As we’ve worked through the Genesis 2-3 creation story so far, we’ve wound up in a place familiar from the end of the Genesis 1 story: humanity living in harmony with God, each other, and creation, exercising our vocation to tend to the thriving of creation, in obedience to the commandment to choose life in communion over independent moral reasoning. But this is not to last. Today we come to what has been the single most important passage in the Old Testament for Christian theology (though it’s had nowhere near the same impact on Jewish theology). This is the story of what we call ‘the Fall’, the entrance of sin as a hallmark of human experience. But because this story has had such a long and important history of interpretation, today we’re going to have to take extra special care to ignore as much of it as we can and focus on what the story itself is saying to us. As Walter Brueggemann put it:
The text has received from the dogmatic tradition such an overlay of messages that the first and perhaps most important task of interpretation is to distinguish between the statement of the text and the superstructure laid upon it. (Brueggemann)
Text
[3.1] Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ [2] The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; [3] but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’ [4] But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; [5] for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ [6] So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. [7] Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
[8] They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. [9] But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ [10] He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ [11] He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ [12] The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ [13] Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’ (NRSV)
Experience & Encounter
I’m combining these two sections here because my experience of the text is to a great degree in response to the four characters. First we meet a wily and slippery figure known only as “the serpent.” He comes up to the woman and sows seeds of doubt in her mind about the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and about God’s motivations for giving it. The serpent then disappears from the story, mentioned again only when God doles out consequences in the next passage. So I’m wondering who this serpent is, and whether there are any Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) corollaries that could help us know more about it.
We also get to know the woman here, finally a character on her own right. She is shown to be cautious and thoughtful, but, ultimately, persuadable. She eats from the tree and shares it with Adam. For his part, Adam takes the food at eats it, apparently without second thought. When questioned about it, he refuses to take responsibility, pointing the finger squarely at the woman, and even at God for making her.
And finally, we have God. It’s interesting that where most of the story refers to God in conjunction with the covenant name YHWH (here translated by convention as ‘the LORD’), the serpent leaves the name out. Aside from this detail, again we see God presented in a very anthropomorphic way: YHWH’s discovery of humanity’s disobedience takes him by surprise and ruins his evening stroll through his pleasure garden.
My thought whenever I read this story is just how relatable it is. It seems like a quintessentially human story. The twisting of truth, the gas-lighting, the allure of forbidden knowledge, the finger-pointing and evasion of responsibility — not to mention the first revelation their knew abilities give them being self-consciousness — it’s all so very human. It’s hard to imagine life otherwise.
Explore
A few question have arisen so far that will guide the rest of this post:
- Who or what is ‘the serpent’, and are there any ANE corollaries to this figure?
- What is the nature of the serpent’s temptation of the woman?
- What is the story telling us about human nature?
The Serpent
Right off the bat, it has to be said that there is no suggestion from the story that the serpent is the devil — at least not as imagined in later, Second Temple Judaism, and far less the devil that arose in the Western Christian imagination in the Early Modern period (Sarna (1989) 24, Barton & Muddiman 44, Brueggemann). There is no real evidence for belief in such a figure in Israelite religion until after the Exile and the encounter with Persian religious ideas, which included a vast array of spiritual beings standing in opposition to God (Sarna (1966) 27). But if we want to take the idea of a ‘satan’ or ‘devil’ at its most basic form — as anyone or anything that schemes, twists truth, gas-lights, or falsely accuses — then, the serpent can be said to be such a figure. Just not with a capital S- or D- — any such identification may be theologically justifiable, especially as the tradition developed during the Hellenistic period (see, for example, the Deuterocanonical book the Wisdom of Solomon 2.24), but would be anachronistic here (Carr, Brueggemann). If there is a link between the serpent in this story to any other kind of mythological figure, the most likely candidate may actually be Leviathan (Sarna (1966) 27). There are two main reasons to propose this connection: first, the common ANE literary trope of sea serpents opposing God’s efforts in creation stories (see the Enuma Elish, for example, and Psalm 74); and second, Isaiah 27.1’s identification of Leviathan as “the fleeing” or “twisting serpent.” It’s an interesting idea here, since sea monsters are mentioned in three of the other four significant creation stories in the Bible, and serpents are mentioned in none; Genesis 2-3 certainly stands apart from the other stories in a lot of ways, but identifying the serpent with one of the sea monsters would make is less of an outlier. (See the chart for more comparisons among the texts: Comparison of Creation Texts.)
