Is the Snake in the Genesis Story Satan or Desire/Free Wil?

[Saxtonite]

Well I remember when younger and at a Lutheran (private) school, they would interpret the Snake in the Genesis Story that tempted Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and give an apple to Adam for his usage. I took a course on world religions and the professor pointed out it wasn't specifically an apple that was growing from the Tree of Knowledge, and that the Snake would actually symbolize Desire and/or Free Will; when we got around to focus on Christianity.

I'm asking you all what you think is the correct interpretation.

[Samuel]

Tzeentch of course. He fits the bill perfectly.

By correct interpretation do you mean what makes the most sense or what was the origional intent?

[loomer]

Old Testament God was a dick, so I've always held the view that the snake is actually God, testing his creations to see if they can be trusted. Of course, you could just argue that Satan was doing the job for him, blahblahblah.

[Stark]

Sounds dumb; they obviously already had free will (since they could decide to do what they wanted), and arguably 'free thought' is what the tree of knowledge gave them.

I think the serpent being satan is a retcon.

[Civil War Man]

By correct interpretation do you mean what makes the most sense or what was the origional intent?

If you want to go by original intent, some myths seem to subscribe to Lamarckian evolution. Creation myths of various American tribes will have animals develop their distinguishing features through their actions in the stories. For example, one may try to explain why vultures don't have feathers on their heads because an ancient vulture burned all of his off while trying to carry the sun. Or beavers have flat tails because a giant stepped on one.

It's possible that the snake in Genesis doesn't symbolize anything other than the fact that snakes don't have legs

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, 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

[Rye]

Snake being Satan is a Christian retcon. From all appearances, it is just a talking snake, one that serves two general narrative purposes. One, it is a "coming of age" desire/rebellion/responsibility/obedience moral tale for human beings; two, it is to explain why snakes don't have legs.

[Knife]

Well I remember when younger and at a Lutheran (private) school, they would interpret the Snake in the Genesis Story that tempted Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and give an apple to Adam for his usage. I took a course on world religions and the professor pointed out it wasn't specifically an apple that was growing from the Tree of Knowledge, and that the Snake would actually symbolize Desire and/or Free Will; when we got around to focus on Christianity.

I'm asking you all what you think is the correct interpretation.

I would have thought the apple (or whatever) was free will, rather than the snake. Isn't that what was supposed to happen? They eat the fruit, lose their innocence and make decisions by themselves instead of doing exactly what they are told?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Well I remember when younger and at a Lutheran (private) school, they would interpret the Snake in the Genesis Story that tempted Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and give an apple to Adam for his usage. I took a course on world religions and the professor pointed out it wasn't specifically an apple that was growing from the Tree of Knowledge, and that the Snake would actually symbolize Desire and/or Free Will; when we got around to focus on Christianity.

I'm asking you all what you think is the correct interpretation.

I would have thought the apple (or whatever) was free will, rather than the snake. Isn't that what was supposed to happen? They eat the fruit, lose their innocence and make decisions by themselves instead of doing exactly what they are told?

Which is a contradiction because they already had that ability if they could be tempted. The snake even has to persuade eve with a tangle benefit. Knowledge.

I think the most coherent interpretation is an allegory for the generalized fall from grace that every person experiences within their lives. Under fucked up christian dogma anyway.

[Darth Hoth]

As I understand it there is no explicit identification of the snake with the Devil (who himself did not exist as a power separate from and opposed to God until late in Judaism) until the centuries around the birth of Christ; the earliest mention usually pointed to is in The Wisdom of Solomon, an apocryphal book (and pseudepigraphon in the original sense) from around 100 BC:

For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity.

Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it.

There is some debate on this, however; some prefer to view it as speaking of Cain and Abel. In any case, the current-day interpretation was reasonably not that of the original writer of Genesis. Of course, a fundie could argue that God gave him the words without him understanding what they meant, similar to how they handle the prophecies purportedly referring to the coming of Jesus spoken by Isaiah et al, but that would be another story.

Christian Identity people, as an aside, apparently think that the snake was an allegory for non-white races seducing Eve so that she committed miscegenation and thus shamed herself and her husband out of paradise.

[Sela]

Is Satan actually ever explicitly mentioned/named in the Bible's Old or New testament? I recall from listening to an eschatology panel once that the Bible has virtually no direct references to hell at all (the closest being something about a city of trash named Gehenna or something like that). Any way this is a case of more of the same - that Satan isn't really brought up in the bible?

[Bakustra]

Is Satan actually ever explicitly mentioned/named in the Bible's Old or New testament? I recall from listening to an eschatology panel once that the Bible has virtually no direct references to hell at all (the closest being something about a city of trash named Gehenna or something like that). Any way this is a case of more of the same - that Satan isn't really brought up in the bible?

