Lilith never appears as Adam's first wife anywhere in the Bible
The story of Lilith walking out of Eden rather than obey Adam comes from medieval Jewish folklore, not scripture. The Bible holds only one debated word, lilit, in Isaiah, which King James translators made a screech-owl. Behind it lies a long trail of Mesopotamian night spirits and protective incantation bowls.
Lilith is a female figure from late-antique Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology. Her oldest known mention is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from about 300 AD she turns up in Mandaean and Jewish historiolas, short spells that weave in a scrap of myth. The Babylonian Talmud names her in several tractates, and the Zohar calls her a fiery female who lay with man first. Not every rabbi accepted her: Maimonides and Menachem Meiri denied she existed.
The famous first-wife tale belongs to the Alphabet of Sirach, written somewhere between about 700 and 1000 AD, in which she is shaped from the same clay as Adam at the same moment. Through the Middle Ages the legend grew richer in Aggadah, the Zohar and Jewish mysticism. Some Talmudic rabbis were wary enough of liliths to advise men against sleeping alone in a house.
Isaiah 34:14 lists lilit among the creatures of a ruined land, and scholars still split between reading it as an animal, possibly a night bird as Judit M. Blair argues, or as a demon or a class of demons. Mesopotamian incantation bowls and amulets from the first to the eighth centuries give the first pictures of Lilith as a female demon. Many worked as symbolic divorce documents, ordering a haunting lilith out of a household.
Her name seems tied to Akkadian lilû and lilītu, spirits of people who died young, before marrying or bearing children. Aramaic Lilith probably merges these with Lamaštu, the Babylonian menace to infants. Lowell K. Handy warns that the Burney Relief, the Arslan-Tash amulet and a Gilgamesh fragment offer scant proof of her. In that fragment, translated by Samuel Noah Kramer and C. J. Gadd as Lilith, a creature nests in the trunk of Inanna's huluppu tree until Gilgamesh kills the serpent at its roots and she flees to the forest.
Source: Lilith
