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The nature of the snake in Eden, and why reading it as “Satan” is unhelpful. The snake in Genesis carries a lot of theological weight in discussions of both the fall of humanity and the nature of evil celestial beings. Against Michael Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 75–76, and G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 75, I see the snake in Genesis 3 as nothing more than a creature.
Heiser assumes the serpent as self-evidently one of the divine throne guardians based on the varied meanings of the word translated “serpent” (nahash). He makes the almost dismissive comment that we simple “know that the Genesis serpent wasn’t really a member of the animal kingdom” (74, emphasis original). Additionally, he appeals to New Testament literature to make the argument that the serpent was self-evidently not a creature, but fails to account for the influence of a developing theology of the celestial realm and of Second Temple mythology as it impacted the first century—something of which Heiser is very much well aware (see Heiser, “The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second-Temple Jewish Literature [PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004], 225).
In a similar vein, Beale assumes a celestial origin for the serpent, and further reads into God’s commissioning of Adam a task “to guard the garden from the satanic snake” (75). For Beale, Adam’s failure was not the taking of the fruit of the tree, but of not casting the snake from the temple-garden. Again, as with my concern regarding Heiser’s assumptions, this entails torturing far more from the text than what it can offer. Given that the Old Testament authors are not above explicitly connecting places and circumstances to the temple (again, see Heiner’s work cited above), it would seem strange that the Genesis account would bury those allusions so deeply that they have to be assumed rather than explicitly identified.
While the above views certainly fits with Second Temple Jewish tradition, reading Ancient Near Eastern celestial beings into the narrative of Genesis is a struggle. God does address the denizens of the celestial realm in Genesis 1:26, suggesting full cooperation of those beings in the human-creative effort. The text gives no reason for a singular citizen to suddenly decide to undermine the creator’s cosmic order. And any reason we might offer comes from very generous interpretations of post-Exilic prophetic material and much later Second Temple Jewish mythological tradition.
The perspective I offer in the chapter better suits both the context of Genesis 1–3 and the thrust of the overall narrative. Humanity bears the burden of their guilt, yes, but the snake bears the burden if its guilt as a creature as well. That burden centers around its creatureliness rather than its position as a divine being. It simply stretches the text too far to read the snake as anything other than a snake.
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Caution against asking questions of the text that authors aren’t trying to answer, or in reframing the text to explain away hard descriptions of God. As much as I appreciate what Peter Enns tries to do in his work on taking the teeth out of Old Testament portrayals of God, his approach to the text is in many ways emblematic of exactly what I caution against here.
Enns is content to reframe the entire theological context of the Old Testament portrayal of God as a condescension to the mythological world in which Abraham and his descendants lived. The real value of the Old Testament for Enns lies in how it can be used to illuminate Jesus and not in what the original authors may have intended (cf. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015], 160–61).
Enns attempts to reframe the Old Testament in terms that make it possible to dismiss the otherwise off-putting images of God that it regularly paints, such as the Canaanite genocide, and instead access the Christ-centered truth underneath. Not everyone who would try to rehabilitate the Old Testament presentation of God is guilty of wresting it from the hands of the original authors explicitly, the net effect of their attempts amounts to the same.
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The creator-God’s odd preference for Abel over Cain. Later on in Genesis, God consistently prefers the younger brother to the older brother. In the Cain-and-Abel narrative, we have another strong literary theme that rockets forward through the whole of the Bible: The powerful rarely submit to God. It’s those with the fewest resources to secure their own autonomy that end up recognizing the role that the creator-God designed for humanity. While not the case here, more often than not it’s the women—the daughters of Eve—that understand human submission.
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The creator-God’s response to Cain and his murder of Abel. In most (if not all) English translations, Genesis 4:13 reads something along the lines of the NIV: Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear.”
Cain’s follow-up words get styled as the complaint of someone who thinks they’re being overly punished, and God’s response in turn reads as someone conceding to the whining of a child. But the who interaction is very different in Hebrew, which, woodenly, reads: “And Cain said to Yahweh, ‘Great is my iniquity from being carried.’”
The phrase in question is only two words in Hebrew: עון (‘avon) and נשא (nasa‘). The first most basically means the culpability deriving from a transgressive act, or simply “guilt.” ‘Avon in the Old Testament—especially in the Pentateuch—is almost physical. There’s certainly a legal component to it that comes out in Levitical law, but in the imagery of Old Testament Hebrew it’s a physical thing. The question the Hebrew idiom asks over and over again, then, is who will carry (נשא) that guilt?
The holiness code in Leviticus will later repeat the phrase many time to refer to infractions against the sanctity of the people or tabernacle, which create a burden of guilt that must be placed on someone. Iniquity, once created, will properly crush the one who carries it. But the ritual practices of the priests provide a means of lifting that guilt—more often than not with a knife across the throat of an animal upon whom the guilt has been placed. It’s burned up in the fire of the altar and ascends to heaven where it rests not on the shoulders of the guilty but on the shoulders of Yahweh himself.
When Yahweh describes himself to Moses in Exodus 34, he says he carries guilt and rebellion and sin. Most English translations render it “forgive.” And that’s precisely the idea the Hebrew idiom is meant to convey. So what all does this have to do with Cain?
The NET Bible offers a fascinating note on the verse that captures the heart of the issue:
The primary meaning of the Hebrew word עון (avon) is “sin, iniquity.” But by metonymy it can refer to the “guilt” of sin, or to “punishment” for sin. The third meaning applies here. Just before this the Lord announces the punishment for Cain’s actions, and right after this statement Cain complains of the severity of the punishment. Cain is not portrayed as repenting of his sin. (Emphasis added.)
The translators acknowledge up front that they opt for an unnatural reading of the phrase. In fact, there are very few occurrences of the word עון where the metonymic principle forces a rendering of “punishment.” (By “metonymy” they mean the idea that a word can stand in for some other related idea. Here, they’re taking “guilt” to stand in for the punishment resulting from that guilt.)
Without explanation, the translators assume up front that Cain isn’t interested in repentance, so they must translate his statement as a complaint about his punishment, even when a far more natural reading would make sense.
Yahweh’s curse against Cain echoes the curse he leveled against Cain’s father. Instead of the ground being curse because of Adam (Gen. 3:17), Cain is cursed from the ground that drank his brother’s blood and Cain will no longer enjoy its fruit. He will wander the ground instead.
So we reach Cain’s response. His guilt, Cain acknowledges, is too great to be carried—whether by him or by someone else. He accepts his banishment, but expresses concern that his guilt will crush him: Someone will find him and execute him in retaliation for his crime. And it’s that concern that Yahweh addresses. Cain will not die a retaliatory death. Yahweh himself acts as the guarantor, setting his own sign on the man to protect his life.