Interpretation of Biblical Genealogies

Faith & Science Conversation
21

The serpent is not named in Genesis as ‘adversary’, let alone Satan, and there’s a discrepancy with the serpent being Satan: the serpent gets cursed to crawl on its belly in Genesis, yet in Job Satan has been walking back and forth.[1]

So either the serpent in Genesis isn’t Satan, or there are inconsistencies with Job.

(Satan is also described in Revelation as a standing dragon, though this is in a vision)

  1. A few translations say ‘going’ rather than ‘walking’. I don’t know if this is a legitimate translation, or an attempt to avoid discrepancy. ↩︎

22

Satan is an adversary not a specific being.
As when Jesus snaps at Peter “Get behind me Satan!”

Richard

23

Satan is a specific being in Job and Revelation.

Using his name as an epithet doesn’t change that, any more than referring to some-one as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Lennie’ would make them not specific characters.

1 Like
26

It surely isn’t. “Condemned to crawl on its belly” for its part in the Fall, is consistent with the Jewish claim that it once was four legged, like other reptiles, and never two-legged like no other reptiles. My own pet theory is that the Tale of the Fall is as much a grandfather’s tale to grandchildren to explain why snakes slither about on their bellies rather than walk on four legs like lizards.

From Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism Paperback – August 24, 2007 by Howard Schwartz

572 HOW CAIN WAS CONCEIVED

Samael was the great prince in heaven. After God created the world, Samael took his
band of followers and descended and saw the creatures that God had created. Among
them he found none so skilled to do evil as the serpent, as it is said, Now the serpent was the
shrewdest of all the wild beasts (Gen. 3:1). Its appearance was something like that of a camel,
and Samael mounted and rode upon it. Riding on the serpent, the angel Samael came to
Eve in the night and seduced her, and she conceived Cain. Later, while Eve was pregnant
by the angel, Adam came to her, and she conceived Abel.
Others say it was the serpent himself who seduced Eve, for after he saw Adam and Eve
coupling, the serpent conceived a passion for her. He even imagined killing Adam and marrying
Eve. So he came to Eve when she was alone and possessed her and infused her with
lust. That is how the serpent fathered Cain, who was later to slay his own brother. And that is
how Eve was infected with his impurity. As a result, all of Israel was impure from that until the Torah was given on Mount Sinai. Only then did Israel’s impurity cease.”

1 Like
27

Derek Kidner writes:

“These words do not imply that hitherto serpents had not been reptiles . . . but that the crawling is henceforth symbolic (cf. Isa. 65:25) - just as in 9:13 a new significance, not new existence, will be decreed for the rainbow.”

Bill Arnold writes:

“This curse does not mean the serpent once walked upright with legs anymore than it wants the reader to assume the serpent will now literally eat dust as opposed to its previous fare. Rather these are idioms for humiliation. The serpent, who had been characterized as the shrewdest of all the animals, will now become the most humble. The changed relationship is between the offspring of the woman and that of the serpent, which relationship will henceforth be marred by enmity (3:15).”

The same exegetical logic that would require snakes to have walked would also require a current diet of dust. Snakes do not eat dust so unless we have a valid exegetical reason to think the first part of the curse was not an idiom while the second one was, we must reject the idea that Genesis teaches snakes could walk before the events in the Garden.

Curiously enough, snakes probably did walk…a hundred million years ago.

1 Like
28

Tell it to Jews.

29

I don’t need to. I realize that was a common Jewish view. Whether it holds up exegetically or not is another issue. Either way, the story is mythological to me and originally may have had dragons in mind as snakes. I see it as rearranging ANE furniture. I can see why many authors would think snakes lost their legs on account of this though.

Vinnie

30

Which they may have deduced based on some snakes having vestigial claws.

I learnt a long time to check before writing general statements like this, because nature is extremely diverse, and there is frequently some obscure organism that doesn’t fit expectations, whether its birds with clawed wings (hoatzins), fish that travel over land (climbing perches and walking catfish) or two-legged reptiles (Mexican mole-lizards).

31

Exegetical logic in Genesis 3?

