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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
The serpent
A snake that talks, more crafty than any beast. Satan, a chaos creature, or a divine being?
Genesis 3:1-5, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: who or what was the serpent in the garden? The man at the door said he was from the gas company. He might have been a man doing a job, a con artist working alone, or someone sent by someone else. The story gives you what he said and what happened, not who he worked for.
Genesis 3 never calls the serpent evil and never names Satan. The New Testament calls Satan "that ancient serpent." How much of the later identification was in the text from the start?
The serpent is nachash, an ordinary word for snake, and it is called arum, crafty or shrewd, a word that can describe the wise in Proverbs. The same word nachash describes Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1.
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.
Lennox is direct: the key thing about the serpent is not its species but that it represents Satan, "that ancient serpent" of Revelation 12:9 and 20:2. Whether Satan used a literal snake or took an animal form is open; God spoke through Balaam's donkey, and Satan entered Judas. What matters is that evil appears to antedate Adam's sin, and Lennox quotes C. S. Lewis's Problem of Pain in support.
Walton argues an Israelite reader would not have identified the serpent as Satan, since Israel's idea of Satan was far less developed than the New Testament's. He reads it as a chaos creature from the non-ordered realm, amoral and disruptive rather than evil, on the strength of nachash for Leviathan and the dragon of Revelation 12:9. The serpent is the catalyst, not the cause. He notes the serpent's words are closer to "don't think that death is such an immediate threat" than to a flat denial.
Heiser reads the nachash as a divine being. He notes the serpent was a common image for a divine throne guardian and, given Eden as God's residence where his council met, identifies the villain as a divine adversary. The Divine Council Index pairs Genesis 3 with Ezekiel 28. The MacArthur Study Bible holds that Satan, a fallen archangel, possessed the body of a snake. The Divine Council Index has the full council reading.
Lennox's reading imports the New Testament identification and has to say what the first readers understood. Walton's leaves the Old Testament with no ongoing role for the serpent and has to account for how quickly Second Temple and New Testament writers made the identification.
Not a talking-animal fable. Every reading here takes the serpent as more than a snake: a chaos creature, Satan, or a divine rebel.
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- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), proposition 14
- Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015), on Genesis 3
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), note on Genesis 3:1
