I love this engraving by the 19th-century French artist Doré Gustave — the viewer’s eye is drawn into the tunnel of the forest, with plant life dominating the scene. Only secondarily do we catch site of the figures — the nude man and woman in conversation are bathed in light, while low in the foreground of the frame appears a snake slithering forward.
This is, of course, a depiction of the pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden, before the serpent tempts Eve to take the forbidden fruit, setting in motion humanity’s moral fall and aeons of consequential suffering.
The story is such a part of Western culture that we take for granted the existence of many elements which were not in fact part of the account in Genesis.
The most surprising of these? The crafty serpent wasn’t equated with Satan. In Genesis, it is a “beast of the field,” unusual because it can speak human language. But it wasn’t equated with “the adversary” — a.k.a. Satan — until the apocryphal Book of Wisdom. Stories connecting the dots between the temptation of the snake and the identity and role of Satan in the Christian tradition really got cemented only in the second century CE.
If the serpent in Genesis wasn’t originally connected with Satan, what sorts of meanings might the creature have had in the mind of the author? A possible explanation could come from overlapping myths about snakes from the Fertile Crescent that appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the main character loses out in a chance to gain enhanced lifespan when a snake steals a unique plant that would have granted it. Perhaps both stories drew from a common cultural association of crafty serpents who prevent humankind from escaping the boundaries of their mortality.
Source(s): Image Gustave Doré, “Satan as a serpent enters paradise in search of Eve,” global gallery.com; YouTube Mikki Brock, “The faces of evil,” https:youtu.be/EUz-WLsbOUo. @bibleinterp.arizona.edu, “The serpent in the Garden if Eden and it’s background,” John Day, Oxford, April 2015.
