This manuscript appears in

The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the

World, Eds. Scorgie, G., Strauss, M., Voth, S. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
2003)

THAT FABULOUS TALKING SNAKE

by
Ronald A. Veenker

Let me first comment on the intentional redundancy in the title of this address.1 I am

using the word fabulous literally, that is, pertaining to a fable. Any story about a talking

snake is, of course, a fable. I have spent much of the last thirty years pouring over the

texts of the early chapters of Genesis seeking to understand them better in terms of their

ancient Near Eastern analogs.2 But in this study, I want to look at the Garden of Eden

story from the standpoint of its context within the traditions of the Hebrew Bible and set

aside Near Eastern connections for a moment.

The opening chapters of the book of Genesis contain the first attempt at a

monotheistic creation story. Therefore, in these two stories, we encounter but one

powerful deity creating this and creating that without violent conflicts with other cosmic

beings in order to use their body parts for the construction of the cosmos. In other words,

when compared with the Mesopotamian creation traditions, it’s a bit dull. In the biblical

story there is no suggestion of the darker side of the universe — only a benign sovereign

bringing order out of chaos, filling the world with living creatures who are to be governed

by human beings, the pièce de résistance of this solitary deity. What a contrast to the

mythopoeic intrigues and murders of Enuma Elish. Our narrators have created a kind of

nice, squeaky clean Walt Disney world and, in so doing, have invented, perhaps

unintentionally, the “Problem of Evil”: That is to say, if Yahweh is benign and, at the
same time, sovereign in the universe, just where does evil come from? It’s striking that

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immediately following the first monotheistic creation story, the author moves directly to

work out the problem of evil. All of us know just how complex the Garden Story is; how

many layers and levels of meaning it contains from the ancient to the last redactor. And

on this final level, the arrangement of the first three chapters in their canonical form, I

believe that we are dealing with theodicy.

Now these creationist narrators are not in the slightest naive. They know exactly

what they have done by positing a monotheistic scheme and move immediately to

address the problem of evil by telling a story about a snake, a man and a woman. The
focal point of this etiological narrative is the poetic section (vss 14-19) which contains a

list of seven primal evils touching the whole natural world, fauna, flora, and human alike.

Each of the etiologies about evil are prompted by ancient man’s most casual reflection on

the world around him. “On your belly you shall go...” Why is the serpent missing its

legs? “He shall bruise your head...” Why do humans loathe serpents? “In pain shall you

bring forth children...” Why are birth pains necessary? “Your husband...shall rule over

you.” Why on earth should men dominate women? “In toil you shall eat...” Why must

we be food cultivators rather than food gatherers? “Thorns and thistles it shall bring

forth...” Working the ground is hard and what good are weeds, anyway? Finally, the big

number seven: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Why must we die? Each of
these addresses one of the seven evils while the earlier narrative of chapter three explains

how it came to be.

If I am catching something intended by those who arranged and edited these opening

chapters of the Bible and not simply reading in my own ideas, I am surprised to find

reflection upon the problem of evil in texts that I had always casually assumed to be

products of an earlier editorial process. Perhaps not, then. Perhaps the final editing of the

primal history occurred a little later than I suspected since the whole enterprise of

separating Yahweh from evil and focusing upon his total goodness is usually assigned to

the last two or three centuries BCE and to those authors who gave us apocalyptic dualism

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and a Satan who is co-ruler of the universe. And thus I find myself taking another look at

the work of the melancholy Danish school of historical criticism (or “minimalists” as

they are known in current discussions) and asking myself whether they may be correct in

their dating of the literature.3

What about the story itself? The characters are familiar: God, the first human couple

and the Serpent. We know them so well. God, Adam, Eve — no problem. But just

exactly who or what is this snake creature? The most fascinating aspect is its ability to

converse with Adam and Eve. How could this snake talk? Well, my students have no
problem with this question. They all know that the serpent is really the Devil. Or the

story is about Satan the ventriloquist. Every English speaker has known this since the

publication of Paradise Lost. To suggest otherwise is a lost cause.4

But if the biblical narrator’s strategy is to remove Yahweh from any association with

evil, then there is a problem in identifying the serpent with Satan. The opening verse of

chapter three says quite simply: “The serpent was more clever than any other wild

creature that the LORD God had made.” If the goal of theodicy is to remove Yahweh

from any moral culpability, what sense does it make for Yahweh to create Satan? No,

this serpent is surely not Satan.

