth year of Bible and Beyond right now! And so Lē Weaver, who is always the one who’s working behind the scenes for us, is going to host that event, and she will be interviewing me about our eight years together.

So that’s what’s happening next month in June. So anyway, right now, please give a special thanks to Matthew for giving us more to think about as we read the Bible, especially in Isaiah, and every time we run across these demons. Very helpful for us, Matthew. Thank you.

Matthew

Thank you. Enjoyed the discussion. Goodnight, everyone.