Pill III: Lilith in the Zohar
2026-11-01
Title page of the first printed edition of the Zohar, Mantua, 1558: a framed page of Hebrew letters with the large title word “Sefer ha-Zohar” set at the top inside an ornamental architectural border.
Sefer ha-Zohar, title page of the first edition, Mantua, 1558. Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the Zohar, Lilith stops being a story about a runaway wife and becomes a piece of the architecture of the universe: a fugitive from Adam’s side who now lives on the other side of creation, with a consort, a household and a moon of her own. This is where the legend we followed through the Pills turns into theology, and into a mirror.
“For there Lilith shall settle and find her a place of rest.”
— Isaiah 34:14, as quoted in the Zohar III, 19a (Sperling and Simon translation, Soncino Press)
When we left Lilith in the last Pill, she had just pronounced a Name that should not be spoken and flown out of Eden. The Alphabet of Ben Sira ended her story there, in the waters, with three angels, a bargain and an amulet. Then, in a short paragraph at the end of “Pill I”, I wrote that the Kabbalah would give her “a companion and a kingdom”. I left that promise hanging for more than two months. It is time to keep it.
It would be easy to tell this part of the story as a simple continuation: Lilith leaves Eden, wanders for a few centuries, and then turns up in the Zohar as the queen of demons. That is how she is usually summarized, and it is not exactly wrong. But it misses what is most interesting. The Zohar does not just inherit Lilith. It rewrites the whole cosmos in such a way that it needs her.
That is the thesis of this Pill, and the rest of it is an attempt to show the documents.
[](#three-shelves-not-one "Jump to this heading")Three shelves, not one
Before we open the Zohar, a small piece of housekeeping, because this is the place where most writing on Lilith goes wrong.
There are at least three different shelves in this library, and they should not be confused. On the first are the rabbinic and post-rabbinic sources: the Talmud, the midrashim, and that strange medieval book, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which we explored in the first two Pills. On the second is the Kabbalah of thirteenth-century Castile, the Zohar above all, together with the small circle of mystics around it. On the third, much later, are the European poets, painters and occultists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who read translations of the first two shelves and made something new out of them.
Each shelf has its own Lilith.
I will keep them separated here, as I tried to do before, because the easiest way to produce fake depth is to pour everything into one mystical soup and call the result “ancient tradition”. The Lilith of the Zohar is not the Lilith of Ben Sira, and neither of them is the Lilith of the Victorian painters. They are related. They are not the same woman.
[](#a-book-that-appeared-in-castile "Jump to this heading")A book that appeared in Castile
The Zohar, Sefer ha-Zohar, “the Book of Splendor”, presents itself as the teachings of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his companions, sages of the second century who wander the roads of the Galilee and open the Torah to one another in Aramaic. It is written as a sprawling mystical commentary, mostly on the Five Books of Moses, full of dialogues, journeys, visions and sudden revelations.
The historical picture is different. Since the work of Gershom Scholem, above all his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), the dominant scholarly view has been that the bulk of the Zohar was composed in Castile in the last decades of the thirteenth century, with Moses de León as its central figure. Later scholars have argued that it was the product of a circle rather than of a single hand, but the time and place are not seriously in question. It began to circulate around 1280–1300 and was first printed in Italy, in Mantua and in Cremona, between 1558 and 1560. The page at the top of this post comes from that Mantua edition.
None of this makes the book less important. Within a few centuries the Zohar had become, for a large part of the Jewish world, something close to a sacred text in its own right.
And it is in this book that Lilith receives her definitive mystical form.
[](#two-sides-of-one-structure "Jump to this heading")Two sides of one structure
To understand what the Zohar does with Lilith, we first need to understand what it does with God.
Kabbalah describes the divine life through the ten sefirot, the emanated powers or qualities through which the hidden God, the Ein Sof, reveals Himself. Among them are Hesed, love or grace, and Gevurah or Din, strength and judgment. In a healthy cosmos, judgment is held in balance by love. The Zohar, building on earlier Kabbalists, imagines what happens when it is not: judgment overflows, hardens and separates itself, and from that excess a whole shadow realm comes into being.
That realm has a name: the sitra ahra (סִטְרָא אַחֲרָא), Aramaic for “the other side”.
It is not a separate god, and the Zohar is careful not to make it one. But it does have structure, ranks, palaces and husks, the kelippot (קְלִיפּוֹת), that surround the holy as a shell surrounds a fruit. As Isaiah Tishby puts it in his great anthology The Wisdom of the Zohar, rendering the Zohar’s own logic: “Just as on the side of holiness so on ‘the other side’ there are male and female, included one with the other.”
