What Wrong Did the Snake Commit?
“Snakes hide in the grass, people behind their lies”—Unknown
Was “the snake” in the garden responsible for, if not guilty of “the fall of man” or humanity’s “original sin” as western culture has come to call the eating from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” by the first human couple as told in Gen 3?
As I suggest in my book Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers), “a closer look at the text would reveal that God had anticipated a priori that Adam would positively eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To be sure, God had forewarned him: ‘For on the day that you eat from it’ (Gen 2:17) … [rather than ‘If you eat from it’. Clearly,] God was certain that Adam would opt to sample that fruit, even before the serpent would ever appear at the scene.
The serpent’s role in this iconic saga was largely inconsequential and limited to triggering a short exchange with the woman; yet, it led in lockstep to the inevitable eating of what was forbidden to her and the man.
As it was, the serpent did not denounce God’s fiat that banned the eating of the fruit, nor did it suggest to the woman to violate it. Indeed, the snake assured the woman that she and her man would not perish when they ate from the fruit. The snake reiterated essentially the same words God had originally said to Adam—’on the day you eat’ — for the dice had already been cast; eating the forbidden fruit was a foregone and imminent action just waiting to happen.
The serpent … essentially spoke the truth by echoing God’s foreknowledge that Adam was bound to eat from the fruit, and would consequently acquire discernment as the talkative reptile predicted.
Damned Be the Innocent Snake
At the brief triple trial in the garden, God did not even find it necessary to ask the woman to spell out her direct accusation against the snake: ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’ (3:13). To excuse her illicit and deliberate action, the woman chose to vilify the animal who serves in the role of a punching bag, a pattern that humans continue and follow to this day.
Without offering the snake the opportunity to speak up in its defense, although allowing it to the two other human defendants, God hastens to damn the serpent, finding it guilty as charged and condensing the verdict to ‘because you have done this’ (v. 14), yet without specifying what ‘this’ (zoht) exactly meant … Despite all of that, God called out the punishment that doomed the snake to become the perpetual archenemy of humans, who will henceforth try to ‘pound your head, and you will bite . . . [their] heel’ (v. 15).
Laying the bulk of the blame for the two humans’ ‘a-bite-too-far’ on the serpent is not warranted, if it is not an injustice, given its minor role in the forbidden eating. Even if the snake indirectly spurred the woman to do what she and Adam were bound to do anyway, they did not have to become such an easy prey to the snake’s mild enticement. Herein we find the foundational portals of the biblical phenomenon where humans mess up and receive their comeuppance, but animals unwittingly get embroiled collaterally; despite their innocence, they are swept into the whirlpool of divine retribution.
While refraining from calling it ‘evil,’ God went on to damn this one creature; the only individual animal that God would ever imprecate: ‘cursed are you among all animals and all wild creatures’ (v. 14 ) … Human dread of snakes has thus become a curse unto all snakes, for humans would seek to dispatch the creeping creature, as God tells the serpent, by booting and striking its head. The ‘enmity’ that God has set between both species simply because the first two humans chose to disobey God—while the serpent did not explicitly urge the woman to bite into the forbidden fruit, nor did it address Adam at all, who also ate of the fruit that the woman handed to him—has disadvantaged snakes far worse than humans …
This whole narrative where the snake is thrown under the bus as an outcome of the two humans’ forbidden eating, will become a harbinger of the biblical phenomenon where God who dooms and designates humans to die for their wrongdoings would carry out their punishment, albeit ensued by collateral harm and ruination that inexorably befall blameless animals as well.” It will be manifested again in next week’s Torah portion, Noah, that narrates the colossal flood.
