The night demoness whose file spans four thousand years. She begins as the Mesopotamian lilītu — night spirits that trouble sleep and prey on the childbearing — and passes into Jewish tradition, where the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira supplies the story that made her a household name: created as Adam's first wife, she refused subordination, spoke the ineffable Name, and flew from Eden to the Red Sea, becoming a taker of infants in the night.
The physical evidence class is unmatched in demonology: hundreds of Aramaic incantation bowls from the 5th–8th centuries — plain clay bowls inscribed in a spiral with binding formulas naming Lilith, buried upside-down under thresholds of homes in Nippur and across Babylonia. They are folk countermeasure as archaeology, and museums hold them by the shelf.
Per Ben Sira, three angels — Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof — pursued her, and she swore to spare any infant guarded by their names. Amulets bearing the three names hung over cradles into the twentieth century, and in some communities hang still.