Adam's FIRST Wife?

I don't understand the part in the LWW book when the Pevensie kids are at the Beaver's house and Mr. Beaver is explaining Jadis, the White Witch to them. He says, " She comes of ... your father Adam's first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn. That's what she comes from on one side."

I don't understand this. What do they mean by "first wife"? Is Lewis just saying this to make the story about Jadis more interesting? Because I well know that Adam married Eve.

I'm not sure about the original story but I believe Lewis got it from George McDonald and his book Lilith which actually tells the story of Adam's first wife. the story is of course false, adam married eve. but it is an interesting idea.

I think the best way to explain this is to quote Wikipedia.

The passage in Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (before describing a mate being made of Adam's rib and being called Eve in Genesis 2:22) is sometimes believed to be an indication that Adam had a wife before Eve.

A medieval reference to Lilith as the first wife of Adam is the anonymous The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. Lilith is described as refusing to assume a subservient role to Adam during sexual intercourse and so deserting him ("She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.'"). Lilith promptly uttered the name of God, took to the air, and left the Garden, settling on the Red Sea coast. As a side note, this places Lilith in a unique position, for she left the Garden of her own accord and before the Fall of Man, and so is untouched by the Tree of Knowledge. However, she also knows the true name of God, which makes her even more powerful.

Lilith then went on to mate with Asmodai and various other demons she found beside the Red Sea, creating countless lilin. Adam urged God to bring Lilith back, so three angels were dispatched after her. When the angels, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, made threats to kill one hundred of Lilith's demonic children for each day she stayed away, she countered that she would prey eternally upon the descendants of Adam and Eve, who could be saved only by invoking the names of the three angels. She did not return to Adam.

The background and purpose of The Alphabet of Ben-Sira is unclear. It is a collection of stories about heroes of the Bible and Talmud, it may have been a collection of folk-tales, a refutation of Christian, Karaite, or other separatist movements; its content seems so offensive to contemporary Jews that it was even suggested that it could be an anti-Jewish satire [3], although, in any case, the text was accepted by the Jewish mystics of medieval Germany.

The Alphabet of Ben-Sira is the earliest surviving source of the story, and the conception that Lilith was Adam's first wife became only widely known with the 17th century Lexicon Talmudicum of Johannes Buxtorf.

In the late 19th century, the Scottish Christian author George MacDonald incorporated the story of Lilith as Adam's first wife and predator of Eve's children into a mythopoeic fantasy novel in the Romantic style.

thanks masterofmonks. i knew there was more to it.

woah i never caught tht!~

It is easy to overlook, I had infact forgotten the reference untill DepolrableWord mentioned it.

I have a book called "The Magical Worlds of Narnia" by David Colbert. In it he discusses a lot of Narnian trivia, explains where the ideas and such came from. Lilith and the Deplorable Word are two of the things he discusses. It was a great book (apparently he's written one for Harry Potter and LotR too), and you can get it at Borders if you're looking for a simple read to fill you in on some of the things that only people who've studied "The Classics" would know. I had certainly wondered about Lilith before I bought the book.

ever since i saw that in a game about angels and demons i wondered where lilith came from. that is very interesting, though i think just a tale. its nice to actually know where it came from now, and why it was used in the book

Wow, thanks a lot everyone!!!

Masterofmonks thank you very much for the story. As you can probably imagine, it answered a lot of my question.

yeh, i'v always thought it was an ingenious origin for the white witch. gives her her human form (and her claim to be human and queen of narnia) and is a really interesting idea.

It begs the question though: as a descendant of the jinn, on earth, how did Jadis get to Charn?

I think I've seen that listed as one of Lewis' "untied threads". Mr. Beaver gives that toss-off line in Lion, but later the more thorough background of Jadis, including the Charn origins, doesn't seem to square with that. Unless someone wants to write some kind of connection between the djinn and Charn, that question may have to go unanswered.