That sentence is the key to everything that follows.
If holiness has a masculine and a feminine dimension, the Holy One, blessed be He and the Shekhinah, then the other side must have them too. It needs a male. It needs a female. And it needs them to be joined.
The female already had a name.
[](#the-fugitive-returns-to-adams-side "Jump to this heading")The fugitive returns to Adam’s side
The Zohar knows the old story of the woman before Eve. In “Pill I” I mentioned one passage briefly; here it deserves to be read in full, because it shows exactly how the Zohar handles its inheritance.
In the Zohar I, 34b, Rabbi Shimon describes the creation of the human being. The name Adam “was found to comprise male and female”. The female “was attached to the side of the male”, until God cast him into a deep sleep, “sawed her off from him and adorned her like a bride and brought her to him”. This is the two-faced Adam of Bereshit Rabbah, the very image we followed in “Before two, there was one”. And then, almost as an afterthought, the text adds:
“I have found it stated in an old book that the word ‘one’ here means ‘one woman’, to wit, the original Lilith, who was with him and who conceived from him.”
The genius of the passage is in the grammar. Genesis 2:21 says that God took “one of his sides”. The Zohar reads the word one as a hidden noun. One woman. The first one.
Notice the move. The Zohar does not choose between the two traditions we met in earlier posts, the separated androgyne and Adam’s first wife. It stacks them. The primordial Adam is double, yes, and his female side will become Eve. But before Eve stood in front of him face to face, there was another female presence at his side, and she conceived.
And notice, too, the phrase “an old book”. The Zohar often appeals to ancient volumes that no one has ever found. Whether such a book existed or not, the gesture tells us something: the author wants this tradition to feel older than himself.
[](#the-sea-the-cities-the-ruins "Jump to this heading")The sea, the cities, the ruins
The fullest account of Lilith’s origin in the Zohar comes much later in the book, in the portion Tazria, in the Zohar III, 19a. It is worth quoting, in the classic Soncino translation by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon:
“Now in the depth of the great abyss there is a certain hot fiery female spirit named Lilith, who at first cohabited with man.”
The passage explains that when man was created, “a thousand spirits from the left side” gathered around his still lifeless body, each trying to enter it, until a cloud drove them away and God breathed into him the breath of life. Then, once again, the female is attached to his side; once again God “sawed the man in two” and brought the woman to him “like a bride to the canopy”.
“When Lilith saw this she fled, and she is still in the cities of the sea coast trying to snare mankind.”
The flight is still there. But it has changed its meaning. In Ben Sira, Lilith leaves because she refuses to lie beneath Adam. Here, she leaves because she sees the bride. She is displaced by a union.
The passage then reaches for the future. When God destroys “the wicked Rome”, the text says, He will settle Lilith among its ruins, “since she is the ruin of the world”, and it cites Isaiah 34:14, the verse at the head of this post: “For there Lilith shall settle and find her a place of rest.”
It is one of the very few biblical verses that mention a lilit (לִילִית) at all. In Isaiah it belongs to a vision of Edom turned into wasteland, among wild beasts and desert creatures. The Zohar hears it as prophecy.
Then comes my favorite sentence in the whole section, because it shows the author arguing with his own sources:
“In ancient books it says that she fled from man before this, but we have learnt differently, that she associated with man until this soul (neshamah) was placed in him, and then she fled to the seaside.”
The Zohar knows there are competing versions. It names the disagreement and takes a side.
That is not how a demon story is told. That is how a commentary is written.
[](#a-mother-for-the-spirits "Jump to this heading")A mother for the spirits
Why does any of this matter so much to the Zohar? Because Lilith now has a function in the economy of the world.
In Ben Sira, she was already a threat to newborns. The Zohar keeps that, and gives it a cosmology. In the portion Aharei Mot, around the Zohar III, 76b–77a, spirits born from unholy unions “all go to the ancient Lilith, who brings them up”. She “goes out into the world and seeks her little ones”, and when she finds small children she tries to cleave to them. There, in a striking echo of the old legend, “three holy spirits” fly before her and take the child’s spirit away from her, to protect it.
They are not named. But any reader of “Pill II” will recognize the shape of Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof behind them.
The Zohar has taken a folk motif, the amulet beside the cradle, and folded it into a theory of souls.
