The Good and Evil Serpent (51 page)

The Cincinnati Art Museum has a nude figure of a man with two fish hanging from a neck ring that fits below his beard. His arms are bound by four snakes that come from behind him. Two snakes curl to face his beard, and the heads of two more appear above his waist. A. Perrot was convinced that the piece was genuine and stolen from the excavations at Tello.
¹¹⁴
The meaning of this image is far from clear, but since the man is bound by the serpents, they may symbolize the animal that is unfriendly.
¹¹⁵

According to Japanese myths, the wild god, Susanoh, was exiled from heaven. On “Izumo” he learned that every year a serpent with eight heads devoured a girl from the village. Surely, many Japanese imagined the serpent as even worse than the Friendless One.

According to Josephus, the serpent in the Garden of Eden showed “an envious disposition” and a “malicious intention.” God thus deprived him of speech and made him an enemy to humans
(Ant
. 1.1.4). Josephus thinks that the serpent has a cruel mind
(Ant
. 17.5.5). Most of the rabbinic references to the serpent are negative; for example: “No one can live with a serpent in the same basket”
(m. Ketubot
72a). As we saw when reviewing the physiological characteristics of a snake, the snake cannot become a friend of the human; there is no possibility of developing a trustworthy relationship, as humans habitually do with dogs, horses, and some cats.

The snake as the Friendless One is adumbrated in God’s cursing the serpent at the end of Genesis 3. It is found in Aesop’s fable of “A Countryman and a Snake”:

There was a
Snake
that Bedded himself under the Threshold of a Country-House: A
Child
of the Family happen’d to set his Foot upon’t; The
Snake
bit him, and he Dy’d on’t. The
Father
of the
Child
made a Blow at the
Snake
, but Miss’d his Aim, and only left a Mark behind him upon the Stone where he Struck. The
Countryman
Offer’d the
Snake
, some time after
This
, to be Friends again. No, says the
Snake
, so long as you have this Flaw upon the Stone in Your Eye, and the Death of the
Child
in your Thought, there’s No Trusting of ye.
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The serpent as the Friendless One often appears in the other fifteen negative symbolic meanings of ophidian iconography and symbology.

Battler (or Enemy)

The snake has horrifyingly deadly venom (cf. 2.20). Its ability to conquer larger foes is evident (cf. 2.9)—a king cobra can kill a large elephant with one bite. These facts lie behind the serpent as symbolizing the Battler or Enemy.

In the Akkadian
Enuma Elish
, we learn about the serpent as the great warrior or battler at creation.
¹¹⁷
Gods are depicted slaying serpent-dragons (
Fig. 8
). God’s malediction to the snake in the Garden of Eden, which was never rescinded, proclaims the snake in many Jewish and Christian symbols and texts as “l’ennemi insidieux et irréconciliable.”
¹¹⁸
The
Hymn of the Pearl
, written sometime between the second and fourth centuries
CE
, describes the search of a young man for the priceless pearl. The youth discovers that the pearl is in the depths of the sea surrounded by a serpent; he must battle against this opponent.

A vast amount of art as well as serpent iconography depicts Michael slaying the dragon, the one whom the gods and angels must confront in battle. Amulets and texts are extant in which one calls on God for protection against enemies, like the snake.
¹¹⁹
Coptic and Arabic art abound with illustrations of the serpent as the symbol of hostile power.
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Constantine developed the symbol of the serpent so that he, the Emperor, would be seen as the one who had slain the dragon or serpent with the lance
(La-barum)
.
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Medals were circulated to announce the new symbolic meaning of the serpent, and Eusebius heralded the proclamation in his
Vita Constantin
3.3. A considerable amount of early Christian art depicts the serpent or dragon as the enemy defeated by Christ; sometimes the snake appears at the foot of the cross.
¹²²

God’s Antagonist

The deafness of the snake (cf. 2.2) helped make it a symbol of one who could not hear God’s word and was thus rebellious and disobedient to God. Succinctly put, the serpent was God’s antagonist. Although powerful now in this age, it will be judged in the coming age. Many murals in churches feature this judgment, including the modern mural in the monastery of the Greek Orthodox Church in Capernaum.

