From Seraph to Satan

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How should we picture the wily serpent of the Garden of Eden?

He’s often regarded as the Devil in snake’s clothes. Yet, much to many people’s surprise, there is no Devil in Eden or, for that matter, anywhere in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, the serpent of Eden is just called nahash, or serpent; he’s never referred to as the Devil or Satan.

The figure called Satan in the Book of Job is not a character bearing this name but a heavenly official with the title Satan, meaning “Prosecutor.” (The Hebrew term derives from the verb “to accuse.”) According to the Book of Job, the Prosecutor roams “to and fro on the earth” and takes his place among the other “sons of God” (bene elohim); his job is to report on earthly doings to the heavenly court (Job 1:6–7). In fact, the first biblical figure to bear the title satan is none other than King David (1 Samuel 29:4: “he may become an adversary [satan] to us in battle”).¹

A fully realized dualist concept of Satan as we know him—a Prince of Darkness, the embodiment of cosmic Evil perpetually at war with the Good of God, first appears in the second- or first-century B.C.E. writings of the Dead Sea Scroll community, which generally refers to him as Belial.

It is not until the first century C.E., in the Jewish Apocalypse of Moses and the Jewish-Christian (New Testament) Book of Revelation (Revelation 12:9, 20:2), that the serpent of Genesis is identified explicitly with the Devil.² Some extrabiblical traditions even suggest that Eve bore Cain after a serpentine sexual seduction.³ Another peculiar consequence of this connection between the Devil and the serpent features regularly in medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Genesis story where (as you can see from the painting) the serpent-Devil is a woman! This is no lesbian serpent-girl on the make for Eve; rather she derives from the medieval Jewish-Christian Lilith tradition, which tried to reconcile the two accounts of the creation of woman in Genesis 1 and 2. According to this legend, the woman created in Genesis 1:27 was Lilith, Adam’s first, rebellious wife; after Lilith left Adam, Eve was produced from his rib, as recounted in Genesis 2:21–22. Jealous, Lilith, with the help of the devil, shape-shifted into a serpent (albeit with her seductive face and hair intact and indistinguishable from Eve’s). She then returned to Eden to wreak her vengeance upon the new couple.^a

While the Lilith of art might seem a far cry from what the biblical writers had in mind when they cast the snake as the snare in the Garden, Lilith’s combination of human and animal form constitutes a remarkable echo of what the original writers probably did visualize. For an idea of what the “original” snake looked like, we can turn to the work of Othmar Keel and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg in Germany, who have been analyzing the remarkable array of images with which biblical Israelites chose to decorate their seals.⁴ Among the motifs was an Egyptian-style two- or four-winged Uraeus (rearing cobra) that appears on seals bearing the names of a royal prince, a Yahweh priest (pictured here), and other prominent Judeans and Israelites. Keel 046identifies these images with the winged singing seraphim of Isaiah 6:2–7. He notes that the poisonous snakes with which God attacked the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness (Numbers 21:6–9) are described as seraphim (the root means “burning”) and that the divinely mandated antivenom was a snake/seraph that Moses cast and set on a pole for the stricken Israelites to gaze at and be healed. According to 2 Kings 18:4, the Israelites worshiped Moses’ bronze seraph, which they called Nehushtan (a play on the words for “snake” and for “bronze”), until King Hezekiah’s reform did away with it. The seal images provide a visual record of this link in Israelite religious tradition between Yahweh and supernatural snakes—that is, seraphim.

Still, why would the snake in Eden have wings? Like Lilith the serpent girl, the seraphim were hybrid creatures, a combination of snake and bird. In the Bible, Yahweh is regularly associated with another, more familiar hybrid, the winged cherub (plural, cherubim) or sphinx. Across the ancient Near East, hybrid animals functioned as divine guardians. Images of such hybrids were regularly situated at thresholds, especially at temple thresholds where earth and heaven were believed to intersect. Such places, where it was impossible to tell where earth ended and heaven began, were believed to be highly charged and dangerous; hybrids, whose individual component parts belonged to the real world but in combination became supernatural, expressed this same ambiguity. Hence the cherubim motif was repeated on the Jerusalem Temple’s doors, walls and curtains (for example, see 1 Kings 6:29), and two giant gold-covered cherubim stood over and protected the Ark of the Covenant (1 Kings 6:23–28). If we turn to the Garden of Eden, another space where earth is heaven and heaven earth, we find cherubim right where we might expect them, guarding the way to the Tree of Life: “At the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the Tree of Life” (Genesis 3:24). The snake may have been posted at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil whose fruit, according to the snake, would take Adam and Eve across the threshold that separated “living beings” from the gods. Yahweh’s curse is most appropriate: The snake must slither upon his belly. Apparently he has lost his wings. No longer winged or celestial, the snake is lower than all the other mere creatures of the earth and is condemned to a diet of dust.

How should we picture the wily serpent of the Garden of Eden?