Serpents in the Bible
Serpents are referred to in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The symbol of a serpent or snake played important roles in the religious traditions and cultural life of ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. The serpent was a symbol of evil power and chaos from the underworld as well as a symbol of fertility, life, healing, and rebirth.
Nāḥāš, Hebrew for "snake", is also associated with divination, including the verb form meaning "to practice divination or fortune-telling". Nāḥāš occurs in the Torah to identify the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, it is also used in conjunction with seraph to describe vicious serpents in the wilderness. The tannin, a dragon monster, also occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible. In the Book of Exodus, the staves of Moses and Aaron are turned into serpents, a nāḥāš for Moses, a tannin for Aaron. In the New Testament, the Book of Revelation makes use of ancient serpent and the Dragon several times to identify Satan or the Devil. The serpent is most often identified with the hubristic Satan, and sometimes with Lilith.
The narrative of the Garden of Eden and the fall of humankind constitute a mythological tradition shared by all the Abrahamic religions, with a presentation more or less symbolic of Abrahamic morals and religious beliefs, which had an overwhelming impact on human sexuality, gender roles, and sex differences both in the Western and Islamic civilizations. In mainstream Christianity, the doctrine of the Fall is closely related to that of original sin or ancestral sin. Unlike Christianity, the other major Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, do not have a concept of "original sin", and instead have developed varying other interpretations of the Eden narrative.
Hebrew Bible
In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Genesis refers to a serpent who triggered the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Serpent is also used to describe sea monsters. Examples of these identifications are in the Book of Isaiah where a reference is made to a serpent-like dragon named Leviathan, and in the Book of Amos where a serpent resides at the bottom of the sea. Serpent figuratively describes biblical places such as Egypt, and the city of Dan. The prophet Jeremiah also compares the King of Babylon to a serpent.Eden
The Hebrew word נָחָשׁ is used in the Hebrew Bible to identify the serpent that appears in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden. In the first book of the Torah, the serpent is portrayed as a deceptive creature or trickster, who promotes as good what God had forbidden and shows particular cunning in its deception. The serpent has the ability to speak and to reason: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made". There is no indication in the Book of Genesis that the serpent was a deity in its own right, although it is one of only two cases in the Torah of animals that talk, the other being Balaam's donkey.God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to tend it and warned Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The serpent tempts Eve to eat of the tree, but Eve tells the serpent what God had said. The serpent replies that she would not surely die and that if she eats the fruit of the tree "then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Eve eats the fruit, and gives some to Adam who also eats. God, who was walking in the Garden, learns of their transgression. To prevent Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Life and living forever, they are banished from the garden upon which God posts an angelic guard. The serpent is punished for its role in the Fall, being cursed by God to crawl on its belly and eat dust.
There is a debate about whether the serpent in Eden should be viewed figuratively or as a literal animal. According to one midrashic interpretation in Rabbinic literature, the serpent represents sexual desire; another interpretation is that the snake is the yetzer hara. Modern Rabbinic ideas include interpreting the story as a psychological allegory where Adam represents reasoning faculties, Eve the emotional faculties, and the serpent the hedonic sexual/physical faculties. Voltaire, drawing on Socinian influences, wrote: "It was so decidedly a real serpent, that all its species, which had before walked on their feet, were condemned to crawl on their bellies. No serpent, no animal of any kind, is called Satan, or Belzebub, or Devil, in the Pentateuch."
20th-century scholars such as W. O. E. Oesterley were cognizant of the differences between the role of the Edenic serpent in the Hebrew Bible and its connections with the "ancient serpent" in the New Testament. Modern historiographers of Satan such as Henry Ansgar Kelly and Wray and Mobley speak of the "evolution of Satan", or "development of Satan".
According to Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament scholar, Lutheran theologian and University of Heidelberg professor, who applied form criticism as a supplement to the documentary hypothesis of the Hebrew Bible, the snake in the Eden's narrative was more an expedient to represent the impulse to temptation of mankind rather than an evil spirit or the personification of the Devil, as the later Christian literature erroneously depicted it; moreover, von Rad himself states that the snake is neither a supernatural being nor a demon, but one of the wild animals created by God, and the only thing that differentiates it from the others in Eden is the ability to speak:
Since ancient Hebrew had no written vowels, the letters comprising נָחָשׁ can also be translated as deceiver or diviner. As the root of adjective, the word could indicate a noun translated to mean luminous/shining one. A derivation of this word was used in number of places in the Bible to refer to the shine of brass, which is a feature that is generally associated with angels or God in the Bible. The International Standard Version of the Bible translates נָחָשׁ as "the Shining One", with "the diviner" and "the serpent" as alternative readings, observing that the word "connotes one who falsely claims to reveal God’s word". Therefore, the serpent in Genesis is often interpreted as a serpentine angel, Seraph.
