For the first book of the year, I decided to take on an old classic which actually, I had never read before. I had been under the impression that “The Book of Lilith” by Barbara Koltuv was a broad analysis on Lilith’s history and symbology. Unfortunately that isn’t what it actually turned out to be.
This is essentially a personal journal on the Zohar with a veneer of Jungian psychoanalysis, and an attempted pseudo-feminist facelift. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I have very tepid feelings towards Jungian psychoanalysis, and am somewhat alienated by the narrative of the Zohar as a pagan, so there was very little chance I was going to love this book. But regardless of my bias, there are still objectively significant structural issues, and I feel a bit misled by the back cover which claims a comprehensive observation of Lilith’s history, and then proceeds to ignore almost all of it.
Most of the book is long quotes from the Zohar and related texts, interspersed with other long quotes of creative writing from other authors or dream sequences of her clients, many of which don’t even mention Lilith. It is honestly pretty confusing to read, and the quotes often carry on for entire pages. Koltuv’s own contribution to the book is surprisingly scant, sometimes composed of only a couple paragraphs between sprawling passages of other people’s writing or dreams. The sourcing is sometimes dubious as well, and she repeats the frustrating New Age falsehood of Lilith supposedly being descended from a generic mother goddess of yore. In places, it almost winds up feeling like preaching, the way she doggedly reproduces and hammers in scripture. The gauze of secularism really is extraordinarily thin, here.
And because this book (at least when it’s on-track) primarily concerns itself with the narrative of the Zohar, and only with Lilith insofar as she serves it, there is really very little of value here for a dedicated studier of Lilith herself. In the context of the Zohar, she’s a sort of bogeyman used as a set piece to be vanquished in order to re-align the feminine with their ideal of pacified womanhood. Koltuv’s facelift merely moves the narrative goal post from “vanquish” to “sublimate” and appeals to us to infantilize the unruly woman rather than burn her at the stake. Ever-loyal to Jung’s worst impulses, she writes about Lilith and womanhood primarily from a male perspective (proposing that their purpose is to be alluring to men, or that women supposedly need to be saved by male “logic”), while trying to conclude that this is somehow liberating to women. It is always so weird to me to watch women writing about themselves as though they only exist in the third person, but I digress.
In the end, this book winds up being less about Lilith, and more about one woman’s struggle to find a sense of self from within her immersion in a sexist school of thought. Lilith is a sort of effigy for this struggle, observed only externally through the male gaze and not really from her own perspective, her esoteric meaning on her own terms, or even her meaning to women as complete individuals unto themselves. It is as though Koltuv calls her own existential frustration “Lilith,” but never quite figures out why it is there. The confusing structure of the book itself seems to mirror the author’s confused internal concept.
The only thing of note in this book for me is that she offhandedly mentions Lilith as a shamanic archetype. That is an interesting idea in Jungian thought that I would like to see explored. But unfortunately, it is chronically ignored in the field and receives only a brief mention in an endless sea of quotes.
I could write a more fleshed out critique of this book, but honestly it wouldn’t be very relevant to the content of my site. The use of Lilith here is so superficial that a deep analysis of the book itself immediately leads me to compositional and philosophical critique, rather than an analysis of Lilith, who is really just used as a sort of narrative shorthand for other philosophical goals. It is certainly not what I expected from the description.
So, for that reason, I’ll end it here. I have to say, I was hoping to get more out of this book than I did. I will readily admit my bias probably makes me like this book even less. But I still don’t feel it succeeds even as the Jungian feminist makeover it’s trying to be, and it’s hard for me to recommend it when you could simply search Sefaria and get half the content of the book for free, and it would be both better organized and better sourced.
– Caretaker