I will not linger on the specific domestic customs the text recommends as protection. They belong to the history of practice, and they are described in the source for anyone who wishes to read them, but they are not what this blog is for. What matters for us is the structure: Lilith is no longer simply a dangerous being out there in the night. She is the mother and nurse of a whole population of spirits generated by human failure.
She is the shadow of fertility itself.
[](#naamah-igrat-and-the-women-of-the-night "Jump to this heading")Naamah, Igrat, and the women of the night
Lilith does not stand alone in the Zohar. She is surrounded by sisters.
In the Zohar I, 55a, the sages discuss Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain in Genesis 4:22, whom an older rabbinic tradition had already turned into a figure of seductive beauty. Rabbi Shimon declares that “she was the mother of the demons, being of the side of Cain”, and that “in company with Lilith” she brings illness on children. When Rabbi Abba objects that demons die, so how could she still exist, the answer comes:
“Lilith and Naamah and Iggereth, the daughter of Mahlath, who originated from their side, will all continue to exist until the Holy One, blessed be He, sweeps away the unclean spirit.”
Igrat, or Agrat bat Mahalath, was already known to the Babylonian Talmud as a queen of demons who roams at night (_Pesahim_ 112b). The Zohar gathers her into the same family.
From here, later Kabbalistic tradition would count four demonic mothers. Gershom Scholem, in the entry “Lilith” of his book Kabbalah (1974), writes that Lilith “is generally numbered among the four mothers of the demons, the others being Agrat, Mahalath, and Naamah”. Raphael Patai, in The Hebrew Goddess (1967), quotes a later Kabbalistic commentator who says it plainly: “Four women were the mothers of demons: Lilith, Naamah, Igrath, and Mahalath.”
It is important to be precise about the word generally. The four do not appear as a neat, closed list in one canonical passage of the Zohar. The list crystallizes across the tradition. That is exactly how myth grows in this literature: a name in the Talmud, a pair in the Zohar, a quartet in the commentators.
[](#the-treatise-before-the-zohar "Jump to this heading")The treatise before the Zohar
There is one more document we need, and it is older than the Zohar itself.
In the second half of the thirteenth century, a Castilian Kabbalist named Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen wrote a short work known as the Treatise on the Left Emanation (_Ma’amar ’al ha-Atzilut ha-Smalit_). Scholem published it in 1927. Joseph Dan later translated and analysed it in English, notably in his article “Samael, Lilith and the Concept of Evil in Early Kabbalah” (_AJS Review_, 1980) and in the volume The Early Kabbalah (1986).
Dan’s verdict is striking. In this text, he writes, “for the first time in a dated Jewish work, Samael and Lilith are described as husband and wife in the realm of the Satanic power, a concept which was later incorporated into the Zohar”.
The treatise claims to transmit an older esoteric tradition, and it describes the couple in terms we already know:
“Samael and Lilith were born as a hermaphrodite, just like Adam and Eve, who were also born in this manner, reflecting what is above.”
Read that sentence slowly. It is the androgynous Adam of Bereshit Rabbah, transposed to the other side.
The same text distinguishes two Liliths: the Elder Lilith, wife of Samael, and the Younger Lilith, wife of Asmodeus, the king of demons, adding that Samael is jealous of Asmodeus because of her. I find it hard to read this without a smile. Even the underworld, in this imagination, has a court, a royal family and a scandal.
[](#samael-and-his-bride "Jump to this heading")Samael and his bride
So when we reach the Zohar, the pairing has already been made. The Zohar takes it and makes it systematic.
Samael, an angelic name that the rabbinic literature had already associated with the serpent of Eden and with the angel of death, becomes the masculine head of the other side. Lilith becomes his partner. Scholem summarizes the result in his Kabbalah: “Wholly new in the kabbalistic concept of Lilith is her appearance as the permanent partner of Samael, queen of the realm of the forces of evil (the _sitra ahra_).” He adds that she “fulfills a function parallel to that of the Shekhinah”: as the Shekhinah is mother of the House of Israel, so Lilith is mother of the impure.
There is a precise trace of this in the text. In the Zohar I, 27b–28a, unchastity is identified with “Lilith, the mother of the ‘mixed multitude’”, the erev rav that came out of Egypt with Israel, and who, the text says, “separate the two He’s of the sacred name”. The divine Name again. In “Pill II”, Lilith escaped by speaking it. Here, her children are accused of tearing it apart.
The mirror is complete: Adam and Eve, Samael and Lilith; the Shekhinah and her shadow.