The biblical statement that the serpent will "crawl on your belly" is paralleled by frequent spells in Pyramid Texts that call on the snake to lie down, fall down, get down or crawl away. These parallels suggest that when the serpent is commanded to crawl on his belly, it does not refer to losing limbs. Instead, it is referring to being sent away in a docile position instead of upright in an attack position. The Pyramid Texts also refer to commands of vanishing serpents to the dust. In both the Epic of Gilgamesh and Job 16:17, the underworld is referred to as the house of dust. Thus, it is likely that the curse of eating dust refers to being cast out to the underworld.
Moses and Aaron
When God had revealed himself to the prophet Moses in, Moses recognized that the call of God was for him to lead the people of Israel out of slavery, but anticipated that people would deny or doubt his calling. In, Moses asked God how to respond to such doubt, and God asked him to cast the rod which he carried onto the ground, whereupon it became a serpent. Moses fled from it, but God encouraged him to come back and take it by the tail, and it became a rod again.Later in the Book of Exodus, the staffs of Moses and Aaron were turned into serpents, a nachash for Moses, a tanniyn for Aaron.
Fiery serpents
"Fiery serpent" occurs in the Torah to describe a species of vicious snakes whose venom burns upon contact. According to Wilhelm Gesenius, saraph corresponds to the Sanskrit Sarpa, serpent; sarpin, reptile. These "burning serpents" infested the great and terrible place of the desert wilderness. The Hebrew word for "poisonous" literally means "fiery", "flaming" or "burning", as the burning sensation of a snake bite on human skin, a metaphor for the fiery anger of God.The Book of Isaiah expounds on the description of these fiery serpents as "flying saraphs", or "flying dragons", in the land of trouble and anguish. Isaiah indicates that these saraphs are comparable to vipers, worse than ordinary serpents. The prophet Isaiah also sees a vision of seraphim in the Temple itself: but these are divine agents, with wings and human faces, and are probably not to be interpreted as serpent-like so much as "flame-like".
Serpent of bronze
In the Book of Numbers, while Moses was in the wilderness, he mounted a serpent of bronze on a pole that functioned as a cure against the bite of the "seraphim", the "burning ones". The phrase in Numbers 21:9, "a serpent of bronze", is a wordplay as "serpent" and "bronze" are closely related in Hebrew, nehash nehoshet.Mainstream scholars suggest that the image of the fiery serpent served to function like that of a magical amulet. Magic amulets or charms were used in the ancient Near East to practice a healing ritual known as sympathetic magic in an attempt to ward off, heal or reduce the impact of illness and poisons. Copper and bronze serpent figures have been recovered, showing that the practice was widespread. A Christian interpretation would be that the bronze serpent served as a symbol for each individual Israelite to take their confession of sin and the need for God's deliverance to heart. Confession of sin and forgiveness was both a community and an individual responsibility. The plague of serpents remained an ongoing threat to the community and the raised bronze serpent was an ongoing reminder to each individual for the need to turn to the healing power of God. It has also been proposed that the bronze serpent was a type of intermediary between God and the people that served as a test of obedience, in the form of free judgment, standing between the dead who were not willing to look to God's chosen instrument of healing, and the living who were willing and were healed. Thus, this instrument bore witness to the sovereign power of Yahweh even over the dangerous and sinister character of the desert.
In, a bronze serpent, alleged to be the one Moses made, was kept in Jerusalem's Temple sanctuary. The Israelites began to worship the object as an idol or image of God, by offering sacrifices and burning incense to it, until Hezekiah was made King. Hezekiah referred to it as Nehushtan and had torn it down. Scholars have debated the nature of the relationship between the Mosaic bronze serpent and Hezekiah's Nehushtan, but traditions happen to link the two.