Having said that, however, I am left with an animal, which Yahweh created when he

was populating the earth — a reptile who, in the beginning of the story at least, had legs,

and could talk. What sort of fable do we have here? Why does this snake talk? The

church fathers and John Milton did not bother to answer this question. It was a simple

matter for them. Having identified the serpent as Satan, it is a small step to ascribe to

Satan god-like powers.

Let’s look at the text again. Man, woman and serpent. Upon each of them is

delivered punishment; one by one they are cursed; evil is forced upon the very core of

their existence. The goal of theodicy is to believe simultaneously in a righteous, benign

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and omnipotent deity who has created us and our world but is not culpable for the

presence of what is commonly identified as “evil” in that world. Therefore, one must

somehow exonerate Yahweh from any blame in this matter of the legs of the serpent, the

woman’s birth pains and weeds in our garden.

From the beginning of civilization, when the first cities were built and people began

to experience urban density, laws regulating human behavior were established. The most

rudimentary laws of behavior were those which recognized a person’s right to protection

from capricious malevolence initiated by another individual. In the Bible, “talion law
prescribes an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ and so forth.” Other Near Eastern law

codes offer compensation in place of talion. For example, in the Middle Assyrian laws, a

man who slaps another’s young wife loses a finger; if he kisses her, his lips are cut off.

Lurking in the Eden narrative is the implication that the benign and righteous nature

of Yahweh demands justice for his world. The God who created mankind as moral must

himself possess at least that same morality and, likely, a greater morality manifesting

itself in a sense of justice that transcends that of his human creation. So this is how

theodicy works in the narrative. God makes laws, others break the laws, and punishment

ensues. God himself does not create evil, but it is necessitated by the actions of free

moral agents living within his domain. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. The woman
went her own way and enjoyed the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The man followed her

and did the same. For these rebellious actions, God is justified in meting out punishment.

The curses are necessitated by such behavior. We all recognize the fact that our actions

are not without consequences.

But when we turn to the serpent, we meet a serious problem. Humans, made in the

image of God, owe their sense of justice to the creator. While God must in all ways be

more just than humans, they, in turn, are a higher created order than the animals. Adam

named those animals, and in so doing participated in some way in the creative process

and held a place of dominion over them.5 They do not have a moral nature but are of a

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lower order of being. One does not blame them or praise them for their behavior for they

do not reason but follow their instinctual nature. Animals simply are not moral agents in

the traditional thought of the Western world.6 Now then, if humans do not hold animals

morally responsible for their actions, why would they expect that God would do so? For

the Creator God to punish a dumb and innocent reptile, to which he gave life, by taking

its legs is unthinkable. That would place him on a moral plane beneath that of his humble

humanity. He cannot be less moral than humankind. Our storyteller has a problem:

How can God be exonerated for cursing what the story teller sees as an innocent animal?
For literally picking on a dumb beast?

Although I am operating from the assumption that humans throughout history have

not considered animals to be moral agents and therefore neither praise- nor blameworthy

for their behavior, I have recently reread Jack Finkelstein’s monograph The Goring Ox,

published posthumously through the great labor of Maria D. Ellis.7 The legal history of

Western civilization is dotted with strange cases and juridical deliberations on the topic

of beastly morality and behavior.8 I am aware that this is no simple matter in the history

of jurisprudence. But please allow me to relate one puzzling anecdote from American

culture.
History sometimes produces bizarre and instructive incidents that rival fiction.
On September 11, 1916 the Sparks Circus conducted its afternoon performance in
Kingsport, Tennessee, and eager hill people filled most of the five thousand seats under
the big top. The show's star elephant, Mary, advertisements embellished, was “The
Largest Living Land Animal on Earth,” three inches taller than Barnum's Jumbo. It was
not just Mary's bulk that was important but also her skill; she could play a series of horns,
hit baseballs at a .400 average, and even argue with the umpire. Only two days earlier
Walter Eldridge, a young man from nearby St. Paul, Virginia, had joined the Circus and
was assigned to handle the elephant, and as the show progressed, he proudly straddled the
world's largest land animal.

