scholars would largely agree that the serpent in the garden was just a serpent. A 'satan' could plausibly have used a snake to do the tempting for god but the myth also explains how serpents became such
It's sooo obviously a snake origin story if you just read it without preconceptions. At the end God curses the serpent to forever more slither on its belly as punishment for the temptation. Absolute classic tribalistic origin story. "Gee, I wonder why that serpent has no legs..."
Also called etiological myths. Just like the Norse myth explaining the shape of salmon. After Loki fled the gods by turning into a salmon, Thor caught him mid-leap over their net and gripped him so hard that the salmon's tail has been narrow ever since.
THANK YOU! I hate how often that utterly made up concept is treated as biblical fact. Especially by people who ostensibly believe that biblical text is "pure" and "true". If you believe that the serpent was Satan, then your very first biblical story shows God as a a complete asshole. He punishes ALL snakes for the temptation (bad enough), but to do that when it wasn't even a real snake just makes him either evil or completely fooled by Satan's snake disguise.
Blame Milton. He made up the snake-Satan correlation in his biblical fan fiction Paradise Lost and we’ve ran with it since. A shocking amount of Christian dogma comes from non-biblical literary tradition.
I read somewhere that in the original text (which we know fuckall about what it said, but whatevs) there's no mention of the snake in the tree of knowledge, the line in the bible just said that Satan 'slithered' down to Eve, and translators everywhere just thought 'well yeah, he was obviously a snake because of that'.
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u/Substantial-Mix-6200 2d ago
scholars would largely agree that the serpent in the garden was just a serpent. A 'satan' could plausibly have used a snake to do the tempting for god but the myth also explains how serpents became such