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And He fashioned for man a woman from the earth, like him (Adam), and called her Lilith. Soon they began to quarrel with each other. She said to him: I will not lie underneath [during sexual intercourse], and he said: I will not lie underneath but above, for you are meant to lie underneath, and I to lie above. She said to him: We are both equal, because we are both (created) from the earth. But they didn’t listen to each other. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God’s avowed name and flew into the air. (qtd. In Hurwitz, trans. by M. Steinschneider, 120)

It is the assertive quality of Lilith demonstrated in The Alphabet of Ben Sira that drew Bolcom to fashion his chamber work around the subject. Bolcom wrote: “I had an image of the liberated woman – Adam’s first wife who wouldn’t behave. Laura Hunter [for whom the piece was written] is a very strong-minded independent woman, and I thought she’d respond to the character” (Bolcom, E-mail interview).

After deciding the context of his new piece for saxophone and piano, Bolcom researched Lilith in greater detail, drawing upon articles that quoted Biblical dictionaries, and later a book that Laura Hunter sent to him (Bolcom, E-mail interview). From these sources he wrote the brief composer’s note that preceded the piano score, including:

LILITH: A female demon believed to haunt desolate places. She is identified in a Canaanite charm of the eighth century B.C., and likewise in post-Biblical Jewish literature, with the child-stealing witch of worldwide folklore. The name derives from Sumerian “lil,” “wind” (i.e. “spirit”)… (Bolcom, Lilith 2)

The note goes on to list some of the other cultures that describe Lilith or a derivative character, including ancient Rome and Greece, Akkad, Mesopotamia, and Europe, and concludes with a quote from a translation of the Bible that associates Lilith with wild beasts and desert wastelands. Some of the following primary sources were integral to Lilith’s mythological evolution and can serve as an elaboration of Bolcom’s definition and a departure point for an interpretive analysis of his piece.

In his study of Lilith’s historical development, Hurwitz catalogs many different entities that have similar child-stealing and seductive characteristics to those of later manifestations of Lilith. According to Patai, the first etymologically related references to Lilith appear in Sumerian texts dating from the third millennium BCE as Lillu and Lilitu that were “night-demons” belonging to an “incubi-succubae class.” These succubae and incubi would visit men and women (respectively) in the night and copulate with them, producing demon offspring (207).

“Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree” is a Sumerian tale related to the Gilgamesh epic that was recorded around 2000 BCE, but may have origins from much earlier (Hurwitz 49). In the tale, as translated by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, “the dark maid Lilith” makes her home in the huluppu-tree, planted in a holy garden by the Queen of Heaven and Earth, Innana, along with a “serpent who could not be charmed” and the “Anzu-bird” (6). Koltuv notes that the Anzu-bird is known for causing mischief (23). Amy Scerba postulates that this early text sets a precedent for Lilith’s later appearances in the story of Eden, and her propensity to flee (“Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree”) to what Wolkstein and Kramer translate as “the wild, uninhabited places”(9). A Sumerian terracotta relief dating from the same era, “The Lady of the Beasts,” depicts Lilith as a beautiful nude woman with wings and bird feet, flanked by wise owls of the night and exercising dominion over the masculine “solar lions” (Kultov 27-28) .

The only Biblical passage (Isaiah 34:14) pertaining to Lilith dates from the ninth century BCE, and like the Gilgamesh story presumes the reader’s foreknowledge of Lilith’s nature (Scerba, “Isaiah 34:14”):

Wild cats shall meet with desert beasts
satyrs shall call to one another
There shall the lilith repose
and find herself a place of rest (The New American Bible 1051)

Program and Myth in Bolcom's Lilith

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