How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth
Genesis 2–3 Read Otherwise

Summary of a presentation to the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, Dallas, Texas, March 1996

Despite the vast bibliography on Genesis 2-3, one finds in the literature a rather circumscribed range of comment on one of the text’s primary actors, the serpent. Comment on the serpent in the critical tradition tends to identify the serpent as (1) a symbol of some ancient near eastern deity opposed to Yahweh, (2) a symbol of some abstract quality such as human curiosity or sexual awakening, or of a sociopolitical group opposed to the dominant regime, (3) a holdover from ancient myth, or (4) a plot device important only insofar as it moves the narrative action along. The first three lines of commentary move too quickly outside the narrative as such, seeking the importance of the serpent elsewhere; the fourth keeps the serpent in the story but gives it a short shrift. The challenge is to account for the serpent’s presence, actions, and motives within Genesis 2-3 as an internally coherent narrative.

The serpent is created by Yahweh during the latter’s search for a helper “corresponding to” (keneged) the man Yahweh had earlier created. Although the serpent is rejected as not “corresponding to” the man, the serpent nevertheless understands that being a help to humanity is the task for which it had been created in the first place. The serpent therefore seeks to fulfill that God-given reason for its existence. Unable to be particularly helpful in the humans’ agricultural pursuits (except for eating pestersome insects and rodents), the serpent decides to use its only two characteristics of which the text takes any note — its cleverness and ability to speak — to help the humans. It notices that the humans do not seem to know what is good and bad for them. First, although sexually differentiated, the human couple apparently have not had sex (at least no sex is narrated before Gen 4:1, and the Bible is hardly reticent about narrating such things). Second, the human couple has not bothered to eat from the tree of life and gain immortality (as Gen 3:22 shows), apparently a much-desired commodity in the ancient near east. Third, the human couple’s shamelessness at their nudity demonstrates their inability to make good evaluative judgments (although modern commentators lament its loss, shameless nudity is never considered a desirable thing elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible). Therefore, the serpent decides to help them gain the facility of discriminating between good and bad by getting them to eat from the tree of knowing good and bad. Still smarting from being rejected as a helper for the man, the serpent approaches the woman. When the woman objects that God had told them they would surely die the very day they ate from the tree in the middle of the garden, the serpent is shocked that God would have misled the humans so. The serpent assures the woman that she will not die, but would become godlike, knowing good and bad. The woman ate and became godlike, knowing good and bad, proving the serpent truthful (Gen 3:7, 16-19, 22, 23 confirm the serpent’s words in all their particulars). When Yahweh discovers what has happened, the man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, and, before the serpent can blame God, Yahweh cursed the serpent, robbing it of its power of speech and altering its customary means of locomotion.

“Losing my legs was a real downer, and losing my voice was even worse. But the worst thing of all was the way God poisoned the humans against me. All I had done was try to help. All I had done was tell the truth. But now, God had turned the humans against me — me, without whom they’d still be ignorant little dupes unable to do anything for themselves. Ever since God got hold of those two, I can’t get anywhere near a human without one of them trying to swat me.”