[](#the-harlot-and-the-moon "Jump to this heading")The harlot and the moon
The _Zohar_’s Lilith is above all a seductress, and this is where most popular retellings stop. Scholem lists the passages where this motif appears, the Zohar I, 14b and 54b; II, 96a and 111a; III, 19a and 76b, and notes the names she receives: “the harlot, the wicked, the false, or the black”.
What is less often noticed is how deeply the Zohar ties her to the dark half of things. In the same passage of the Zohar I, 34b, interpreting the creatures of the fifth day, “every living creature that creepeth” is read as “the soul of the creature which creeps to the four quarters of the globe, to wit, Lilith”. Elsewhere she is one of the “old females” who scatter at a heavenly proclamation (_Zohar_ II, 27b), and “the maidservant” who carries off souls (in the portion _Mishpatim_). The image of the maidservant comes from Proverbs 30:23, where the earth trembles at “a handmaid that is heir to her mistress”. The handmaid who usurps the place of the queen.
There is an ancient intuition hidden in that verse, and the Kabbalists saw it immediately. Lilith is not the opposite of the Shekhinah. She is her counterfeit.
[](#not-a-goddess-not-a-heroine "Jump to this heading")Not a goddess, not a heroine
It is tempting, at this point, to make Lilith into something she is not. The sitra ahra can sound like a dark mirror-religion, and Lilith like its goddess. The Zohar resists that.
The other side, in its theology, has no independent life. It feeds on the holy, on what is misplaced, wasted or broken. Its powers last only “until the Holy One, blessed be He, sweeps away the unclean spirit”, in the words of the passage on Naamah. Even Lilith’s final home among the ruins of Rome is a sentence of exile. She is real in this system, but she is not sovereign.
This is why I find the modern habit of calling her the “dark goddess of the Kabbalah” so misleading. The phrase carries a whole Victorian and twentieth-century apparatus into a medieval Hebrew and Aramaic text that would not recognize it.
Which brings us to the third shelf.
[](#the-third-shelf-the-west-discovers-her "Jump to this heading")The third shelf: the West discovers her
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith: a woman with long, loose golden-red hair sits in a white gown before a mirror, combing her hair, surrounded by white roses and foxgloves, with a calm, absorbed expression.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1866–68, altered 1872–73. Oil on canvas, Delaware Art Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
When Lilith entered European culture, she did not come through the Zohar directly. She came through retellings of retellings.
Goethe put her briefly into the Walpurgisnacht of Faust, Part One (1808), where Mephistopheles identifies her for Faust as “Adam’s first wife” and warns him against her beautiful hair. That single line, very much in the spirit of Ben Sira and of the Talmud’s long-haired night creature, did more to make her famous in the West than any Kabbalistic treatise.
A generation later, Rossetti painted her. His Lady Lilith, above, shows a woman absorbed in her own reflection, combing her long golden hair. It was paired with his sonnet “Body’s Beauty”, which opens: “Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told / (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)”. There is no Samael here, no sitra ahra, no kelippot. There is a Victorian anxiety about beauty and female autonomy, wearing a Hebrew name.
Then, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, occult writers, and after them a part of the feminist movement, built new Liliths out of these fragments: some demonic, some liberating, many simply decorative. That history deserves its own Pill, and I will not try to compress it here. It is enough to say that whatever she became in the West, she became through translation, and translation always chooses.
[](#what-the-zohar-actually-did "Jump to this heading")What the Zohar actually did
Let us gather the threads.
The Talmud gave us a winged, long-haired creature of the night. The Alphabet of Ben Sira gave her a biography: created from the earth, equal to Adam, escaping by the Name. The Treatise on the Left Emanation gave her a husband and a twin birth on the other side. And the Zohar gave her a place in the very structure of the divine.
It moved her from the margins of the night to the inner logic of creation. She is there at Adam’s side before Eve. She flees when the bride arrives. She nurses spirits that are born from human failure. She rules beside Samael. She counterfeits the Shekhinah. And she waits among the ruins for the end.
That is what I mean when I say that the Zohar does not simply inherit Lilith; it rewrites the cosmos in such a way that it needs her. A universe built on the union of masculine and feminine, on face-to-face reunion after separation, requires a shadow of that union. Otherwise the drama has no stakes.
In “Before two, there was one” we saw the Kabbalists turn the separation of Adam into a metaphysics of love.
This is its dark twin.
The same book that taught that two must be divided so that they can meet again also imagined a woman who was cut away and never returned. A union on the other side, mirroring the union above, and a mother who never stops looking for her children.
She is still in the cities of the sea, the Zohar says.
Waiting for the ruins.
[](#heading "Jump to this heading")
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