Lilith

About this book

From the silences between sacred texts emerges one of the most contested figures in the history of myth: the woman said to have walked beside Adam before the familiar story began. Across centuries, Lilith has shifted between demon, rebel, serpent, warning, and symbol. Her traces appear in Mesopotamian tablets, the Talmud, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Zohar, later interpretive traditions, magical bowls, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the enigmatic Queen of the Night relief. In this investigative study, writer and translator Saif Al-Attar follows those traces with literary sensitivity and critical discipline. He does not recycle the legend as fact or dismiss it as a simple superstition. Instead, he examines how names, fears, and theological questions move between cultures, and how gaps in the historical record invite successive generations to construct new meanings. Lilith stands at the border between religion, mythology, archaeology, and collective memory. The book leaves readers with a difficult question: is she merely a story shaped by human anxiety, or the surviving outline of a tradition whose evidence has largely disappeared?