Well, I’ll leave Joshua to carry the discussion on that point, since he seems to have a well-developed view on Satan and the serpent.
A very interesting article, George. Certainly, from the point of view of “history of religious thought” and “history of Christian thought” this sort of study is legitimate and valuable. It’s the kind of thing I used to enjoy reading lots of, and still enjoy to some extent. However, it still remains a question how much the author(s) of Genesis had all of these ideas and connections in mind when they set down the Garden story.
Much depends on how one thinks the different parts of Genesis are related. If one thinks that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 have no intrinsic relationship to each other, but are just two distinct creation stories that happen to have been preserved by the scribal tradition, then one doesn’t need to take into account Genesis 1 when reading Genesis 2-3. But if one thinks that the stories, however separate their origins, are in their current form meant to be read together, and shed light on each other, then one has to take seriously that the serpent is one of the beasts of the field that God made. The whole “Satan as fallen angel” theme appears to be completely missing from Genesis 1’s creation story. So based on what we know from Genesis 1, the serpent is a created animal. A bright one, to be sure, but not a supernatural being. Genesis so far has mentioned no “supernatural” beings except for God himself. And indeed, the general tendency of the whole Hebrew Bible is to deny the existence of supernatural beings other than God. Even the angels that appear in Genesis, etc. appear to be temporary beings rather than permanent ones, and in some cases appear to be disguises of God himself. The other gods of the Near East, with perhaps a few exceptions I can’t think of at the moment, are treated as non-existent. The population of the world with supernatural beings, either good or evil, is just not characteristic of Hebraic thought. That’s why the interpretation of the serpent as Satan in disguise is somewhat difficult for a Bible scholar (as opposed to systematic theologian) to handle. The Bible scholar is historically-minded, literary-minded, and philology-minded, and always wants local textual evidence, and doesn’t trust the imputation of ideas from later texts and traditions. The systematic theologian who works within a tradition (especially if it’s Roman Catholic or Orthodox) is less sticky about that.
The Bible Analyst looks for discontinuities… why would a God with so much invested in snakes portray a rival or opponent as a snake at all?
My working assumption is that the Farsi-centric priests who had the ears of Persian sponsors wanted to drive a wedge between the Old-Time snake religion and the New-Time faith that better suited the new era of religious compassion.
If you are speaking strictly about the text of Genesis 3, I think the answer is that we don’t know enough to be sure what’s going on. (I’m speaking with the Bible scholar’s hat on, not the Jewish rabbi’s, the Christian theologian’s, etc.) The text doesn’t tell us why this beast of the field is so smart, or how it can communicate with human beings, or even what its motives are. The only motive we can discern is the immediate one: the serpent is trying to induce Adam and Eve (or Adam, through the influence of Eve) to eat the fruit. Why does the serpent want them to possess knowledge of good and evil? To thwart God’s plans? We aren’t told. And if he does want to thwart God’s plans, why does he want to do that? If he is a creature of God, why would he act against his Creator? We aren’t told.
As for why the text makes the tempter a snake, I think that can be explained for cultural reasons. Snakes in many cultures are regarded as evil, or at least as dangerous; as sneaky, treacherous, with hidden ways and motivations. So if you want to choose an animal to act as a tempter in your story, what animal will you choose? An elephant? Nah. A horse? Nah. A dog? Nah. A hog? Nah. A hen? Nah. Most animals won’t do. It has to be an animal which has an air of evil, or at least of slyness, about it. Maybe a scorpion, maybe a poisonous spider, maybe a black cat (if black cats were thought of as evil in Biblical times, which I don’t know). Maybe a night-bird such as an owl or a black bird such as a raven. Maybe a crocodile (but that is somewhat serpentine in form), or a mythical beast such as a dragon (again somewhat serpentine). But no substitute seems as good as the snake. You need an animal which has a malicious streak in it, and a sneaky streak in it, indeed, which is almost characterized by those things. I can’t think of a better choice from the animal world. Can you?
My point was much less cumbersome. The Persian culture considered snakes particularly nefarious. This was not a random choice… and a cold text critical assessment is that this part of Genesis was inspired by contact with the Persian hegemony.
FYI - - Archaeologists are familiar with the area in Egypt where the Jeremiad exile community lived (for those who recall the Jewish group that fled Babylon’s clutches and took Jeremiah with them). Most interestingly, Persia ruled over Egypt for a time, which eliminated the national border between Egypt and Sinai/Canaan (or between Egypt/Sinai and Canaan).