I don’t disagree that Genesis 3:14 uses idiomatic humiliation language, nor that “eating dust” should not be read zoologically. My point wasn’t that Genesis teaches reptile anatomy, but that Jewish interpretive tradition often imagined the serpent as ontologically different prior to the curse. That mythic imagination—attested in later Jewish sources—coexists comfortably with symbolic exegesis. In other words, etiological storytelling and metaphorical meaning are not mutually exclusive categories.

Isaiah 65 speaks of new heavens and new earth. Literal or figurative?

25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the Lord.

4 Likes
32

While the verb in Job can be – and often is – used of walking, I think the collection of renderings from the KJV is instructive:

(all) along, apace, behave (self), come, (on) continually, be conversant, depart, + be eased, enter, exercise (self), + follow, forth, forward, get, go (about, abroad, along, away, forward, on, out, up and down), + greater, grow, be wont to haunt, lead, march, X more and more, move (self), needs, on, pass (away), be at the point, quite, run (along), + send, speedily, spread, still, surely, + tale-bearer, + travel(-ler), walk (abroad, on, to and fro, up and down, to places), wander, wax, (way-)faring man, X be weak, whirl

So while “walk” is a common rendition into English, the word isn’t limited to that.

“Satan” is not a name in Job, however much translations like to render it that way; it is a title, literally “the satan”, i.e. “the opposer”. In fact in Job it isn’t even evident that this opposer is an enemy; it works just as well with him being a functionary with the task of looking for issues to bring up to the divine council.

Whether that makes him “a specific being” is an open question; I would argue it does, but the function of the definite article in Hebrew is different enough from that in English that may not be the case; it could refer to an office – compare “prosecutor” – filled by different individuals at different times.

A big problem here is that – as is not uncommon – tradition is guiding translation more than scholarship is, taking a title as a name.

Maybe. It’s a weird scene; the “serpent” both is and is not a mere animal given it/he is a nakhash, a “shining one”, a term which on its own could be rendered as “heavenly being” but in the context is not merely a heavenly being.
My current view is that the nakhash, resembling a serpent, got all serpents in trouble by association.

Gotta love Jewish lore!

1 Like
33

I would hope than an omniscient benevolent deity wouldn’t practise guilt by looks-like-him-if-you-squint.

34

Of course we have to ask what the ancient significance of dust, and of eating it, was. For all I know it could have been an insult on the order of “Eat dirt, scum!”
OTOH it may have just been an indication of a demotion from the heavenly realm to the earthly, from nakhash to animal.

1 Like
35

It was written by humans. Maybe the writer just didn’t like snakes. Or maybe there’s some metaphysical reality we aren’t aware of.

36

I remember reading that some ancient people really believed that snakes eat (also) dust. That assumption may have originated from snakes ‘licking’ while moving. Snakes use their tongue for smelling their prey but it may look like they were licking dust.

2 Likes
37

It makes me wonder if a different author would have had a spider tempting humans in the garden.

2 Likes
38

Or maybe the fox as used in many secular fables and fairy tales. You could even work it into Samson’s tying torches to fox tails and releasing “Satan’s curse” in destroying the Philistine’s crops.

1 Like
39

I’m not sure we should imagine a normal snake to begin with. This is an answer to the question from academic Biblical is quite interesting :

Definitely a lot of interesting things to mull over.

2 Likes
40

The Bible Project had a great podcast series called the Chaos Dragon that traced this theme throughout the Hebrew Bible and the NT. You can see allusions in the armor that Goliath wore against David. The leviathan in Job is also a reference to the serpent in this same theme, and multiple Psalms refer to God conquering the dragon/serpent (like in Psalm 74). Obviously the dragon in Revelation 12 is another big one too. It seemed like throughout the Scripture, the Hebrews were subverting ANE serpent theme (Especially Bablyonian conceptions)

5 Likes
41

It’s almost like you get more out of the Genesis account when you approach it like literature instead of a catalogue of ancient facts.

4 Likes
42

All, great, entirely natural, ancient lit. Where’s naturally impossible plain meaning by God in it? What is it? Or does one need spiritual discernment?