At some point in the performance, things went suddenly wrong when the
inexperienced mahout hit Mary to correct her course. Mary smashed Eldridge to the
ground, gored him, and then tossed his remains into the crowd amid screams, panic, and a
scattering of pistol shots aimed at the pachyderm by alarmed spectators. The bullets, the
press reported, did not take effect. The Kingsport city fathers decided that Mary had to
pay for this crime with her life, and after rejecting further gunplay and poison, they

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agreed to hang Mary from The Clinchfield and Ohio Railroad crane located in nearby
Erwin. On September 13 there were five thousand people waiting in Erwin for the
execution, as many as had attended the circus and watched Eldridge's death. Before
her burial, a doctor helped saw off her tusks and noticed several abscessed teeth, and he
speculated that Eldridge's blow to her head may have hit the sore teeth and provoked her
rampage.
On first glance, the hanging of Mary seems so bizarre as to preclude analysis; yet there
are elements that provide insight into Southern psychology. Obviously, a number of
spectators attended the circus armed, and one can only speculate why they carried pistols
into a Circus tent for an afternoon performance or why they felt compelled to fire their
weapons at Mary even though the tent was crowded with women and children. Mary's
death sentence came from the eye-for-an-eye sense of justice that pervaded the South, but
the decision to hang Mary instead of shooting her was more puzzling. Fourteen years
earlier, the police chief of Valdosta, Georgia, killed Gypsy another circus elephant, with
his rifle when she trampled her keeper to death and ran wild through the streets. (A
photograph shows chief of police Calvin Dampier sitting atop the slain elephant, with his
rifle prominently displayed.) The argument that a rifle would be ineffective on Mary
seemed lame among a people who were descendants of Daniel Boone. No doubt the
prospect of a hanging intrigued the Kingsport city fathers; it would be a spectacle far
more gripping than a firing squad or death by poison. The incident shows that
Southerners not only were armed and ready for violence but insisted that murder be
punished, after, of course, a trial of sorts. It also indicates that, given the opportunity,
Southerners opted for spectacle.9

Our response to this story is to laugh incredulously — to laugh at the absurdity of

it. We can scarcely imagine ourselves party to such goings on. We simply do not regard

animals as moral equals. Likewise, our ancestors’ natural intuition was to regard

themselves as benignly disposed toward and superior to the animal world. For them to

imagine that a serpent angered the gods to the extent that they took away his legs may

have been as mystifying as the elephant hanging in East Tennessee. Humans do not enter

into moral discourse with the animal kingdom. We are not able to do so because they are

dumb. They do not speak. And this is precisely the point in the garden narrative. By

means of deus ex machina, the narrator takes charge of this microcosmic world and

creates a talking snake. A serpent with human intelligence and the gift of speech. His

story requires a talking serpent in order to remove from God himself a charge of
unjustified cruelty to an innocent animal. For the theodicy to be complete, the snake

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must be given rationality like a human. Then and only then can he become responsible

for his own actions and bear his own punishment fairly. The serpent does not talk

because Satan manipulates him. The serpent must speak or God will be guilty of acting

unjustly by human standards. The goals of the theodicy will always be served.

There is no need to summarize the simple points of this short address, but, in

conclusion, I wish to point out that the ideas contained in it are a result of an attempt to

read the story as it earliest narrators understood it. Whether I have been successful will
depend upon the wisdom and judgment of the reader. I think this is a very important way

to approach scripture, especially for the Bible translator. It is so easy to find

interpretations we have been taught since our youth in the text of the stories of early

