Did Adam Have a Wife Before Eve Named Lilith?
Every once in a while, a Bible question slips into your inbox wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket, and the confidence of someone who absolutely does not belong in Genesis. “Did Adam have a wife before Eve named Lilith?” is one of those questions. It sounds ancient and mysterious, like a lost chapter from some secret scroll Indiana Jones forgot to return to the museum. But when we actually follow the trail, the story turns out to be far younger, far stranger, and far funnier than most people expect.
Let’s begin where all good theology begins: the text itself.
If the Bible were trying to hide Adam’s first wife, it did a spectacularly bad job. Genesis gives us a crystal-clear sequence: Adam is formed from the dust, Eve is formed from Adam’s side, and together they become the first human couple (Genesis 2:21–22). Eve alone receives the stunning title “the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20). Jesus affirms the same pattern when He says that “from the beginning” God made them male and female (Matthew 19:4), and Paul echoes it by noting Adam was made first, then Eve (1 Timothy 2:13). There is no hint—no footnote, no lost verse, not even a biblical eyebrow raised in Lilith’s direction.
So where did this idea come from?
To answer that, we need to pack our bags and take a very long flight back to ancient Mesopotamia. Long before Israel existed, Sumerian and Akkadian cultures told stories about female night demons called lilītu—spirits associated with desolate places, storms, and seduction (Hallo & Younger, 1997; Lambert, 2013). They were scary, chaotic, and decidedly unfriendly, but they were not human. And nobody, anywhere, ever married one to Adam. Ancient Mesopotamians would have been just as confused by that idea as modern readers.
At this point, some people bring up Isaiah 34:14, where older translations mention “Lilith.” But the Hebrew word lilit is almost certainly referring to a night creature, possibly an owl, used as poetic imagery in a judgment oracle (Arnold & Beyer, 2008; Blenkinsopp, 2000). Isaiah was not slipping a demon ex-wife into the footnotes. He was describing wilderness animals—you know, the kind you do not want to meet after dark without a good flashlight.
Still, Judaism eventually developed folklore involving dangerous female spirits, but even in this early material, no one placed such a being in Eden or tried to enroll her in the “first wife of Adam” storyline (Keel & Uehlinger, 1998). That idea was still centuries away.
The real plot twist doesn’t show up until the Middle Ages in a curious little document called The Alphabet of Ben Sira. This text is not Scripture. It’s not even serious theology. It’s satire—a kind of ancient Jewish parody for readers who appreciated humor, folklore, and the occasional eyebrow raise from a rabbi with a mischievous streak (Alexander, 1999). In this imaginative tale, Lilith is created at the same time as Adam. They fight about household roles. She refuses to “lie beneath” him. She speaks the divine name (always dramatic), flies away from Eden, and becomes a demon (Siegel, 1978). Three angels chase her. A bargain is made. And suddenly you have a story wild enough to make a modern screenwriter jealous.
Remember: this is satire. Medieval satire. Scripture did not write this; Moses did not hide this; rabbis did not teach this; and no archaeologist has ever dusted off a clay tablet reading, “Dear diary, today Adam lost his first wife to flight.”
The story grew even stranger as time moved on. Medieval Kabbalistic texts recast Lilith as the demonic consort of Samael, mother of demons, queen of nocturnal chaos—basically the darkest Disney villain ever conceived (Scholem, 1974; Dan, 2006). From there, she wandered into Renaissance occultism, 19th-century romanticism, 20th-century feminist symbolism, and finally modern pop culture. Today she shows up in novels, video games, comics, neo-pagan rituals, and more than a few tattoos.
But none of this has anything to do with Genesis.
What is true, historically and textually, is that Lilith begins as a Mesopotamian demon class (Hallo & Younger, 1997; Lambert, 2013). In medieval Jewish satire, she becomes a character in a moral story about marital conflict. In mystical literature, she becomes a symbol of danger, chaos, and sexual threat (Scholem, 1974). But she is never presented as Adam’s wife in any biblical text, any early Jewish text, or any Christian tradition grounded in Scripture.
What is possible—though not provable—is that Isaiah’s word lilit reflects the common ANE vocabulary of night creatures (Walton, 2006; Hutter, 1988). It is also possible that Jewish folklore used the figure symbolically to warn against spiritual danger. But what is not possible is inserting her into Genesis without ripping apart the entire biblical storyline.
What is myth is everything else: the claim that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, the rumor that she appears in lost scrolls, the conspiracy theory that she was edited out of the Bible, and the internet whisper that the Church “covered up” her existence. These claims are not ancient—they are modern. Not theological—they are folkloric. Not scriptural—they are imaginative retellings piled on top of a medieval joke.
So why does this question still matter? Because it reveals how quickly folklore can overshadow Scripture when we are not rooted in the text. It reminds us that the Bible’s clarity is often challenged not by rival gods but by rival stories. And it shows that people long for mystery—even if they have to borrow it from Mesopotamian demonology and medieval satire.
But here is the beautiful truth: the gospel does not need Lilith to be interesting. Eve is God’s intentional gift—formed with purpose, endowed with dignity, invited into partnership. Creation is not a cosmic soap opera; it is a story of order, beauty, and blessing.
So walk it out with confidence. When strange stories appear on the internet—often written in the same tone as a late-night infomercial—let them drive you back to the Word that speaks with authority, clarity, and life. Let curiosity lead to discernment and discernment lead to worship.
And if someone ever asks you again whether Adam had a wife before Eve, you can smile gently, take a breath, and say, “Only if medieval fan fiction counts.”
Because Eve is the first woman.
Lilith is the first viral myth.
And Genesis doesn’t need a rewrite.
Reference
Alexander, P. S. (1999). The ‘Alphabet of Ben Sira’ and the ancient Jewish world. In P. S. Alexander (Ed.), Textual sources for the study of Judaism (pp. 143–155). Manchester University Press.
Arnold, B. T., & Beyer, B. E. (2008). Encountering the Old Testament: A Christian survey (2nd ed.). Baker Academic.
Blenkinsopp, J. (2000). Isaiah 1–39: A new translation with introduction and commentary. Anchor Yale Bible Commentary. Yale University Press.
Dan, J. (2006). Kabbalah: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Fredrick, S. (2015). Disarticulating Lilith: Notions of God’s evil in Jewish folklore. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 31(2), 25–43.
Hallo, W. W., & Younger, K. L. (Eds.). (1997). The context of scripture. Brill.
Heiser, M. S. (2015). The unseen realm: Recovering the supernatural worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press.
Hutter, M. (1988). Lilith. In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (pp. 511–514). Brill.
Keel, O., & Uehlinger, C. (1998). Gods, goddesses, and images of God in ancient Israel. Fortress Press.
Lambert, W. G. (2013). Babylonian creation myths. Eisenbrauns.
Patai, R. (1964). Lilith. In Encyclopaedia Judaica. Keter.
Pritchard, J. B. (Ed.). (1969). Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament. Princeton University Press.
Scholem, G. (1974). Kabbalah. Keter Publishing.
Siegel, J. (1978). The book of Ben Sira. The Jewish Publication Society.
Walton, J. H. (2006). Ancient Near Eastern thought and the Old Testament. Baker Academic.
Worthington, M. (2022). Lilith unsexed: The līlītu in cuneiform medical texts. Journal of Mesopotamian Civilizations, 40, 54–64.