Satan is mentioned within the book of Job within the Old Testament. Satan means, in Hebrew, "the adversary." In Job, he is one of the angels, who convinces God to test Job's faith. He does the same in Zechariah with the titular prophet, but God rebukes him. By the New Testament, there are references to Satan being related to demons somehow, as in the quote, "how can Satan cast out Satan?" This suggests that there may have been a shift between the time when Job was written and the time that the Gospels were written, or it could be a nonspecific term, as Jesus refers to Peter as Satan in Matthew 16:23, suggesting that there may not have been a meaning shift after all. Someone like Rye with more knowledge about religious history may know more about how Christianity became more dualistic in nature.

As for Hell, there are three things that make up the Christian idea of hell. Firstly, there is Sheol, which was the Jewish afterlife, where people awaited resurrection, or alternatively the grave. Sheol is similar to the Greek Hades, and indeed was translated as Hades into Greek. Secondly, there is Gehenna, which was the shortened name of a valley outside Jerusalem where people burned their garbage. The Bible claims that children were sacrificed to Moloch here. Jesus uses Gehenna to describe the fiery annihilation of those who reject him, saying that their souls will burn in an unquenchable fire. Finally, there is the lake of fire in Revelation, which is probably intended to be Gehenna, wherein all who rejected Jesus will burn for eternity. I hope this helps.

[Darth Hoth]

Is Satan actually ever explicitly mentioned/named in the Bible's Old or New testament? I recall from listening to an eschatology panel once that the Bible has virtually no direct references to hell at all (the closest being something about a city of trash named Gehenna or something like that). Any way this is a case of more of the same - that Satan isn't really brought up in the bible?

In the Old Testament the eschatology that Christianity adopted was not fully developed. Originally, the Jews did not believe in either a resurrection or a Heaven/Hell - if God rewarded you it was in life, and after death you were simply obliterated (or sent to Sheol, there was some disagreement there). Only the rare mortal was allowed into God's Heaven (Enoch in Genesis and the prophet Elijah in 2 Kings). This is the pretty grim worldview that shaped Ecclesiastes, which was still espoused by the Sadducees in Jesus's time. There was no concept of eternal punishment or reward - you had better do well in life, because you had only that one chance. So if your teacher was talking about the Old Testament, then he would basically be correct. It is only in the late OT writings (e.g., Daniel) that the idea of life after death and God's Judgement is really explored. You can see the idea being developed further in the Apocrypha, and by the New Testament we have it in full swing, with Jesus being the prophesied Son of Man who would judge the Earth.

Similarly, Satan's role greatly expanded with time. Originally, God was believed to be the creator and originator of everything, both good and evil came from him. Over time this changed; it is theorised that this was due to dualistic influences from Persian religion, but in any case, some Jews came to believe that evil could not stem from God. They elaborated on where it would then have come from - there were a number of theories, from free will to fallen angels and finally Satan. There was originally no "archspirit of evil" in Judaism; the figure "Satan" in Job is more accurately rendered from the Hebrew as "the Satan", meaning simply "the accuser [of men]" - "Satan" was a title, not a name, and given to God's loyal angel who prosecuted sinful men before him and tempted them to evil to test their faith. But when re-reading the stories the Jews found in him the figure they needed to explain the problem of evil (somewhat - he was still subject to God, so it was ultimately His fault, but by working through Satan He did not need to dirty His own hands; compare the accounts that 2 Samuel and Chronicles in the Bible, respectively, give of how David was tempted to hold a census). So they expanded on him, and then by the time of Jesus you had the quasi-dualism that Christianity inherited, with the Devil being the king of the unclean spirits and God's arch-enemy. It is taken to the furthest in Revelation, where he is explicitly identified with the Dragon and the Ancient Serpent (connecting him both to the serpent in Eden and Rahab/Leviathan, the ancient chaos monster of the sea that Isaiah prophesied that God would slay on the Day of His Wrath).

I probably made a mess of things above, but I am short on time right now, so I will just trust Rye to correct or clarify what I bumbled when he gets back here.

[Johonebesus]

Snake being Satan is a Christian retcon. From all appearances, it is just a talking snake, one that serves two general narrative purposes. One, it is a "coming of age" desire/rebellion/responsibility/obedience moral tale for human beings; two, it is to explain why snakes don't have legs.

Thirdly it impugns the archetypal serpent, which was typically a symbol of life and rebirth and worshiped accordingly (see the Rod of Asclepius and the Caduceus).

[Darth Paxis]

The way I look at it, Genesis states that the snake is not Satan, instead calling it the craftiest of all the creatures that God created.

Job always amused me, I thought of it as portaying God as a gambling deity, with God showcasing Job as an example of His awesomeness, and then daring Satan to prove Him wrong.

[Darth Hoth]

"Satan" in Job is not Satan as in "Beliar Lucifer Satan teh Prince of Darkness". The Hebrew has a definite article (ha-satan, "the accuser", as opposed to Satan, "Accuser/Adversary"). It describes a title, not a name. Similarly, when Queen Jezebel speaks of gathering "sons of Belial" to bear false witness against Naboth in 1 Kings 21, she means simply evil men, not demon spawn with glowing eyes and pitchforks. (The word belial in Hebrew means approximately "worthless", in the context "men of iniquity" or something thereabouts, and was used in that sense centuries before it became a name for the demonic Satan/Devil figure.)

