Footnotes

1.

See Susan Greiner, “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” BR, August 1999.

2.

For more examples of this subject in Eastern and Western art, see Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, “The Harrowing of Hell,” BR, June 2003.

Endnotes

1.

Other ancient Near Eastern stories also cast the serpent in the role of trickster. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, after Gilgamesh has obtained the plant that gives eternal life, the serpent steals it from him, and Gilgamesh is left weeping over his lost immortality.

2.

Some of these texts are available in English in R.H. Charlesworth, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, vol. 2, The Pseudepigrapha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 123–154. The stories may also be found, with some discussion, on http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:80/anderson/archive.html.

3.

Translated by Charles, in Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, p. 136.

4.

Variant A translated by Michael E. Stone, in Adam’s Contract with Satan (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2002), p. 27.

5.

Stone, Contract, p. 33.

6.

Stone, Contract, p. 38.

7.

Stone, Contract, pp. 38–39. (The brackets indicate Stone’s emendation to a somewhat convoluted Russian text.)

8.

Stone, Contract, p. 44.

9.

Tertullian, De pudicitia 19.19-20.

10.

Stone, Contract, p. 104.

11.

Quoted in Stone, Contract, p. 105.

12.

Stone, Contract, p. 114.

13.

Stone, Contract, p. 116.