One thing Lewis did tie down - in a parenthetical comment in Nephew (which I can't find right now), Lewis makes reference to "giantish blood in the royal houses of Charn."

I do recall that. There's a story in there, somewhere, if someone wants to tackle how the daughters of Lillith got from earth to Charn ...

Perhaps they were exiled there! In Arabic mythology (very close to Jewish, as you'd expect), the great Sulieman ben Daoud (Solomon son of David) was a great wizard, who spent a lot of time corraling the djinn ("genies", as they were translated to English). Some he bottled up in lamps & such that he drowned in the ocean, others he exiled. Maybe he figured a way to exile them out of our universe altogether!

btw, these "bottled up" djinn were the source of the old "genie in the lamp" stories. The idea of one granting three wishes for being released is a rather santized version - in the original legends, if you were so foolish to break a Solomon's Seal and liberate one, you would be lucky to escape with your life.

Now, if we could just figure out how they'd be able to mate with giants...

I thought the giants were the offspring of the sons of heaven mentioned in the Old Testament and human women ... so I guess a djinn could take a wife ... and I like your idea of Solomon banishing them right out of our universe!

That's the version that crops up in Jewish legends, but every serious Scripture scholar I've ever heard on that issue interpreted it to mean the "sons of God" were the the men descended from Shem, while the "daughters of men" where from the line of Cain, and the resulting "giants" were men who were political "giants", in the sense that we'd use the term "strongman" or "warlord". Nimrod was one of these, and according to legend the motivator behind the Tower of Babel. The "giants" were the first to wage war and to enslave their fellow men.

However, I do find it interesting that every single legendary tradition on earth has a giant component. Very interesting.

Isn't there a tradition that says that Jinn come from another world anyway, and are only summoned here when their lamps are rubbed? Or am I just thinking of the children's conversation in PC when they realized they've been summoned out of their world and how one never thinks of how it must feel like for a jinn?

Anyway, I think it's totally possible that Lilith (who apparently knew the Deplorable Word because it really had to have been passed down from somewhere), could have summoned a Jinn her self and ordered that she be taken to another world where she could rule as queen.

Yes, I hadn't thought of that. good thought.
Welcome, Deeper Wonderment. I didn't see you post before.

Huh, those are very interesting concepts and ideas, so thank you everyone, this is turning into a very ineresting and worth- while thread! (For me, anyway! )

Deeper_Wonderment said:

Isn't there a tradition that says that Jinn come from another world anyway, and are only summoned here when their lamps are rubbed? Or am I just thinking of the children's conversation in PC when they realized they've been summoned out of their world and how one never thinks of how it must feel like for a jinn?

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The children did some speculation along those lines, but I think the idea was that the djinn were summoned from "another place" - which was where Sulieman (or whoever) had banished them.

Deeper_Wonderment said:

Anyway, I think it's totally possible that Lilith (who apparently knew the Deplorable Word because it really had to have been passed down from somewhere), could have summoned a Jinn her self and ordered that she be taken to another world where she could rule as queen.

Click to expand...

Well, according to the legend quoted at the start of this thread, the djinni were Lilith's children, and thus less powerful than she. I don't know much of the legend of Lilith, though it is deeply tied up with the Kabbalah. As long as we're making up stories, maybe we could have one of Solomon's lieutenants corner a djinn and a giant in a cave and seal them in. Then the djinn tries something with some charm she's been entrusted with and ends up in the Wood Between the Worlds. There she and the giant try a pool and end up in Charn when it is a world of petty feudal states. They ally with one of the ruling families and proceed to create the Empire of Charn. They breed with each other but not with any of the citizens of Charn, whom we'll presume to be human (somehow), and ultimately by physical strength and black magic end up ruling the place. Plus, maybe the elements of the Deplorable Word are graven on the charm, and the djinn kills herself trying to decipher them. Then her children...

Oops, got carried away there. Wonder what Charn Tim would think of this?