[Bakustra]

"Satan" in Job is not Satan as in "Beliar Lucifer Satan teh Prince of Darkness". The Hebrew has a definite article (ha-satan, "the accuser", as opposed to Satan, "Accuser/Adversary"). It describes a title, not a name. Similarly, when Queen Jezebel speaks of gathering "sons of Belial" to bear false witness against Naboth in 1 Kings 21, she means simply evil men, not demon spawn with glowing eyes and pitchforks. (The word belial in Hebrew means approximately "worthless", in the context "men of iniquity" or something thereabouts, and was used in that sense centuries before it became a name for the demonic Satan/Devil figure.)

For that matter, even Satan in the Gospels refers to Beelzebub, the Jewish pejorative name for Ba'al, suggesting that Satan, like antichrist, was originally a title/insult that became associated with a singular entity.

[Darth Wong]

Why do people always assume there must be some deep philosophical meaning behind stories made up by a bunch of illiterate Bronze Age goat herders? These peoples' understanding of philosophy was so incredibly limited that they had never even pondered the questions of existence and free will that we routinely imprint onto their stories.

I think Rye is on the right track: it's just a stupid story made up to explain to children why the Israelites lived in a crappy geographical area with water supply problems, and to remind them to obey their elders' instructions. The snake doesn't "represent" anything; he is just there to remind kids to stay away from snakes.

Seriously, there are three (very simplistic) moral lessons in the Garden of Eden story:

1) "When a Lord or Father tells you to do or not do something, don't question it. Just obey."
2) "Everything bad in our lives is our own fault. We brought it upon ourselves by not being good."
3) "Stay away from snakes, kids."

Anybody who thinks there's deep profound meaning in the story is projecting society's pervasive apologist bullshit onto it.

[Elfdart]

Exactly. It's just an older version of Little Red Riding Hood, only with a talking snake instead of a talking wolf.

[Gil Hamilton]

Which is a contradiction because they already had that ability if they could be tempted. The snake even has to persuade eve with a tangle benefit. Knowledge.

I think the most coherent interpretation is an allegory for the generalized fall from grace that every person experiences within their lives. Under fucked up christian dogma anyway.

I'm surprised you don't say the most coherent interpretation is that snakes are even more amazingly awesome than ever and that research should be conducted vis a vie the relative persuasive power of various breeds of serpent.

[Stuart]

I'd be inclined to agree with Mike and Rye on this one. In fact, we can probably reconstruct the original story (with a little poetic license).

Now, once upon a time a little boy and a little girl were playing in a garden. Their daddy came out and told them not to go near the trees because they were dangerous. Then he went away. The children looked at one of the trees and thought the fruit looked nice so the little girl picked some and ate it. It made her very ill. The little boy got help but didn't want to tell anybody she's eaten fruit from the tree so he said she'd been bitten by a snake. Thinking there was a poisonous snake in the garden, their father forbade them to play in there again.

And now children, don't be like those two silly children. Do as your father says. Don't eat any fruit you pick without showing it to your father first. And stay away from snakes, they are very dangerous."

There's no need for any elaborate analysis or interpretation. Just a folk-tale that was intended to teach children and then got written down by people with an agenda.

[Korto]

I wouldn't think a bunch of desert raiders would be that interested in deep philosophy about free will. If the snake originally represented anything, I would bet on it being the god followed by whoever the Jews were butting heads with at the time.

"See how evil they are? They follow the one who got us thrown out of paradise!"

[wautd]

It's silly to think the serpent was satan in disguise. It was merely a snake. Which could talk. And had legs appearantly.

[Khaat]

I always try to place the stories people tell in their mythology in the framework of their actual history (and social changes). The "change of management" in Greek history, for example, lays excellent foundation for their myths: Pythos (cthonic diety of earlier people) is superseded by Apollo at Delphi (but at the cost of his own blood) and they continued to honor the "new" Oracle who continued the old practices.

Cross-pollination of their stories with other cultures' changed the message in Genesis from "listen to your father" to "ETERNAL DAMNATION! THE ADVERSARY!"

Otherwise, the priests got tired of answering that one kid who asked "Why is the snake so special? Did God forget to tell the snake to keep his place when He told Adam and Eve? What did they do with his legs after they took them off?"

[Simon_Jester]

Question:

If you start with a random ancient tribe's equivalent of the Little Red Riding Hood story, then spend the next few thousand years building it up into a creation myth and having hordes of surprisingly well-paid people think it over... does the story still have no more deep meaning then when it was created? Or can it pick up deep meaning over time as people find new ways to interpret it?

Or, short form: Can a story ever contain more depth and significance than its creator intended, or is meaning 'conserved' in that respect?

[Crossroads Inc.]

It's silly to think the serpent was satan in disguise. It was merely a snake. Which could talk. And had legs appearantly.

Which is something I love... I DARE you to find me a painting done by some Christian Artist that shows the garden of Eden scene with a snake that HAS Legs. I have never seen a snake with legs, even though, according to the exact words of the bible, it Has them.