undermines the story's later cultural valence. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, in mourning they refrained from sex for one hundred and thirty years. During that time, he was visited by succubi
and she by incubi,
and both produced demon children (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 195). And indeed, the Talmud refers to the very ancient (see Milgrom 1988, 22629 and cited literature) "Lilin and Lilioth," both male and female demons of the nightboth male and female in incantations from the period as well (ibid., 231). By the Middle Ages, this motif has become, "Know and understand that when Adam separated himself from Eve for one hundred and thirty years and would sleep alone, the first Eve, that is Lilith, would find him and she lusted after his beauty, went and slept with him, and from here there went out demons, spirits and night demons" (Yassif 1984, 65 and literature cited there). A genderneutral statement of how demons exploit celibates has become by a subtle shift a representation of demonic female sexuality.
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In the rabbinic period, such legends, fears, and terrors of women's sexuality apparently persisted below the consciousness of the official textuality and culture. The evidence for the existence of such legends in the rabbinic culture comes only, however, from their denial or repression in the "official texts." The rabbinic culture (understood strictly here as the culture of the Rabbis themselves) did not countenance them. But from the early Middle Ages on, they become well entrenched in rabbinic culture and official religion, paralleled exactly by similar changes in the discourse of menstruation from cultic disability to near-demonic contamination (Shaye J. D. Cohen 1991, 281 and 28485). The development of such demonized images of women and demonization of menstruation is, moreover, paralleled by a growing anxiety about sexuality itself in the Jewish Middle Ages (Biale 1992). We could argue, then, that misogyny was a latent and predictable effect of the disenfranchisement of women and even more so of the menstrual taboos themselves. We must not, however, read the texts of classical rabbinic literature through the fear and hatred of women characteristic of the later period, running the risk, by doing so, of further canonizing that misogynistic position.
29
In this domain it seems clear that the Rabbis are much closer to the biblical than
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 | | 29. As a case in point, I would cite the notoriously misogynistic modern Hebrew poet, H. N. Bialik, who in his anthology of rabbinic lore on marriage cited extensively the most misogynistic texts and virtually nothing else (Bialik 1951, 48099).
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