5-2 The Serpent In Eden

Genesis 3:4-5: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”.

Popular Interpretation

It is assumed that the serpent here is an angel that had sinned, called “Satan”. Having been thrown out of heaven for his sin, he came to earth and tempted Eve to sin.

Comments

1. The passage talks about “the serpent”. The words “satan” and “devil” do not occur in the whole book of Genesis.

2. The serpent is never described as an angel.

3. Therefore it is not surprising that there is no reference in Genesis to anyone being thrown out of heaven.

4. Sin brings death (Rom. 6:23). Angels cannot die (Lk. 20:35-36) , therefore angels cannot sin. The reward of the righteous is to be made equal to the angels to die no more (Lk. 20:35-36). If angels can sin, then the righteous will also be able to sin and therefore will have the possibility of dying, which means they will not really have everlasting life.

5. The characters involved in the Genesis record of the fall of man are: God, Adam, Eve and the serpent. Nobody else is mentioned. There is no evidence that anything got inside the serpent to make it do what it did. Paul says the serpent “beguiled Eve through his (own) subtilty” (2 Cor.11:3). God told the serpent: “Because thou hast done this...” (Gen.3:14). If “satan” was using the serpent, why is he not mentioned and why was he not also punished?

6. Adam blamed Eve for his sin: “She gave me of the tree” (Gen. 3:12).

Eve blamed the serpent: “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:13).

The serpent did not blame the devil - he made no excuse.

7. If it is argued that snakes today do not have the power of speech or reasoning as the serpent in Eden had, remember that:-

(a) a donkey was once made to speak and reason with a man (Balaam); “The (normally) dumb ass speaking with a man’s voice forbad the madness of the prophet” (2 Pet. 2:16). and

(b) The serpent was one of the most intelligent of all the animals (Gen. 3:1). The curse upon it would have taken away the ability it had to speak with Adam and Eve.

8. God created the serpent (Gen. 3:1); another being called “satan” did not turn into the serpent; if we believe this, we are effectively saying that one person can enter the life of someone else and control it. This is a pagan idea, not a Biblical one. If it is argued that God would not have created the serpent because of the great sin it enticed Adam and Eve to commit, remember that sin entered the world from man (Rom. 5:12); the serpent was therefore amoral, speaking from its own natural observations, and was not as such responsible to God and therefore did not commit sin.

Some suggest that the serpent of Genesis 3 is related to the seraphim. However, the normal Hebrew word for “serpent”, which is used in Genesis 3, is totally unrelated to the word for “seraphim”. The Hebrew word translated “seraphim” basically means a “fiery one” and is translated “fiery serpent” in Numbers 21:8, but this is not the word translated “serpent” in Genesis 3. The Hebrew word for brass comes from the same root word for “serpent” in Genesis 3. Brass represents sin (Jud. 16:21; 2 Sam. 3:24; 2 Kings. 25:7; 2 Chron. 33:11; 36:6), thus the serpent may be connected with the idea of sin, but not a sinful angel.

The serpent was a beast of the field which God had made (Gen 3:1). Yet out of the ground [Heb. adamah- earth, soil] God formed all the beasts of the field, including the serpent (Gen. 2:17). So the serpent was likewise created by God out of the ground- it wasn't a pre-existing agent of evil. Note the snake, as one of the beasts of the field, was " very good" (Gen. 1:31)- hardly how one would describe the serpent according to the orthodox reasoning.

Suggested Explanations

1. There seems no reason to doubt that what we are told about the creation and the fall in the early chapters of Genesis should be taken literally. “The serpent” was a literal serpent. The fact that we can see serpents today crawling on their bellies in fulfilment of the curse placed on the original serpent (Gen. 3:14), proves this. In the same way we see men and women suffering from the curses that were placed on them at the same time. We can appreciate that Adam and Eve were a literal man and woman as we know man and woman today, but enjoying a better form of existence, therefore the original serpent was a literal animal, although in a far more intelligent form than snakes are today.

2. The following are further indications that the early chapters of Genesis should be read literally:-

- Jesus referred to the record of Adam and Eve’s creation as the basis of His teaching on marriage and divorce (Matt. 19:5-6); there is no hint that He read it figuratively.

- “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived (by the serpent), but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Tim. 2:13-14) - so Paul, too, read Genesis literally. And most importantly he wrote earlier about the way the “serpent beguiled Even through his subtilty” (2 Cor. 11:3) - notice that Paul doesn’t mention the “devil” beguiling Eve.

- Is there any evidence at all that there is anything else in the record of the creation and fall that should be read figuratively? The world was created in six days according to Genesis 1. That these were literal days of 24 hours is proved by the fact that the various things created on the different days could not usefully exist without each other in their present form for more than a few days. That they were not periods of 1,000 years or more is demonstrated by the fact that Adam was created on the sixth day, but died after the seventh day at the age of 930 (Gen. 5:5). If the seventh day was a period of 1,000 years then Adam would have been more than 1,000 when he died.

3. Because the serpent was cursed with having to crawl on its belly (Gen. 3:14), this may imply that previously it had legs; coupled with its evident powers of reasoning, it was probably the form of animal life closest to man, although it was still an animal - another of the “beasts of the field which the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1 & 14). It was cursed “above (“from among”, RVmg.) every beast of the field” (Gen. 3:14), as if all the beasts were cursed but especially the serpent.

4. Maybe the serpent had eaten of the tree of knowledge which would explain his subtilty. Eve “saw that the tree was...a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6). How could she have seen this unless she saw the result of eating the fruit in the life of something that had already done so? It may well be that Eve had had several conversations with the serpent before the one recorded in Genesis 3. The first recorded words of the serpent to Eve are, “Yea, hath God said...” (Gen. 3:1) - the word “Yea” possibly implying that this was a continuation of a previous conversation that is not recorded.

5. I've shown elsewhere (1) that the entire Pentateuch is alluding to the various myths and legends of creation and origins, showing what the truth is. Moses was seeking to disabuse Israel of all the myths they'd heard in Egypt, to deconstruct the wrong views they'd grown up with- and so he wrote Genesis 1-3 to show the understanding of origins which God wished His people to have. The serpent had a major significance in the surrounding cultures. It was seen as a representative of the gods, a kind of demon, a genie. But the Genesis record is at pain to show that the serpent in Eden was none of those things- it was one of the "beasts of the field". No hidden identity is suggested for the serpent in Genesis. J.H. Walton comments: "The Israelites [made no] attempt to associate it [the serpent] with a being who was the ultimate source or cause of evil. In fact, it would appear that the author of Genesis is intentionally underplaying the role or idenitifcation of the serpent...In Canaanite literature the role of chaos was played by the serpentine Leviathan / Lotan. In contrast, the Biblical narrative states that the great sea creatures were simply beasts God created (Gen. 1:21). This demythologizing polemic may also be responsible for avoiding any theory of conspirational uprisings for the existence of evil... there is no hint in the OT that the serpent of Genesis 2-3 was either identified as Satan or was thought to be inspired by Satan. The earliest extant reference to any association is found in Wisdom of Solomon 2:24 (first century BC)... the earliest reference to Satan as the tempter through the serpent is in Apocalypse Of Moses 16-19, contemporary to the NT... in the writings of the church fathers, one of the earliest to associate the serpent with Satan was Justin Martyr " (2).

Notes

(1) See Digression 3 The Intention And Context Of Genesis 1-3.

(2) J.H. Walton, 'Serpent', in T.D. Alexander and D.W. Baker, eds, Dictionary Of The Old Testament And Pentateuch (Leicester: IVP, 2003) pp. 737/8.