Before This World? Lost Worlds, Samael, Lilith, and a Christian Reading of the Origin of Evil

This article examines two traditions that are often combined in modern discussions of Jewish mysticism: the rabbinic image of worlds created and destroyed before the present world, and the thirteenth-century Kabbalistic mythology of Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen in the Treatise on the Left Emanation. It asks whether these traditions describe failed creations as the origin of evil, and whether their dark figures - especially Samael and Lilith - imply a power opposed to God. The article argues that the sources must be distinguished. The rabbinic lost-worlds saying is a midrashic meditation on creation, while Isaac ha-Kohen develops a mythic counter-structure of evil within a Jewish monotheistic framework. A comparison with the Apocryphon of John shows genuine structural parallels, yet also a decisive difference: Gnostic myth can place cosmic defect in an ignorant lower creator, whereas biblical and Christian theology confesses one good Creator through the Word. Read from a Christian perspective, these mystical traditions are valuable not as alternative revelation but as historical attempts to explain how evil can be real without becoming a second god.