Agrat bat Mahlat

The passage that made her famous is in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Pesachim 112b, and it belongs not to a treatise on demonology but to a list of practical advice that boils down to one rule: do not go out alone at night. There it is told that Agrat bat Mahalath, «Agrat daughter of Mahalath», goes out accompanied by a hundred and eighty thousand angels of destruction, and that each of them is licensed to do harm on his own account.

The text narrates two almost identical encounters, separated by centuries. In the first, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa runs into her. She warns him of what she could do to him; he answers that his name has been proclaimed in heaven, and forbids her to pass through inhabited places. She begs him to leave her something, and he grants her the nights of Wednesday and the nights of Shabbat. In the second encounter, centuries later, Abaye repeats the scene almost word for word and reaches the same bargain.

What is remarkable about the passage is that Agrat is not defeated: she negotiates. She asks for an exception, obtains it, and the Talmud records the agreement in the same tone in which it records case law. From there comes the custom of not walking alone on those two nights, which is the only thing a reader of the Talmud had to take home.

The detail most often quoted about Agrat is also the one that travels worst between translations. The Hebrew says «לילי רביעיות ולילי שבתות», the nights of the fourth days and the nights of the Sabbaths. But in Jewish reckoning the night precedes the day it names: Wednesday night begins when Tuesday's sun goes down, and Shabbat night begins on Friday at dusk.

That is why a literal translation says «Wednesday and Saturday» while a translation carried over into the Western calendar says «Tuesday and Friday», and both are right. The English editions on Sefaria choose the second; the rabbinic tradition in Spanish usually keeps the first. Anyone who reads both without knowing this will think they contradict each other, and they do not: they tell the same thing from two clocks.

What is special about those two nights the Talmud does not explain. The eve of Shabbat is easy to understand: it is the threshold of the holy day, and thresholds are dangerous in every folklore on earth. For the fourth night of the week late astrological explanations have been proposed, none of them present in the text.

The other ancient trace of Agrat is in the midrash Bamidbar Rabbah 12:3, and it is a gloss on Psalm 91, the psalm of nocturnal protection that Judaism recites before sleeping. Where the psalm says «you shall not fear the terror of the night», the midrash specifies which terror is meant: «from Agrat bat Mahalath and her chariot, nor from all the demons that rule the night».

That chariot is practically her whole iconography, and it is enough to set her apart from her three companions. Lilith comes in through the window; Naamah comes into the dream; Agrat travels the road, in the open and with an escort. She is a demoness of open country and not of the bedroom, and her danger is the traveller's, not the sleeper's. That is why her remedy is not a cradle amulet either but an hour: stay indoors.

The Yalkut Hadash adds a late and curious detail, that of the demoness who dances on rooftops, and while it is at it cuts her host down to eighteen thousand. Figures of this kind do not claim to be censuses: they were how the period said «countless».

The canonical list of the four mothers of demons is not in the Zohar but in a biblical commentary, and it appears precisely on the verse that names Naamah. Rabbeinu Bahya ben Asher, commenting on Genesis 4:22 at the end of the thirteenth century, writes: «Four women became the mothers of demons. They were Lilith, Naamah, Igrat and Machalat».

That fourth one is worth pausing on. Mahalath is Agrat's mother, and yet she appears on the list beside her own daughter, so that the fourth place is held by the mother of the third. Other schools put Eisheth Zenunim there, and from that comes the fact that the lists of the four queens never quite agree: they do not argue about who the first three are, they argue about whether the fourth is Mahalath or someone else.

In Zoharic Kabbalah the four are consorts of Samael, the accusing angel turned prince of the Other Side, and later treatises such as the Emek haMelech (1648) and the Tuv haAretz (1655) share them out by kingdoms and by hours of the day. Agrat gets her portion, and it is consistent with everything above: the night in the open.

Whose daughter she is, the Sefer Meir Tehillot (1512) tells: Mahalath was a daughter of Ishmael, and the demon Igrathiel joined with her and begot Agrat. The daughter's name is therefore the demon father's put in the feminine, and the «bat Mahalath» that goes with her everywhere serves to distinguish her from any other Agrat and to recall which side her blood comes from.

Whose mother she is, is more disputed, and it must be said carefully because it touches another entry in this encyclopedia. A tradition attributed to the RaShBA holds that Agrat joined with king David and begot Asmodeus, king of the demons. It is a minority version: most kabbalistic literature makes Asmodeus the son of Naamah, and Naamah's own entry records it that way. Here the variant is set down without being adopted, which is what is called for when the sources do not agree.

It is also worth not confusing her mother with the two biblical women of the same name: Mahalath daughter of Ishmael, who married Esau (Genesis 28:9), and Mahalath granddaughter of David, who married Rehoboam (2 Chronicles 11:18). Demonology took the name from the first, but the figure it built with it stopped being her a long time ago.