And it was exactly during this time (circa 525 BCE) that the Jeremiad settlements appear to have become dormant. It was precisely during this time that the Jewish returnees from Persia would have become active in Jerusalem again (between 339 and 520 BCE!) - - see timeline below.
NOTES ON PERSIAN OCCUPATION:
The entire Twenty-seventh Dynasty of Egypt, from 525 BC to 402 BC, save for Petubastis III, was an entirely Persian-ruled period, with the Achaemenid kings being granted the title of pharaoh (123 years).
Egypt fell to the Persians again in 343 BC after the last native Pharaoh, King Nectanebo II, was defeated in battle, which remained in Persian hands a mere 11 years until the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.
You give mountains of historical information in your posts, but it’s often not clear what your thesis is. How about stating it? Are you claiming that the writers of Genesis made the snake a symbol of opposition to God because they were influenced by the cultural assumptions of ancient Persian religion?
If so, you may have a dating problem. Those who try to date Genesis 2-3 have usually dated it fairly early – to a period long before Persian culture would have influenced writers living in Palestine. So unless you are going to give Genesis 2-3 quite a late late, I’m not sure you can make the Persian influence claim stick. (The case is different for the New Testament of course, which was written after Persian influence became prominent. But we are talking about what that serpent is doing in a text that was probably written long before the Persian events you are talking about.)
Yes… from the orthodox and conservative viewpoints, I have the dating problem.
However, on the topic of a 2000+ year old document, discussing a talking snake with legs, who convinced 2 humans to eat magical fruit … I would say it the dating problem is somewhere other than with me.
There is only one culture that was interested in making snakes the “bad guy”!
But I’m confused regarding which culture you think that is.
On the one hand, you seem to be saying that it was the Persian culture of about the 6th century B.C.
On the other hand, you seem to be saying that it was the Israelite culture of the 9th-12th century B.C., the one which produced Genesis 2-3.
And to make matters still more complicated, you refer frequently to comparative mythology and religion, and in the literature of those subjects, we see, if not “snakes”, at least sinuous reptilian creatures, associated with gardens, fruits, etc. and also with evil, in many cultures throughout the world, not just the Persian.
You seem to be shifting back and forth between two very different types of explanation, one historical, i.e, the Biblical writers got the idea of an evil serpent from this particular source, at this particular point in human history, and the other ahistorical, i.e., that the association of serpents with evil is found in a vast number of cultures, and therefore probably is not due to any historical development, but something to do with human religious psychology; humans tend to symbolize certain things by the use of certain created things (certain animals, certain plants, certain minerals, sky, earth, sun, moon, light, darkness, etc.).
Can you clarify? Are you offering a historical explanation, or an ahistorical one, for the story of the serpent in Genesis 2-3?
I believe, like many others, that Genesis is a post-Exilic document. The Table of Nations appears to have a focal year of 560BCE (naming towns that existed then, but not in the Bronze Age while ignoring settlements that were populated in the Bronze Age but were empty by the time of the Exile).
While we know Jerusalem was around even during the Amarna period, the state of Judah doesnt seem to exist until the Assyrians ruin the Northern Kingdom.
Nobody even mentions Yaudi, as city state, until the last/recent half of the 700’s.
To my view, Genesis makes the most sense as the “back story” to Exodus, which in itself was the “back story” of Samuel/Kings.
The four major creation themes lent to Yahweh comes right out of the Babylonian myths for Ea/Enki:
"The Sumerian god Enki played an
important role in:
1] the Creation Myth;
2] the forbidden fruit myth,
3] the confusion of speech myth; and
4] the flood myth,
Below are details on the four elements/myths:
[1st Element - ENKI: Warns of the Flood]
Genesis 6:7 where Yahweh warns Noah of the coming disaster, was based on the archetype flood myth in which the god Enki [=Akkadian “Ea”] warns the flood hero.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the Sumerian Noah sacrificed at the temple of Enki, a story element that was adapted for Genesis 8:20: “Noah built an altar to Yahweh … and offered burnt offerings on the altar.”
[2nd - ENKI: Confusion of Speech]
Likewise the Genesis 11:6-7 story where Yahweh said “let us go down and confuse their language, that they may not understand one antoher’s speech” was adapted from the Golden Age myth: “Enki, the lord … of Eridu, changed the speech in their mouths [bringing] contention into it, into the speech of man that had [previously] been one.”