The leading word for “snake” in Assyrian is
seru
¹²³
or
serru(m)
,
¹²⁴
which is very similar, and perhaps cognate, to
serru
. The latter noun denotes not only a door-pivot that is an entryway for “demons,” but also “enemy” or “adversary.” The worship of the serpent was an aspect of the Canaanite cult at Timna
^c
(
Fig. 22
), Beth Shan, Hazor (
Fig. 21
), and elsewhere (
Figs. 29
-
33
). While the snake often denoted to the Israelites, in contrast, the antagonist of God, it is clear that at biblical Dan the snake house, which was probably modeled after a temple, and the three
pithoi
(large vessels) with serpent decorations from the time of Jeroboam I, found only in the sanctuary area, indicate the importance of snakes to the cult at Dan.
¹²⁵

In Euripides’
Ion
, the son of Zeus, during the
gigantomachia
(battle of the gods with the Giants), slays Zeus’ adversary. The latter is the snake of Lerna
.
¹²⁶
According to Pseudo-Apollodorus’
Library
, Periclymenus turned himself into various forms, including a snake (
), but he was eventually slain by Hercules (I.9.9).
¹²⁷

Recognizing that Canaan provided much of the iconography and sym-bology for ancient Israel, F. Hvidberg concluded that, according to Genesis 3, the serpent brought death and not life. He was the deceiver who is not synonymous with Satan but with Baal, Yahweh’s old adversary.
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Devil

The snake is perceived to be slimy. He is not warm and fluffy like a puppy (cf. 2.25); thus, the apparently disgusting feel and behavior of the serpent (e.g., swallowing another animal whole and sometimes while it is still alive) caused the creature to become a symbol of the Devil. The snake’s elusiveness (cf. 2.6), deafness (cf. 2.2), and fearlessness (cf. 2.15), as well as its cold-bloodedness (cf. 2.12), made him an ideal symbol for the Devil, Satan.
¹²⁹

In Second Temple Judaism, the serpent is most often identified with the Devil or equated with the Devil, Satan. In the first-century
CE
Lives of the Prophets
, Habakkuk is reputed to have forewarned the faithful that they will be pursued “by the serpent in darkness as from the beginning.”
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Sometime at the end of the first century
CE
, the author of the
Vita Adae et Evae
presented an expansion or Midrash on Genesis. In his retelling the story of the Fall, the serpent is replaced by the Devil, the adversary. Hear the words placed in the mouth of Adam: “The Lord God appointed two angels to guard us. The hour came when the angels ascended to worship in the presence of God. Immediately the adversary, the devil, found opportunity while the angels were away and deceived your mother so that she ate of the illicit and forbidden tree. And she ate and gave to me.”
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In the Greek recension of this Pseudepigraphon, the serpent is not the Devil. They become one in the dastardly act of Genesis 3. Note the following excerpt:

And the devil spoke to the serpent, saying “Rise and come to me, and I will tell you something to your advantage.” Then the serpent came to him, and the devil said to him, “I hear that you are wiser than all the beasts; so I came to observe you. I found you greater than all the beasts, and they associate with you; but you are prostrate to the very least. Why do you eat of the weeds of Adam and not of the fruit of Paradise? Rise and come let us make him to be cast out of Paradise through his wife, just as we were cast out through him.” The serpent said to him, “I fear lest the LORD be wrathful to me.” The devil said to him, “Do not fear; only become my vessel, and I will speak a word through your mouth by which you will be able to deceive him.”
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The author is more interested in expanding and obtaining moral lessons from Genesis 3 than in understanding it (as we shall see);
¹³³
he does not grasp that the serpent in the beginning had feet and did not have to eat “weeds” or dust. He does, however, portray the serpent as the vessel into which the Devil entered. The serpent and the Devil are then one and the same.

In the New Testament, two authors equate, indirectly or directly, the serpent with the Devil. Luke associates Satan and the serpent. Alone among the Evangelists, he has Jesus state to the Seventy when they return joyful: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents” (Lk 10:18–19). Within the New Testament clearly, and within Early Judaism (300
BCE
-200
CE
) probably, the clearest equation of the dragon, the serpent, the Devil, and Satan is in Revelation 12:9. The passage is thus singularly important to warrant a full citation: “And he was cast down—the great dragon, the ancient serpent, the one called Devil and the Satan, the one deceiving the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels with him were cast down.” Sadly missed in modern translations is the intricately crafted
inclusio:
“He was cast down,” “they were cast down.” The completed action of the thrice-used Aorist passive is also impressive. Yet no translator could miss the equation: The dragon is the serpent; he is the Devil, the Deceiver, and Satan. Later, the author of Revelation sees another vision in which an angel, holding a key and a great chain, seizes the dragon, that ancient serpent, the Devil and Satan, and binds him within the bottomless pit for a thousand years (20:1–3). The equation is so clear,
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graphic, and pictorial that it has influenced almost all biblical scholars,
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who—without hesitation—have told me for six years that I was wasting my time because the serpent is simply Satan. A symbol clearly defined, and in a canonical book that completes a perceived climax to revelatory literature, should not determine how the selfsame symbol was understood by others.

In the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament, Satan appears as a snake. Only two examples must suffice. According to the
Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior
16, Satan takes the form of a serpent. According to the
First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ
23, Satan appears as a dragon.