I sometimes imagine myself having conversations about the Bible with somebody who is deeply skeptical. One such imaginary conversation goes like this:
Skeptic: So, do you think that snakes can talk?
Me: Excuse me?
Skeptic: The Bible says snakes can talk. Do you believe that?
Me: Not snakes, snake. Singular. Do you know how metaphors work?
Skeptic: So you’re saying it didn’t really happen?
Me: I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that. I just asked if you know how metaphors work.
Skeptic: Yeah, I know how they work. A metaphor is a figure of speech that substitutes a well known thing for an unknown or lesser known thing.
Me: Exactly. Metaphors can help explain, and they also allow an author to say in just a few words what would otherwise take a great many words.
Skeptic: Okay, so what’s your point?
Me: By ‘snake’ you’re referring to the temptation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, right?
Skeptic: Yeah. So are you saying it’s metaphorical?
Me: Suppose I said that some snake had gotten my friend pregnant and then disappeared with ten thousand dollars of her money. It’s the same thing in Genesis: the situation is not a metaphor; the metaphor is the word “snake” Moses uses to describe the temptor. And if you’ve got half an hour or so I’ll help unpack it for you and show you just how rich in meaning this metaphor really is.
This imagined conversation illustrates pretty well why God hasn’t called me to do street apologetics. I just don’t do very well trying to condense Scripture into a sound bite or an elevator speech. I’m drawn instead to dig deep and try to understand the full complexity of God’s word. As I write this, in fact, I’ve just spent two weeks going through Genesis 3 in my quiet times, and I’m still not quite finished with that chapter. I don’t do verse-of-the-day.
With that introduction, there’s still a very good question here; why did Moses use the word “snake” (most English translations actually use the word “serpent,” which is the same thing) to describe the tempter? You might want to get yourself a cup of coffee and find a comfortable chair, because there’s a lot of meaning here to unpack.
Genesis 3:1 reads:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
Now it’s instantly obvious that a talking snake is not a normal animal. It’s absurd to think that any of the original readers would have failed to recognize that. The people Moses was writing this for lived close to the land. They might not have had our scientific knowledge, but most of them had far more actual experience with snakes than you or I do. Literally nobody thought snakes could talk. Moses, as well as his readers, would certainly have understood this serpent to be some sort of supernatural creature.
Of course, much later, in the very last book of the Bible we see the serpent specifically identified as the devil:
The great dragon was hurled down – that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him (Revelation 12:9).
That’s great for us, but Revelation was written a very long time after Genesis. The original readers, as well as many generations of readers after them, did not have access to it. So why wasn’t Moses more explicit?
We might think Moses could have written “Satan” instead of “serpent,” but that’s probably not the case. Moses does use the Hebrew word “śāṭān,” as a word simply meaning opponent or adversary, in Numbers 22, but it’s not a personal name there. In Job Satan appears as a name in most English translations, but if you look at a good commentary or study Bible you’ll find that it’s really more of a title than an actual name. In fact, in the entire Old Testament you’ll find “Satan” as the name of a specific being only in 1 Chronicles 21 and Zechariah 3, both of which were written many centuries after Genesis. In Moses’ era, the being that would later be called Satan does not appear to have had a name in any human language yet. (This might come as a surprise, but all the names in the Bible, including the names of God, are human words in human languages. There are no purely heavenly names.)
So the name “Satan” is out. Let’s look closer at the word Moses did use. The Hebrew is “nāḥāš,” which does refer to a snake. But keep in mind that Hebrew words are not written with vowels. As Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser points out (2015:87-88), the same consonants with different vowels and in a different context can also refer to the practice of divination, or to something that is shining. To a native speaker of ancient Hebrew, those connotations would have made the word in this context something of a triple entendre.
But there’s more. Remember that the Israelites had just come out of Egypt. Specifically, lower Egypt, in the region around the Nile delta. If you’ve ever looked closely at a picture of King Tut’s mummy, you may have noticed that on his crown there are two animals; a vulture, which was the symbol of upper (northern) Egypt, and a cobra, symbolizing lower (southern) Egypt. This cobra symbol, which historians and archaeologists call a uraeus, also represented a goddess named Wadjet. At the time of Moses it had been the symbol of lower Egypt for around a thousand years. In addition to the pharaoh’s crown, this uraeus image also appeared on amulets and jewelry, and as a hieroglyph meaning “cobra,” and also “goddess.” It was not in the least bit obscure.