[3rd - ENKI: Forbidden Fruit]
Likewise the story about eating forbidden fruit in Genesis 2:17, 3:1-19 was adapted from the myth “Enki and Ninhursag”
[Footnote 32: Samuel Noah Kramer, HISTORY BEGINS AT SUMER, third edition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn. Press, 1981), p. 142.
[4th - ENKI: Creation Story
This myth suggests that archivists had already collected several myths about Enki [Ea/Yah] in the Babylonian archives, and these were made available to Judean priests during the exile.
[END OF CLIP FROM BEST’s BOOK]
The final assembly of Genesis may have been post-exilic, but for many years there was a consensus that the Garden story of Genesis 2-3 was a much older document than the “Priestly” creation account of Genesis 1, and hence long antedating the Persian period.
You confuse me further – you do tend to jump around! – when you start talking about Babylonian and Sumerian myth. You are aware, are you not, that the texts we have from Babylon and Sumer are a thousand years and more older than the Persian texts you referred to earlier? So I’m confused. I though you were trying to convince me that the figure of the serpent came from Persia, where snakes were hated. But now you are talking about cultures vastly older than the Persian, and further, cultures for which you haven’t indicated their attitude toward snakes.
Can you get the chronology under control, and then tell me: Are you offering a historical thesis about where the Genesis author got the idea of an evil serpent? And if so, what is that thesis? When and through what channels did the Persian idea of evil serpents reach the Genesis author, and when in your view was the Garden story written down?
The Babylonian priests continued to function throughout the Persian hegemony… and were fluent in not only what the cuneiform said in “Akkadian”, but also what the cuneiform said in Sumerian.
That is why it is such the name of Moses is such an interesting play on words. Sure, the Bible says Moses was named after the Semitic meaning of the word (which is pretty generous for an Egyptian woman to do… when all Egypt is looking to kill little Jewish babies).
But in cuneiform, MS (or MuS), means “snake” and “priest” and even “snake priest” all at the same time. The fact the almighty God makes MuS the master of snakes to prove his power… and the power of his God, is quite a delicious irony, yes? And yet for this word play to work, the Jewish priests would have to know about it, right? By placing the wise men of Judah amongst the wise men of Babylon is the most natural solution to the rather odd problem. This solves the dilemma of Exodus.
But if we are looking for a back story for Exodus… we first have to have the story of Exodus. So the patriarchal narratives are logically best placed after Exodus. Do we see any shred of support for this? Yes, of course we do. And that’s why I listed the 4
Enki /Ea mythologies:
God creates humanity;
God creates forbidden fruit;
God saves humanity from a flood;
God garbles human language.
In a way, these four themes are the most difficult to co-opt without anyone noticing … and yet when someone points to the 4 Jewish versions … perfectly reasonable people start to repeat: “must be a coincidence”.
Could you try a bit harder to be both clear and coherent? It’s hard to tell what your scenario is or what support you’re offering for it. I think you may be trying too hard to be clever, and it’s getting in the way of your message.
Is this question addressed to George Brooks? I don’t see any little arrow icon allowing one to trace it back to the author it’s responding to.
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So let’s get this straight. You are now claiming, not just that the business about the serpent originated in Persian times, but that all the patriarchal narratives (the entire book of Genesis) date from later than the Exodus? And by “Exodus” do you mean the event, or the book of that name? The book might have been written centuries after the event.
There aren’t many Biblical scholars who think the Hebrew text of Genesis 2-3 was written before the event of the Exodus, so if you are saying only that, you are stating the obvious, and it doesn’t teach us much. But if you think the text of Genesis 2-3 was written after the writing of the book of Exodus, you might be saying something informative and important, depending on when you think Exodus was written. So please tell us when you think the event of the Exodus happened, and when you think the book Exodus was written, and when you think the patriarchal narratives were written.
And just to be crystal clear, let us know whether you think all of Genesis was written at roughly the same time, or whether certain parts were added much later. For example, if you think the story of the Garden was written in 1,000 B.C., but the bits about the serpent weren’t added until post-Exilic times, you need to make that clear.
A table-type format might be helpful to express your hypothesis, e.g.:
??? BC: Death of Abraham
??? BC: Death of Jacob
??? BC: Duration of Egyptian period of Israel
??? BC: Date of the Exodus (the event)
??? BC: Date of writing of our current text of Exodus
??? BC: Writing of Chapters ?? – ?? of Genesis
(repeat as necessary)
??? BC: Writing of Serpent entries in Genesis (if they were added to Genesis 2-3 later)
Before we invest this discussion with emotion, this is you and I discussing when we think books of the Bible were written… and it has nothing to do with Genealogical Adam.
