Imagine this. You’re Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam is out naming the animals, like God told him to. And when he comes home at night, you ask him how his day was. He shrugs and goes “Fine.”. You then, having taken an interest in his work as his dutiful wife, ask him what animals he has named and he goes: “Giraffe, Elephant, Cheetah”. Then, of course, you ask “What are they then?”
Adam looks at you in a funny way and asks you what do you mean.
“Well, what is a geeraffy? What’s it do?”
At this point Adam gets a bit annoyed and shrugs you off. He is having to come up with names, that’s hard enough and now he comes home to be interrogated about the day’s work as well.
But I think that was God’s point. He didn’t want Adam to just match an arbitrary sound with the picture and call it a day. God charged him to investigate the world. Not just to go out and look, but to think. And to make a start on learning how to judge. What animal does what? What’s it’s use? Is it food or danger? To name anything is to capture its essence in a word. Tiger. Deer. Mouse. You’ll know which one to run from.
Sometimes people insist that a word is not “the thing itself”, but that just says something about the strength or weakness of our word associations. If you investigate the world properly, then your understanding of a thing becomes rich enough that the word does capture the whole thing.
Furthermore, to assign words to anything, implies that there shall be future communication about that which is named. It’s not just about sitting there on your own inventing sounds and telling them to the land and sky, it’s about establishing a means of communication with fellow humans. To name the animals and to share the names and embedded knowledge, first with Eve, then with their future offspring (because I do think that having children was planned from the start and would have happened whether they obeyed God on the apple or not).
At some point, Adam must have named the serpent. Because it has a name. Serpent. It’s not described, which is what you’d do if you didn’t have a name for it. No, it’s mentioned by its name. Serpent. Animal with a forked tongue. It can tell both truth and lies. I’m guessing Adam didn’t cover that part. Or he didn’t share it with Eve. Or maybe he did but he didn’t follow up and kick the snake out. Or maybe he did and the serpent came back and just pressed the right buttons with Eve. Or maybe they did everything right, who knows.
The Garden of Eden story exposes possible weaknesses in both men and women through the serpent. Did you name the animal? Did you capture its essence, and share it with others? Do you listen when someone else tells you about a new animal they encountered? Do you consistently act in the way that the animal’s name requires you to act? That is, run from it or hunt it or chase it out. In other words: Is your judgment well developed? The serpent seems to test whether the naming of the animals was done properly.
One man on his own cannot keep all the serpents out and at the same time go into the world to do his duty. Was it up to Eve to hold the fort? If she had the information to do so, then yes, that’s on her. She, too, must develop her judgement and be able to avoid, evade or escape danger. Did they communicate well? Well there were probably some communication issues, because Eve blames the snake and Adam blames Eve. You can’t tell me that’s mature of either if them. You can’t figure out exactly what happened, but you can be sure they mucked up in how they related to the world and each other. When things dissolve into chaos, you won’t get noncontradictory witness statements.
Then there’s Eve’s reaching for the apple. She knows it’s forbidden. Why do it then? Furthermore, why would the serpent entice her to do so? What’s in it for the serpent? You could say he’s just an evil creature. But if God created everything, then that creature is also God’s creation and must therefore have a reason for being there.
God gave Adam and Eve free will. Free will means the ability to disobey God. Otherwise, they’d just be puppets and that would get pretty boring pretty fast. No, much more interesting to see what happens if they have freedom. The serpent is here to point out that they have a choice to stay God’s puppets or to choose for themselves. Now, the choice could have been to obey God. But that could only happen if the alternative was also there: to disobey.
God surely wanted Adam and Eve to develop into capable adults, with good judgment. It may be that the fruit was there for them to eat once they had some basic knowledge in place. Freedom implies the possibility of making mistakes. A puppet can’t make mistakes, it has no mind of its own. But a human can.
We were created in God’s image. Does that mean that our flaws are God’s flaws too? Could be. Like any overly concerned helicopter parent, God made a mistake. Or maybe he didn’t, because it’s a decision any parent probably has to make. How do you tell children, who don’t know much about the world yet, how to stay safe? He scared his “children” into obedience. “Don’t eat this or you’ll die.” Whoops. That’ll come back to bite you when they reach puberty.
The Bible shows us what it’s like to be human. To be human is to be exposed to temptation. When our judgement isn’t developed, we fall prey to it. But here’s the kicker. We develop good judgment not by following orders but by making our own mistakes. The serpent indirectly contributed to God’s plan by giving Eve a choice that God hadn’t given her. She had to judge. And she did. Did it end well? Well, she saw that the fruit was good for eating, she exposed God’s lie that she would die from eating it and by this act she became fully human, and so did Adam. No longer sock puppets, but their own person, who learns to take responsibility and be accountable for their choices. That’s desirable, even though it’s not easy and inevitably comes with a few cries of “No, I didn’t mean for this to happen!”. But reality doesn’t give a hoot about your intentions. You made a judgment call because at the time you though it was the right thing to do. Was it? By eating from the fruit, they came alive. Yes, that implies dying, somewhere along the line. But isn’t it better to have lived and died than never to have lived at all?
Should they have waited? Perhaps. But for how long then? When are you really “ready”? How many kids these days are still living with their parents in their late twenties or early thirties. You’re ready when you dare to make a choice, for better or worse, and to deal with the consequences. Had they decided to kick out the serpent and follow God’s plan for them, that would have been a decision too.
The serpent, no matter his flaws and forked tongue, did contribute to that.
There’s a theory that the serpent was a dragon. Because God takes away his ability to do anything other than slither and crawl. That ties into my theory on why dragons hoard gold. But that’s an old blog post of mine, I’ll have to see if I can extract it from the Wayback Machine.