Obyzouth

Obyzouth has no arms and no legs. Her hair hangs wild and tangled. She moves through the night and strangles newborn children. The Testament of Solomon, which catalogued dozens of demons with clinical precision, gave her one of the most disturbing physical descriptions in the entire text: a being reduced to a head, a torso, and the will to kill infants.

The testimony

When Solomon brings Obyzouth before his throne, she tells him what she does without hesitation. She visits women in labor, waits for the birth, and strangles the child. If she fails to kill the newborn, she moves on to attack the child’s eyes, mouth, or mind, leaving damage where she cannot leave death.

Solomon asks the standard question: what thwarts you? Obyzouth names the angel Raphael. She gives Solomon a specific protective formula: write the name of Raphael on a piece of papyrus and place it near the woman giving birth. The demon will flee.

This passage is closer to folk medicine than theology. The Testament does not explain why Raphael’s name works. It simply records the prescription, as though the information were too important to bury in commentary. For anyone reading the text as a practical manual, and there is evidence from incantation bowls and amulets that people did exactly this, Obyzouth’s testimony was the useful part.

The punishment

Solomon’s response to Obyzouth is unique in the Testament. Other demons are assigned to labor: quarrying stone, spinning rope, carrying beams. Obyzouth is hung by her own hair in front of the Temple for public display. She is made into a warning rather than a worker.

The punishment fits her body. A being with no limbs cannot quarry or carry. But a being with wild, disheveled hair can be suspended by it. Solomon, throughout the Testament, matches punishments to natures with the precision of a sentencing judge who has read each defendant’s file.

The public display also serves a practical function within the text’s logic. Obyzouth operates in secret, at night, in the private space of the birth chamber. Hanging her in front of the Temple, the most public space in Jerusalem, inverts her method. The hidden killer becomes visible. The secret predator becomes a spectacle.

The tradition

Obyzouth belongs to a category of beings that spans the ancient world. The Mesopotamian Lamashtu, depicted on Neo-Assyrian bronze plaques and clay amulets from the first millennium BCE, attacks pregnant women and nursing mothers. She is driven away by the protective demon Pazuzu, whose image was placed in birth chambers. The Greek Gello, mentioned by Sappho in the sixth century BCE according to later sources, kills children. The Jewish Lilith, in the Alphabet of Ben Sira (c. 8th-11th century CE), strangles infants and is repelled by the names of three angels: Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof.

The pattern is consistent across cultures that exchanged ideas along the trade routes of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. A female demon targets infants. A divine name or image repels her. The protection is written or drawn and placed near the vulnerable. Obyzouth is one node in a network that connects Mesopotamian clay to Jewish papyrus to Greek poetry, all built around the same fear and the same response.

Related reading

• The Testament of Solomon. The full article on the text that contains Obyzouth’s interrogation.
• Onoskelis. The mule-legged seductress, another female demon from the same text.
• Lilith. The most famous infant-killing demon in Jewish tradition.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Testament of Solomon (Greek text, 1st–5th century CE)
• C. C. McCown, The Testament of Solomon (1922) — critical edition
• Dennis C. Duling, ‘The Testament of Solomon’ in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, ed. James H. Charlesworth (1983)
• Walter Burkert, ‘Gello’ in Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (1979) — comparative context