I reject the idea that Genesis 2-3 was written before the EVENT of the Exodus.
There wasn’t even a state or tribe of Judah prior to Exodus. The tribes of Exodus are fictionalized… since the settling of the tribes described in Joshua is more or less fictional.
Israel, a nomadic people, does not coalesce into a “state” until the Sea People (including the Pelest) drive them into their highland refuges.
Judah doesn’t appear until a state until Assyria ruins Israel and Israelite refugees flee into the region around Ur-Salem (City of Salem).
Abraham can’t speak to the Philistines until the Philistines arrive on the coast, which is sometime between 1200 BCE and 1130 BCE. By 1130 BCE, the Pelest and the Canaanites have joined forces to drive Egypt out of Canaan… which means driving them out of northern Syria, where Egypt had maintained a frontier almost from the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos. Sadly, the crucial battle of Kadesh (against the Hittites) was only 75 years before the rise of the Sea People. Much ado about nothing I fear.
Since the priestly content of Exodus seems to include lots of Persian elements, I would place the WRITING of Exodus after the Exile… with Genesis being written after Exodus.
The Table of Nations is clearly an iron age document.
In fact, the entire Old Testament is Iron Age… tools and implements are all assumed to be made of Iron… not bronze. And Egypt is considered to be an Iron Furnace… but iron furnaces were not generally known until after the rise of the sea people made bronze production impossible.
I have not indicated any emotion. I have asked for clarification of what you are claiming. And I’m not the only one, it seems. John Harshman can’t follow what you are saying, either.
Actually, it was supposed to be about your claim that the idea of the serpent was of Persian origin. If the age of the books of the Bible came into it, that was a side-effect produced by your way of handling the subject, not something I wanted to discuss.
Obviously true, since I am the one who started this topic (did you remember that?), and I was never at any point talking about Genealogical Adam. I was talking about the identification of the serpent in Genesis 3.
Good, but as I said in my previous response, that is taken for granted by most Bible scholars, and isn’t very informative.
Of all of Exodus, or only parts of it?
Can you cite me some first-rank mainstream Biblical scholars (i.e., the kind of people who teach at places like Tubingen, Columbia, Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Toronto, etc.) who share your view about the Persian elements in Exodus, and about the late dating of Exodus?
Eventually, perhaps, you will come back to my original question, and answer it directly:
Is your thesis that the appearance of the serpent in the Garden story in Genesis 2-3 is a direct product of Persian influence on the thought of the Israelite writers?
And if you hold that view, how do you square it with the fact that most Bible scholars believe that Genesis 2-3 was written long before the era of Persian influence?
I made one statement about emotional investment… and you go on this long discourse about it. Goodness, Eddie, it was a simple statement. Dont let your keyboard carry you away.
You dont think there are any Bible scholars who hold to Genesis being post-exilic?
I am a Minimalist as these scholars are considered:
at the University of Copenhagen,
And Philip R. Davies.
What long discourse? The only thing I said in response to your “emotional” comment was:
After that I dropped the topic of “emotional” completely, and went on to other points.
I repeat my question, which you still have not directly and clearly answered:
Will you answer this question?
I don’t know of any Biblical scholars – at least, any widely respected in the academic world – who believe that all of the current text of Genesis was written after the Exile. It’s of course an old view that the “P” account in Genesis 1 was post-Exilic or written at roughly the time of the Exile, and if that view is accepted, then other parts of Genesis attributed to “P” could be of the same vintage. (I refer to the P source as if it corresponds to anything that ever really existed, for the sake of argument, implying neither endorsement nor rejection.) But accepting P as post-Exilic would not help your case, because the Garden story is supposedly from JE, which has long been regarded as much older. So standard source theory runs against what you seem to be saying. Are you not familiar with the typical datings of the J, E, and P sources?
I see from your references that “minimalist” is a new term since my day, but the rough ideas held by the minimalists don’t appear to be new: the Bible can’t be trusted as history, it is a religiously motivated fictional history, etc.
Do you have any specific statements from any of your authors that the serpent of Genesis 2-3 was added to the Biblical narrative of the Fall during the Persian period? Can you cite the works and page numbers?