Lilith Fair

[vovat]

Friendly's is having an all-you-can-eat shrimp special for Lent, and I feel kind of bad about not getting it when I went there yesterday with bethje and Dorothea, since I do like their shrimp pretty well. I didn't really feel like having shrimp, though, and non-buffet places are usually pretty slow about supplying the refills when you get an all-you-can-eat meal. I ended up having the chicken fingers.

To switch to a totally different subject, the brief mention of Lilith in the book of Isaiah made me wonder when and how the idea that she was Adam's first wife came about. According to the Wikipedia article, it originated in a book called The Alphabet of Ben Sira, which says that she left him because he insisted he was superior, and that he should always be on top during sex. Sounds pretty sensible on her part. I'm not even sure where Adam would have gotten the idea that he was supposed to be on top, since it seems like his only guides in this respect would have been the animals, and most of them don't use the missionary position. Actually, I understand that armadillos do. I wonder if there were any of them in the Garden of Eden. Or did they not exist until the tortoise learned to curl up and the hedgehog to swim? Anyway, that John Collier picture at the top of the Wikipedia page makes Lilith look pretty sexy, despite (or perhaps partially because of) her herpetological fetish. She looks kind of bitchy in the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting farther down the page, but then, from what I've seen of Rossetti's art, he made pretty much everybody look bitchy.

Comments

[colbyucb.livejournal.com]

Serious case of man-face in the Rosetti painting. The figure of Lilith has always intrigued me, and your LJ entries mentioning her are now my excuse for not doing any of my own research. MORE BIBLICAL CLIFF'S NOTES PLZ.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I did a search for other Rossetti pictures, and while I do like the style he worked in, it looks like his men and women tend to have similar faces, and most of them are pouting. Santa Claus wouldn't approve. {g}

Wikipedia actually seems to have a surprising amount of information about mythological/religious topics. I realize that it might not always be the most accurate source, but most of the time the articles seem pretty thorough.