The Serpent’s Subtlety

In his commentary on Genesis in the Old Testament Library series, Gerhard von Rad provides a careful reading of the serpent’s subtlety as it craftily draws the woman into a conversation. Let’s see how he unpacks the subtle and crafty tactics of the serpent which set the woman and man up for their catastrophic failure.

The Serpent

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.”

Genesis 3:1

The serpent which now enters the narrative is marked as one of God’s created animals (2.19). In the narrator’s mind, therefore, it is not the symbol of a “demonic” power and certainly not of Satan. What distinguishes it a little from the rest of the animals is exclusively its greater cleverness. On the basis of this characteristic alone the narrator initiates the following address.

It would be well to withhold from this beginning of the narrative the great theological weight that the exposition of the church, almost without exception, has given it. The mention of the snake here is almost incidental; at any rate, in the “temptation” by it the concern is with a completely unmythical process, presented in such a way because the narrator is obviously anxious to shift the responsibility as little as possible from man. It is a question only of man and his guilt; therefore the narrator has carefully guarded against objectifying evil in any way, and therefore he has personified it as little as possible as a power coming from without. That he transferred the impulse to temptation outside man was almost more a necessity for the story than an attempt at making evil something existing outside man. “There is no aetiology of the origin of evil” (Westermann, ad loc.).

Throughout the entire story this antagonist of man remains in a scarcely definable incognito, which is not cleared up. In the history of religions the snake indeed is the sinister, strange animal par excellence (v. d. Leeuw), and one can also assume that long before, a myth was once at the basis of our narrative. But as it now lies before us, transparent and lucid, it is anything but a myth.

The Serpent’s First Statement

“He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?’”

Genesis 3:1

We are not to be concerned with what the snake is but rather with what it says. It opens the conversation—a masterpiece of psychological shading!—in a cautious way, with an interested and quite general question (not mentioning the subtly introduced subject of the conversation, the tree of knowledge, which it leaves to the unsuspecting woman!). The serpent’s question contains, it is true, a complete distortion, for God never said man should eat from no tree in the garden; but in just this way the serpent drew the woman into conversation. It gives her the opportunity first of all to be right and to defend herself for God’s sake. In the form of this question, however, the serpent has already made a deadly attack on the artlessness of obedience.

The Woman’s Response

“And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

Genesis 3:2-3

The woman is quite ingenuous with regard to this malice. She corrects the distortion but in so doing goes a bit too far in her zeal. God did withhold only one tree from man (this part of the narrative does not seem to know the tree of life), but God did not say that it should not even be touched. This additional word already shows a slight weakness in the woman’s position. It is as though she wanted to set a law for herself by means of this exaggeration.

The Serpent’s Second Statement

“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”

Genesis 3:4-5

In any case the serpent can now drop the mask behind which it had pretended earnest concern for God’s direction. No longer does it ask, but asserts with unusual stylistic emphasis that what God said was not true at all, and it gives reasons too. It asserts that it knows God better than the woman in her believing obedience does, and so it causes her to step out of the circle of obedience and to judge God and his command as though from a neutral position. It imputes grudging intentions to God. It uses the ancient and widespread idea of the god’s envy to cast suspicion on God’s good command. And man’s ancient folly is in thinking he can understand God better from his freely assumed standpoint and from his notion of God than he can if he would subject himself to his Word. “Wherever man attacks the concrete Word of God with the weapon of a principle or an idea of God, there he has become the lord of God” (Bonhoeffer).

In what follows, the grammatical construction is uncertain. Is the yōde‘ē tōb wārā‘ appositionally connected to ’elōhīm (meaning, “as divine beings who know good and evil”)? It is more logical to understand yōde‘ē tōb wārā‘ as a second predicative designation (as God—or divine beings—and knowing good or evil). In the first instance the accent would be upon “like divine beings”; in the second, more on the knowledge of good and evil. Elohim can be understood as plural (LXX); the insinuation scarcely means that men could become like Yahweh, but rather that they could be divine, like gods. So far as knowledge of good and evil is concerned, one must remember that the Hebrew yd‘ (“to know”) never signifies purely intellectual knowing, but in a much wider sense an “experiencing,” a “becoming acquainted with,” even an “ability.” “To know in the ancient world is always to be able as well” (Wellhausen).

“Knowledge of good” should not immediately suggest a capacity for distinction within the moral sphere in a narrower sense; it certainly does not indicate the knowledge of absolute moral standards or the confrontation of man with an objective idea. No objective element is involved. For the ancients, the good was not just an idea: the good was what had a good effect; as a result, in this context “good and evil” should be understood more as what is “beneficial” and “salutary” on the one hand and “detrimental,” “damaging” on the other.

So the serpent holds out less the prospect of an extension of the capacity for knowledge than the independence that enables a man to decide for himself what will help him or hinder him. This is something completely new in that as a result man leaves the protection of divine providence. God had provided what was good for man (2.18!), and had given him complete security. But now man will go beyond this, to decide for himself. The question in mind is probably whether the coveted autonomy might not be the greatest burden of man’s life. But who thinks of that now? The step to be taken is such a small one!

The fascination of this statement is in its lack of restriction, its intangibleness; it is intentionally mysterious, and after it has brought the thoughts of man into a definite direction, it is again open on all sides and gives room to all whispering secret fantasies. What the serpent’s insinuation means is the possibility of an extension of human existence beyond the limits set for it by God at creation, an increase of life not only in the sense of pure intellectual enrichment but also of familiarity with, and power over, mysteries that lie beyond man. That the narrative sees man’s fall, his actual separation from God, occurring again and again in this area (and not, for example, as a plunge into moral evil, into the subhuman!), i.e., in what we call Titanism, man’s hubris—this is truly one of its most significant affirmations.

Summary

The serpent neither lied nor told the truth. “With tiny shifts of accent, with half-truth and double meaning, it can bring the unsuspecting partner to the point when she joins in and acts of her own volition, which is precisely what it intended” (Steck). One should also observe that it speaks no summons; it simply gives men the great stimulus from which decision can be made quite freely. Here too we see the narrator’s effort to transfer the matter and thus the question of guilt as little as possible outside of man.

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