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Excersus CIII: Lilith, Fair and Unfair
Lilith is one of the interesting Biblical examples of very clever people working very hard to reconcile things which are very unreconcilable. Because the Old Testament was written by three or four different people at radically different times, you see all sorts of different, conflicting versions of the same story popping up in it. The same problem happens in the New Testament - none of the apostles can agree on just what it says on Jesus's cross in their different accounts, or what happened on the resurrection of Jesus. But it gets just ridiculous in the Old Testament.
Now, of course, if you believe that every word is that of God, you have to reject the clear explanation that these are different accounts written by very fallible humans that were stitched together by a compiler some time ago. Instead, all of those contradictions have to be reconciled as if the whole thing is one seamless whole of squishy Truth. One of the most glaring of these instances comes from the two different stories given about the creation of the first woman. The story that most people know, of her being created from the rib of Adam, is actually the second of these. There is an earlier woman mentioned, being created from dust at the same time and in the same manner as Adam, only we don't hear anything about her again, as the rest of the story in the Bible is taken over from a different source, which had its own story about how everything went down. So, we have this woman who is created before Eve and disappears entirely. This is Lilith, and there are books and books of literature trying to construct for her a backstory that fits in with everything else we think we know about mankind's early history.
- Count Dolby von Luckner
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