Viewed in this way, the fate of the serpent acts as a kind of Just-So Story explaining how the snake came to be without arms and legs. This implies that the serpent, prior to this, did not crawl about on its belly, but had limbs.

This is because, owing to its role in leading Adam and Eve astray, God punishes it, according to Genesis 3:14, by declaring: ‘Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life’. There’s also a strong suggestion that it had legs, like a lizard: at least, initially. But in Genesis there is no reason to suggest he is evil incarnate: he is simply the subtlest of all creatures. The idea that the serpent is the Devil first turns up in the Apocrypha, in the Wisdom of Solomon (2:24: ‘Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world’). In fact, the Bible never mentions this, simply referring to the snake as ‘the serpent’. It is often assumed that the serpent in the Book of Genesis, that speaks to Eve and tempts her to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, is Satan in disguise. And it’s the tree of life that God wants to guard with the flaming sword. Except that Genesis 2:9 presents them clearly as two distinct trees: ‘the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.’ At the end of chapter 3, they appear to have become one central tree. Is this another name for the tree of knowledge? That would explain things. However, this becomes the ‘tree of life’ at the end of the narrative. God originally tells Adam not to eat of the tree of knowledge (i.e., knowledge of good and evil), but every other tree is fine to eat from. And that was it: it was pack your bags time, and don’t slam the garden gate on your way out.īut which tree did Adam and Eve eat from? There is an inconsistency in the Genesis narrative. The way the writers of the Genesis story solve this problem, of course, is by presenting a narrative in which God initially did shelter his creation from these hardships, until humankind showed itself untrustworthy and ill-deserving of relief from these travails. But any God that allowed such things to afflict his people can’t be wholly good. Analysed this way, then, the Adam and Eve story is a kind of origin-myth for the hardships of the flesh: women’s pain in childbirth, man’s back-breaking toil in the field, the wife’s subjection to her husband.

Garden of evil book