April, 1917 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 7 



or as spelled at present, leilaq.^ The flower was brought to 

 Europe before the crusades, probably by the Venetians. In 

 Spain it remains lilac or is Hispanized as lila. Skeats, Etymolog- 

 ical Dictionary, gives Anglo-Saxon lilie, not the Hly, but the lilac ; 

 but gives no context on which his statement is supported. An 

 EngHsh book of 171 5 gives lilach. 



One would imagine the same root for the Latin lilium, orig- 

 inally the night flower. Thus it dates back before ' the Greek 

 XecpLov, the phonetic change from / to r being wholly in accord 

 with law. 



The word lilith occurs once in the Old Testament, the famous 

 passage, Isaiah 34, 14: "The wild beast of the desert shall also 

 meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry 

 to his fellow; the screech owl (lilith) also shall rest there, and 

 find for herself a place of rest." Whether or not we accept the 

 translation of the King James version, the horns of a dilemma 

 remain — did the woman give the name to the bird, or did the bird, 

 always of ill omen, furnish the name for the despised woman? 

 Apparently the former. The translation as screech owl has been 

 bitterly assailed, although it has the support of the Septuagint. 

 The King James translators found themselves in a quandary for 

 words to account for several owls and other birds. There was 

 a cos of Leviticus, for which big owl seemed a feasible rendering. 

 The other owls appear, one in this very passage of Isaiah. There 

 are tinshemeth and yamshuph, for one horned owl being sug- 

 gested (with marginal note of swan). The names of animals in 

 the whole passage must be dubious in any translation, for they 

 include unicorns, bullocks, cormorants (margin — pelican), bittern, 

 owls, ravens, dragons, satyrs, great owls, and vultures. St. 

 Jerome, following Symmachus, departed from precedent and took 

 the word lamia, a name applied to a bird only in this place. The 

 familiar Latin name for owl is noctua, which Linne appropriated 

 for the owl moths, insects whose luminous eyes and heavy color 

 render them excellent miniatures of the bird. In Horace, Ap- 

 puleius and Tertullian Lamia is a witch delighting in sucking 

 children's blood, and so is not unlike the whole conception of 



* The popular Oriental names of women, Leila and Lillah, seem to have 

 this root. 