Some of you have probably heard of seraphim (singular seraph) as a kind of angelic being that is mentioned in the Bible. Seraphim were frequently pictured by ancient artists as winged snakes, both with and without legs. Some of these images, inscribed onto seals and amulets, have been found by archaeologists. Many scholars, in fact, think that Israelite artists may have been influenced in this by the Egyptian uraeus. (Keep in mind that these artists, for the most part, had never seen a living angelic creature of any kind.)
So far, then, this supernatural creature called a “serpent,” who Moses portrays as a liar and an enemy of both God and humanity, has associations with shining, with divination, with pagan Egyptian deities and with angelic beings. That’s a lot of associations for one word.
But wait. Genesis 3:1 says that the serpent was “more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.” How does it make sense to compare the intelligence of animals to that of an angelic being? Obviously, it doesn’t. But a lot of the so-called “problems” with the Bible disappear when we look at the original text rather than limiting ourselves to just the English (or worse, just one English translation). In this case, if we look more closely at what the text actually says, the Hebrew word that the NIV translates as “wild animal” is “ḥay,” which actually means “living creature.” Ezekiel uses the same word for the four living creatures he saw supporting the throne of God (Ezekiel 1:4-28). Both an animal and an angel could properly be called a “ḥay.”
Finally, snakes, even as purely natural animals, have connotations as well. We have to be a little careful here, though, because they have connotations in English too, which don’t necessarily apply in a different culture. In modern colloquial English we frequently use the word “snake” to refer to a person who deceives and manipulates others for their own gain (as I did in my imagined conversation at the beginning of this article). A con man, for example, or a corrupt politician. But that connotation probably had its origin in the serpent of Genesis 3. An ancient Israelite would not have made that association.
But there are other associations that would have been part of an ancient Israelite’s understanding because, as I said earlier, the Hebrew people, like pretty much everyone else in that era, lived close to the land. They had experience with snakes, and knew how dangerous they could be. That’s a reality I’ve experienced myself, working as an archaeologist in the deserts of Arizona, California and Nevada. If you don’t watch out, if you put a hand or a foot in the wrong place, you could find yourself in real trouble. Snakes are a danger that can generally be avoided if you’re alert, but if you stop paying attention or get distracted, you can get bit. So their experience with actual snakes would also have tied in to the way the original readers would have understood Moses’ description of the tempter as a snake.
That’s a lot of meaning to pack into one word. A lot more than can be gotten from the overly literal wild speculations you sometimes find. (Such as the devil possessing an actual snake with God, for some unexplained reason, punishing them both. God’s actions in that scenario make no sense, and possession of that type is not found anywhere in the Old Testament.) And Moses is not finished. After Adam and Eve sin and are confronted, God says to the serpent:
“you will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14).
Crawling and licking dust both appear in the Bible as images of humiliation. For example, in Isaiah God says to Israel:
“Kings will be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground; they will lick the dust at your feet. Then you will know that I am the Lord; those who hope in me will not be disappointed” (Isaiah 49:23).
And in Micah, God says of the Gentile nations:
“They will lick dust like a snake, like creatures that crawl on the ground. They will come trembling out of their dens; they will turn in fear to the Lord our God and will be afraid of you” (Micah 7:17).
Since Moses has already described the tempter as a snake, what could be a more fitting way for God to announce his punishment? And in the very next verse, God speaks of the hostility between the Eve’s offspring and the serpents:
He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15).
This verse itself has a lot to unpack; enough that it will require another article. For now, however, I would point out that Israelites hearing this would not have been thinking of garter snakes striking the heel; they would have been picturing vipers or cobras.
The Holy Spirit did not reveal very much about the devil in the Old Testament. He had other priorities that needed to be dealt with first. What he does reveal is that the devil is sneaky, deceitful, and a deadly danger to anyone who doesn’t remain alert. That gets taught right here near the beginning. And we should not forget also that, because of the association with the uraeus, calling the devil a serpent links him with the worship of false gods, and particularly with the gods of Egypt, during the same period the Israelite people were being tempted to return there (Exodus 16:3, 17:3, Numbers 11:5, 14:3, 20:5, 21:5).
For us, too, the warning of deadly danger if we don’t stay alert remains valid, reinforced by many other Scriptures as well. But I think we should also see in this image, and in this passage, an encouragement to deeply study God’s word. It is work, there’s no denying that. It takes effort and it takes time; time that can usually be obtained only by giving up something else. But it is worth the effort and it’s worth the time to:
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15).
References Cited
Heiser, Michael S.
2015 The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, Kindle Edition. Lexham Press, Bellingham.