Like the sea monsters in Genesis 1 and Psalm 104, the text stresses that this serpent is not a supernatural entity outside of God’s authority, but is just one of the “many animals God had made” (3.1; see Sarna (1966) 26). There is no indication that, despite working here against God’s purposes, the serpent is evil or ‘fallen’; he is simply working within his natural, God-given craftiness, or shrewdness. The Hebrew word describing this trait, `arum, is ambiguous, but is more often than not a positive trait in the Old Testament, referring to practical wisdom or prudence (see, for example, Proverbs 12.16 and 23). Here, this natural gift of wisdom is clearly misdirected (Barton & Muddiman 44). This means that there is no origin story for evil or sin here in Genesis 2-3; the serpent is able to oppose God even within the utopian garden. This seems to reinforce a message in Genesis 2-3 that sin or evil is not something supernatural, but is entirely in our hands as moral agents (Brueggemann).
Temptation
As mentioned above, the primary sense of both the Hebrew term Satan (Shatan) and the Greek Devil (Diabolos) is about deception, sowing confusion, and casting doubt and false accusation. And so, while it may be anachronistic to think of the serpent as ‘the Devil’, the serpent is one hundred percent a ‘diabolical’ figure in this original sense of the word. Its entire temptation of the woman consists in misconstruing God’s commandment and casting doubt on God’s motivations in giving it. (It’s interesting to note that the serpent takes this approach with the woman, who did not hear the commandment directly from God, but presumably second-hand from the man (Sarna (1989) 24).) The serpent misrepresents God first as being unreasonable and then as being self-serving. It turns God’s statement of the fact of mortality (2.17) into a threat (Brueggemann). And, by casting doubt on the commandment’s validity, the serpent changes its status in the woman’s mind, no longer a given of existence, but an option:
The rhetoric of fidelity has given way to analysis and calculation. The givenness of God’s rule is no longer the boundary of a safe place. God is now a barrier to be circumvented. The scene moves quickly to its sorry resolution. (Brueggemann)
Humanity
In the end, the serpent’s smear and fear campaign carries the day, and the man and woman both eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had commanded them not to eat. The results come quickly: First, they develop self-consciousness, and become aware of and ashamed of their nudity (Sarna (1989) 26). Then they become afraid and try to hide from God’s presence. Then comes a refusal of responsibility that arises out of self-protection; when confronted by God, the man blames the woman (and God for creating her!), and she in turn blames the serpent.
These are such hallmarks of human experience and relationships and seem a pretty keen, if depressing, analysis of the human condition. The joys and blessings of complete communion with each other are exchanged for self-consciousness, fear, self-protection, and a refusal of accountability. Faithfulness is exchanged for broken relationships (Brueggemann, Pearce, Harper). Nahum Sarna makes an intriguing suggestion, noting that Adam’s response to God “I heard you…” could in a different context mean “I obeyed you,” possibly indicating that Adam was trying to hide his falsehood in his words (Sarna (1989) 26).
The lack of accountability here seems to be a particular focus of the story (Carr, Pearce). This is corroborated by the whole thrust of the Law of Moses, which assumes the reality of sin but provides a set of rituals to manage it, provided one takes responsibility for their actions. The Mishnah sums up the general thrust of the Scriptures well when it says, “An individual is always responsible, whether the act is intentional or inadvertent, whether awake or asleep” (Mishnah, Bava Kama 2.6).
It’s clear from all this that the commandment-breaking changes the humans’ relationship with God and each other for good. Even before God lays out the consequences (which will be the focus of the next post), the consequences are clear and immediate. And, as we’ll see as Genesis goes on, these natural consequences spread, from generation to generation, as broken relationships beget broken relationships. To the story here of the breach between male and female are later added the breach between brother and brother (4.1-16) and father and sons (9.20-27) (Carr).
That said, the Old Testament does not seem to know of a ‘Fall’ as Christians have traditionally understood it. The story of garden is seen in the Old Testament and Judaism writ large, not as the origin story for sin but as a representative story of sin, a story that gets repeated time and time again in every generation (Sarna (1989), Pearce, Madueme 14).
Expand
At the outset of this post, I made it clear that the goal would be to separate the text from the many, heavy layers of interpretation it has accrued over the millennia. Those layers are important — and I’ll address them in a future post — but muddy the waters of what the text is actually saying. The interpretation that emerged in this post places responsibility for what happens primarily on the humans in the garden. The serpent, a creature like any in the garden, may misuse its God-given intelligence to twist the truth and confuse the man and women, but the choice was ultimately theirs. And it’s a choice that remains ultimately ours (Brueggemann). There is no super-powerful supernatural force of evil at play here, no origin story for evil or sin, and far less any hint of sexual impropriety — just a very human story of failure to live up to our responsibilities in our relationships (Sarna (1966) 24).
This choice transformed the relationships of the garden instantly and irrevocably. But whether it did so essentially is not a concern of the story, and must be left for another day.
Either way, the broken relationships we see in the story are just the first shoe to drop. In the next post, we’ll see the further consequences of the first humans’ breaking faith with God.
* For more information, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 
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