By John Day
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies
Lady Margaret Hall
Oxford University
April 2015
For Adam and Eve the serpent in the Garden of Eden represented the voice of temptation but it needs to be noted that for the original writer, the Yahwist (or J) source, the serpent was not equated with Satan (the Devil). The concept of Satan developed only later (first attested as a personal name c. 300 B.C.E. in 1 Chron 21:1
[1]), and we find him first equated with the Eden serpent in the apocryphal book of Wisdom (Wis 2:24, “but through the Devil’s envy death entered the world”
[2]). We may compare Rev 12:9, 20:2, where we read of “that ancient serpent, who is [called] the Devil and Satan”. Less well known is the fact that the serpent is equated in 1 Enoch 69:6 with Gader’el, one of the wicked angels who descended from heaven to have sex with women on the earth (elaborating the story in Gen 6:1-4). Genesis 3:1, however, refers to the Eden serpent as one of Yahweh’s earthly creatures, a “beast of the field”. It is certainly the case that it is the ancestor of later ordinary serpents known to humanity (cf. Gen 3:14-15), but in its original pre-cursed state the serpent not only has the capacity to speak but also to have supernormal knowledge, which makes it more than an ordinary serpent at that point, a kind of magical animal
