Bible Review

The translation is my own. The full Hebrew text of The Alphabet of Ben Sira is found in Ozar Midrashim: A Library of Two Hundred Minor Midrashim (New York: J.D. Eisenstein, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 35–49.

Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enlarged ed. (Detroit: Wayne State, 1990), p. 226.

All talmudic references are to The Babylonian Talmud, trans. Isidore Epstein, 17 vols. (London: Soncino, 1948).

4Q510. See Joseph M. Baumgarten, “On the Nature of the Seductress in 4Q184,” Revue de Qumran 15 (1991–1992), pp. 133–143.

These items may arise from Lilith’s association with darkness. Some translators and commentators have mistaken the etymology of Lilith’s name. Lilith, lylyt [tylyl], was not derived from the Hebrew word for night, lylh [hlyl], as they supposed. Instead, Lilith’s name originated in her depiction as a mythic Mesopotamian fiend and foe of Gilgamesh.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Bible quotes are from TANAKH: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

Translated by Theodor H. Gaster in Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith—The First Eve (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon, 1992), p. 66. Another translation does not mention Lilith’s name and reads, “Be off, terrifying ones, terrors of my night.”

All Gilgamesh quotations are from Samuel N. Kramer, Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree: A Reconstructed Sumerian Text, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Assyriological Studies 10 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1938).

James Joyce, Ulysses, chap. 14, “Oxen of the Sun.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty,” in The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928), p. 183.