Eve Was Tempted by a Snake

Eve was spoken to by a snake.  Balaam was spoken to by a donkey.  The speakers were a snake and a donkey.

The notion of a talking snake sounds ridiculous, but the situation is not made any less ridiculous by calling the snake the Devil.

The Devil, as the concocted interpretation goes, sought out of malice bring down Mankind through the Fall.  One wonders, then, why God told the snake "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed."  Had they not enmity enough--if the snake were indeed the Devil?

In the ancient world the bite of a snake could mean sudden and horrible death.  If a child of our time dies of snakebite, we cast about for reasons why our modern certainty about prevention and treatment could have failed us; how in the world could anyone die of snakebite?

In the ancient world the treasured child of any parents could be lost without warning to snakebite--and that does not even include the possibility that infection, rather than venom, might have been the cause.  The ancients understood little about the natural world--as evidenced by the silly reference to hares as chewing the cud in Leviticus.  Or as evidenced by the Genesis description of the cursed serpent: "dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life."  (The Book of Micah tries to clean that up a bit, focusing on the snake's darting tongue: "They shall lick the dust like a serpent" (7:17, KJV).)

Snakes do not eat dust, but that does not eliminate the possibility that the reference was powerful enough for Eve.  What did she or her contemporaries know of snakes or worms, or any need or possibility of distinction between the two?  Worms twisting in the soil could be just as loathsome, and surely the millennia could not have passed without worms twisting in the dying flesh of necrotic, snake-bitten limbs.

The snake, in the context of the Genesis curses, need not have referred to the Devil, or to damnation, or to the death of the soul.  The snake meant actual death.  The snake had assured Eve that she would not die, and now not only had the snake's wiles resulted in the first couple's estrangement from the Tree of Life, it had resulted in the snake--in the consciousness of Adam and Eve--being a personification of Death.  The snake had promised safety from death, and now the snake would bring death.  That would seem to be curse enough to go around.