What do we know about the serpent in the garden?
I have always wondered about the serpent in the garden because of the many questions it seems to leave unanswered. Any honest reader would find it strange that a snake would talk. That does not mean we can’t believe it happened, but it is not something we experience. The bigger question for me is about the curse of crawling on its belly. You have to wonder if snakes had legs, and then God recreated them to lose their legs and make them crawl. That would be a recreation of snakes. But then I noticed that it speaks about a specific serpent, not serpents in general.
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
Genesis 3:1
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:.
Genesis 3:14
Then, there is the protoevangelium, promising to crush the serpent’s head. Is it for all snakes to have their heads crushed? If we did not have some previous belief the Bible was true, this story would be hard to believe or understand. However, I hope my readers trust the Bible and desire to understand these difficult passages.
I needed to find answers.
For years, I have wondered about the serpent and read people mocking the talking snake so many times. I had no answer, but that did not keep me from believing. As I was writing my book on Genesis, I knew I had to deal with this topic, and I spent time in prayer asking God for wisdom. Then the answer came, at least for me, and I want to share that with you.
First, to reach my conclusion, we need to understand the setting. Moses was writing about the garden incident about 2500 years later. So, whatever this serpent was, it existed for many years before Genesis was written. We know that if it wasn’t Satan himself, he was at least behind it, and therefore, Satan must have been deceiving humans all along. So the question is, how did Satan manifest himself to the world before the Bible was written?
Can we find Satan in history?
Since the Hebrews had been living in Egypt for four hundred years before Moses led them away, they must have come in contact with satanic influence there. That is where I think it gets interesting. One day, I read something that stated that snakes were worshipped in Egypt. So, after a quick search, I found out about Nehebkau; according to Wikipedia, Nehebkau was originally considered evil.
“Nehebkau first appears in the Pyramid Texts,[1] and he is described as an evil, long and winding serpent who devoured human souls in the afterlife.”1
What is also interesting is that Nehebkau was a serpent with legs!
The Hebrew word satan means adversary and is not always used as a proper name, though sometimes translated that way. I heard Michael Heiser speak about how satan is often used with the Hebrew article ha (the). That, for example, is what we find in Job 1:6. So in Hebrew, it is, “and the satan (the adversary) came also among them.” Dr Heiser points out that, as in English, you don’t have a definite article before a proper name. Would we say to our friend Brian, the Brian! My point is satan was not a proper name until much later, and at this point, the Hebrews could have known him as Nehebkau.
What is meant by the curse?
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:
Genesis 3:14
The curse makes a little more sense with the knowledge that Nehebkau had legs. But there still needs to be more clarity because are we to believe that Satan now crawls on the ground and eats dust? We can ask the question, is this a symbolic curse? Not that it isn’t meant to be true. It is how it will come to pass. Throughout history, we have made symbolic curses. A similar modern version of this would be when someone tells another they will beat them in a race; they symbolically say, “eat my dust.”
Can that be substantiated from the Bible? Well yes!
They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him;
And his enemies shall lick the dust.Psalm 72:9
And kings shall be thy nursing fathers,
And their queens thy nursing mothers:
They shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth,
And lick up the dust of thy feet;
And thou shalt know that I am the Lord:
For they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.Isaiah 49:23
They shall lick the dust like a serpent,
They shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth:
They shall be afraid of the Lord our God,
And shall fear because of thee.Micah 7:17
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
The second part of the curse is also symbolic and needs little explanation.Isaiah 14:12
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Genesis 3:15
We know it is symbolic because Paul uses it that way.
And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.
Romans 16:20
So the curse and promise are that Jesus and His church will be victorious over the adversary.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that the Hebrews understood that there was a being described as being like a snake and having legs. That should not come as a surprise because we have another illustrative description of Satan in the Bible.
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. 4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Revelation 12:3–4
Moses used that description of Satan to tell us about what happened in the garden. He was cursed when Nehebkau deceived the couple to eat from the forbidden tree. The curse was for him to be made so low that, metaphorically, he would crawl in the dust of the earth. Because he would be cast down, it would be easy for the victor to crush his head to give a death blow and victory.
It seems obvious that Genesis is not a fairytale or, as some would say, a myth. Sure, they described things differently than we would today, and that might be because they were more keenly aware of the spiritual world than our modern minds would allow. Nevertheless, we understand that there has been a battle with Satan from the beginning of creation, and it will continue until his head is crushed. Remember what Paul said to the church, and we need to be doing it.
And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.
Romans 16:20
1 Nehebkau. (2024, July 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehebkau