The Good and Evil Serpent (7 page)

The author of the
Epistle of Barnabas
, perhaps composed a little earlier than Justin Martyr’s work, explains away the problem. Moses, following God’s word, commanded Israel not to make an image to worship, yet “makes one himself to show a type of Jesus.”
⁵⁹

How did ancient Jews justify making images if they had been prohibited by God from crafting them? In light of the vast amount of iconographic images now available from Second Temple Judaism, it is wise to ponder how Jews—and even Israelites before the Exile—interpreted the second commandment. Perhaps some Jews began to understand the second commandment not as anti-iconic (a prohibition against making an image) but anti-idolic (a prohibition against making an image as an idol).
⁶⁰
That is, the command was not one long prohibition; it consisted of two parts. Those who obeyed God’s commandments could make images (whether sculptures or paintings), but they must not worship them.
⁶¹
Hence, according to this reasoning, God does not break God’s commandment. God instructs Moses to make an image, but God never intended anyone to “bow down” to it “or serve” it. Rather, in looking up to the serpent on a stake, the Israelites were affirming their dependence on God.

Figure 4
. A Demon with a Phallic Serpent in an Early Church, Northern Spain. Before fourth century CE. JHC

THE PRESUPPOSITION THAT THE SERPENT DENOTES ONLY EVIL OR SATAN

An Unexamined Presupposition

The commentators on the Fourth Gospel tend to assume—without investigation—that the “serpent” is only a pejorative symbol. This point is illustrated by a comment found in D. Simpson’s
Judas Iscariot: The Man of Mystery, History, and Prophecy.
⁶²
His exegesis of Genesis 3:15, where God curses the serpent, and of John 13:21, which narrates the entry of Satan into Judas, is typical of popular exegesis: “By the possession, Judas becomes the seed of the serpent, Satan, the son of perdition; at all events, he is then revealed as such by our Lord Himself” (p. 48).

What can be dismissed as emotionalism or uninformed exegesis appears pervasively in scholarly works. Those who assume that the snake is always a negative symbol can mine the biblical text to prove their point. According to Leviticus 11:41–43, the serpent cannot be eaten because it is an abomination and would make one unclean.

The Apocrypha also may be mined—which is not acceptable methodology—to prove that the snake is evil. The author of the Wisdom of Solomon seems to be alluding to Numbers 21 when he refers to God’s wrath that was meted out by “the stings of crooked snakes” (Wis 16:5). According to the second-century Jewish scholar Sirach, the snake is evil. He instructs his “son” to flee from sin as “from the face of a snake” (Sir 21:2). Later, he warns that as there is no wrath greater than the wrath of an enemy, so there is “no head above the head of a snake” (Sir 25:15). According to the author of 4 Maccabees 18:8, who is roughly contemporaneous with the Fourth Evangelist, the righteous mother of the seven sons reports that “the destructive, deceitful snake (
)” did not spoil her virginity. This verse is surely an example of the snake as a pejorative symbol of the phallus.

The authors of publications on the history of evil or on Satan customarily do not ask if the serpent can signify positive as well as negative concepts; they presuppose that the serpent is a symbol of evil and denotes Satan. Note these examples (in chronological order):

…. the serpent, of old the “seer,” was, in its Semitic adaptation, the tempter to forbidden knowledge. Satan played this part to our ancestors in the Garden of Eden. [Rudwin, 1931]
⁶³
Both the Hebrew and the Persian Devil are associated with the serpent. [Russell, 1977]
⁶⁴
Justin Martyr “established the connection between the Devil and the serpent of Eden forever after.” [Russell, 1988]
⁶⁵
Next, the angel-dragon-beast was linked with “that serpent of old” responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve from Eden. [Turner, 1993]
⁶⁶
Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial … [is] the serpent who tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden. [Stanford, 1996]
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There are often many brilliant and significant ideas in these books, yet a search for the various meanings of serpent symbolism is not one of them;
⁶⁸
this is essential if one is to talk about the literature in which the serpent is mentioned. Evil appears iconographically as the snake in many interpretations of Genesis, as Naga who is the chief among Krishna’s enemies, as the snakes that torment Laocoon and Hercules, and as the snake-worm that kills Sigmund, the Nordic hero.
⁶⁹
Questions should guide the scholar and the nonscholar, as in G. Messadie’s
The History of the Devil
, “Yet we must wonder if it was really our Devil who in the guise of the ‘subtle serpent’ of Genesis told Eve that she and Adam would never die if they ate the fruit from ‘the tree in the midst of the garden.’ “
⁷⁰
In fact, the author or compiler of Genesis 3 does not envision the serpent as Satan, and that equation does not appear in the Old Testament.
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It must not be assumed that the serpent represents only, or primarily, evil or Satan in antiquity or modernity; moreover, Satan appears in Christian literature as every animal that had been represented by “pagans” as a god (ape, bat, bear, bee, bull, cat, crocodile, eagle, even fish).
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According to Tyndale’s vision, Satan appeared “blacker than a crow.”
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And one should recall Ben Jonson’s comedy called
The Devil Is an Ass
.

Negative symbolic use of the snake is too well known or presumed to need much further illustration. In the New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the examples are numerous. One example alone must suffice. In the “Hymn of the Pearl,” we find this confession by “the snake” or Satan in the
Acts of Thomas:
“I am a reptile of reptile nature … I am he who hurled the angels down from above … I am he who kindled Judas and bribed him to betray Christ to death”
(AcThom
109:31). As we all know, the issue is not whether the serpent could mean something negative. The question is: What did the serpent symbolize, and did it often represent something positive?

The Ambiguity of Genesis 3

In Genesis 3 the “serpent” appears in a role that often is assumed by critics today to represent Satan and evil. A thoughtful reading of the text, however, prohibits one from categorizing this creation as “evil.” The animal has been created by God and is not dumb.

What does the serpent inform the woman (Eve)? It is that she, the mother of all life, will have knowledge of good and evil if she eats from the tree in the middle of the garden (Gen 3:5). The woman and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, and God confirms the insight of “the serpent” by stating: “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22 [NRSV]). Thus, knowledge, which is certainly desirable—according to the biblical view expressed especially in Proverbs—is what results first from eating the forbidden fruit. Did the serpent not speak the truth? Was this not consequently confirmed by God? What is the meaning of Genesis 3:1? Is the serpent deceitfully clever or cleverly wise? Rather than assuming that the serpent is evil, we need to examine what seems to be a confusing portrayal of the serpent in Genesis 3.

The presentation of the Genesis serpent as Satan and evil has rightly been resisted by many authors from antiquity (see the following discussion of
ApMos)
to modernity. For example, Lord Byron (1788–1824), the Romantic poet whose compositions are frequently autobiographical, wrote in “Cain: A Mystery” about the characteristics of the serpent. The drama is based on an imaginative exegesis of Genesis 3:1 that is parallel in startling ways to many legends that had developed among the early Jews. Lord Byron said Lucifer did not tempt Eve “in the shape of a serpent.” Byron read Genesis 3 carefully. He correctly pointed out in his preface to “Cain” that “the book of Genesis has not the most distant allusion to anything of the kind, but merely to the Serpent in his serpentine capacity.”
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By attending so carefully to the biblical narrative and not being persuaded by what a scholar had published, Byron discloses that he would have been a fine biblical exegete.

In Byron’s drama, Lucifer—the “Master of Spirits”—appears to Cain as a serpent, denies that he ever tempted Adam and Eve, and stresses that the serpent who appeared to them in the Garden of Eden, before the fall, was neither a spirit nor a demon. Note Scene I:

The snake
was
the snake—
No more; and yet not less than those he tempted,
In nature being earth also—
more
in
wisdom
,
Since he could overcome them, and foreknow
The knowledge fatal to their narrow joys.
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Here in this drama is an imaginative recreation of human origins, according to the Bible, with often brilliant attention to the details of Genesis 3. Lord Byron removes from the serpent the condemning cloak of evil. The portrayal of the serpent in Genesis 3 as wise and clever—and not Satanic—appears in many other compositions that antedate or are roughly contemporaneous with the composition of the Fourth Gospel. It is no longer prudent to assume that the serpent is evil in Genesis. Likewise, we dare not fail to heed the full symbolic thrust of the Fourth Gospel in 3:14–15. Calvin, a genius in interpreting Scripture, may provide some insights.

OVERCOMING THEOLOGICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS: CALVIN AND JESUS THE SERPENT

Calvin (1509–1564) does indeed make the equation clear between Jesus and the serpent. We should expect Calvin to grasp the symbolism of John 3:14, since he was a focused, logical, and systematic thinker; he also mastered both Greek and Latin grammar. His commentary on the Fourth Gospel was completed in 1552, three years before he controlled Geneva. The second edition of his commentary appeared in that year, 1555. Although Calvin is more interested in engaging exposition (preaching the gospel to his followers) than historical exegesis (exploring the original meaning intended by the Evangelist), he does state clearly that in 3:14 “Christ compares Himself to the serpent.”
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Moreover, for Calvin the “similitude is not inappropriate or far-fetched” (p. 72). He shuns the idea regnant among ancient and especially modern commentators that the comparison is to Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross; for him, the verb refers to “the preaching of the Gospel” (p. 72). He is adamant: “The explanation which some give of it as referring to the cross does not agree with the context and is foreign to His [the Evangelist’s] argument” (p. 72).

What does Calvin think the Evangelist meant by comparing Christ to the serpent? He provides two logical options: a resemblance between Christ and the serpent or a sacrament like manna. Calvin is clear that it is the latter, although his language is opaque. He intends, with Paul who referred to the manna as a mystery (1 Cor 10:3), to think of the serpent in the same way. Here Calvin has substituted one simile (the serpent and Christ) with another (the manna and the serpent). His words, “I think it was the same with the serpent” (p. 73), are far from lucid.

Calvin does not include any mention of the positive portrayal of the serpent nor does he suggest that the serpent symbolizes life, healing, wisdom, or resurrection. Nevertheless, Calvin correctly perceives that the Fourth Evangelist presented Christ comparing himself “to the serpent” (p. 73). These preliminary observations disclose that it is imperative and fruitful to explore what the “serpent” symbolizes in the Fourth Gospel and what ophidian symbology the Fourth Evangelist might inherit. How shall we continue?