Genesis. I have never understood why these very sophisticated narratives, sometimes in

a very difficult genre to identify, have so frequently become the focus of Sunday school

presses when preparing materials for the primary grades. Have we not all seen more than

once Noah and his cute little ark with its friendly animals dancing about on a

flannelgraph board? The story of the garden does not mention Satan nor does it seek to

identify this serpent as anything other than an exceptional animal, which God created. Of

course, the serpent as Satan identification grew out of the work of Hellenistic exegetes
and found it's way into the church fathers. From there it was further expounded upon by

John Milton in our English tongue and nothing further need be said. I would not for a

second presume that the meaning of the story for its original narrator is the only valid and

appropriate message to be extracted from the Garden narrative or any other. But I think it

is important for the task of translation, and even annotation, that the scholar try as much

as possible to free himself from leading the reader to his own personal perspective on the

matter. There is, after all, plenty of time after translation for unlimited hermeneutical

adventure. And let me conclude by saying that I stand admonished by my own

exhorations.

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1 This manuscript was delivered as the presidential address for the Middle West Branch
of the American Oriental Society at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, 17 Feb, 1997. I
offer it with gratitude to Professor Youngblood as it was read on that date.

2 It is a great honor to be included in a volume honoring Ronald F. Youngblood. He was

my mentor as a young student at Bethel Theological Seminary in the early 60s. It was his
fascination with Genesis that set me on my life-long desire to read, study and reread these
amazing biblical stories. I have yet to plumb the actual depths of any and am continually
aware of how much more there is to learn and understand, especially in the enigmatic
chapters 1-11. Professor Youngblood was a great inspiration to his students who
continue to hold him in the highest esteem.

3 What I mean to say here is that the minimalist historians are placing the formation of
the Hebrew scriptures later and later, encroaching on the Hellenistic period. The Stoic
philosophers were talking about the problem of evil about this same time. I do not think
that the writers and editors of Hebrew scripture had to be privy to Greek philosophical
discourse in order to think about the problem of evil nor do I think that this concomitance
is an obvious coincidence. For an example of this sort of thinking see Seneca’s opening
sentence “You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if a Providence rules the world, it still
happens that many evils befall good men.” in “To Lucilius on Providence,” in John W.
Basore, ed, Seneca Moral Essays, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 214 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1928), 3-47. For examples of the minimalist reconstructions of
Israelite history note especially Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and
Tradition, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1998);
Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London:
Pimlico, 1999); Philip R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel, Journal for the Study of
the Old Testament Supplement Series, 148 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995)
and the works of others who are pushing the dates of biblical literature later and later.

4 On the historical development of the figure Satan in the Hebrew Bible see Jeffrey
Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity,
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1977) and Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan, (New York: Random
House, 1995).

5 “In a way which defies precise rational clarification, every word contains something of
the object itself. Thus, in a very realistic sense, what happens in language is that the
world is given material expression. Objects are only given form and differentiation in the
word that names them. This idea of the word’s power of mastery was very familiar in the
ancient world. Even in J’s story of the Garden of Eden, the word of the man is noticeably
given precedence over the world of objects. It was only when man gave the animals their
names that they existed for him and were available for his use (Ge 2.19f.).” G. von Rad,
The Message of the Prophets (London: SCM Press, 1968), 61.

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6 “In primitive law, animals, and even plants and other inanimate objects are often
treated in the same way as human beings and are, in particular, punished. However, this
must be seen in its connection with the animism of primitive man. He considers animals,
plants, and inanimate objects as endowed with a ‘soul,’ inasmuch as he attributes human
and sometimes even superhuman, mental facilities to them. The fundamental difference
between human and other beings, which is part of the outlook of civilized man, does not
exist for primitive man.” H. Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, transl. A.
Wedberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 3-4.
7 J.J. Finkelstein, The Ox That Gored, Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, 71.2, (Philadelphia: 1981).
8 See especially Finkelstein, The Ox That Gored, Part Two, Section XI for examples of a
disorderly mule in Knoxville, TN in 1956; a sheep killing dog in Virginia, 1961; a
German Shepherd that attacked a woman in New Canaan, CT in 1960.

9 Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life since 1900, (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1986) 52-54. Note as well, Charles Edwin Price, The Day They Hung the
Elephant (Johnson City, Tenn.: The Overmoutain Press, 1992), a 40 page monograph
with pictures.