This is the first article in a series examining the role of Satan in Scripture.
In a good story, the main characters are usually introduced toward the beginning. As the narrative unfolds, the characters develop, and our understanding of them also develops. For example, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the hobbits of the shire go from being juvenile to brave. As the story progresses, readers begin to appreciate a depth to the hobbits that had not been evident at the beginning.
In addition, the same character may be described in different ways by different people. Friends who know me in my late 40s would describe me differently than those who knew me in my early teens (I hope!). The descriptions might overlap, but they are not exactly the same.
The same is true of the biblical story. Because we know the whole story, it is easy for us to read the end into the beginning. But that can often flatten the characters into single, static ideas. Instead, it is important to understand how each character unfolds before our eyes, and the circumstances that cause them to become who they are in the end.
In our attempt to understand the devil in the Old Testament, the particular texts that we consider will have a big impact on our understanding. By the end of the Bible, the devil is described as a big dragon (Revelation 12:9). But he wasn’t a big dragon at the beginning of the story. Each depiction is like a snapshot in the larger portrait of what we call “the devil.” Each of the snapshots may be slightly different from one another, but they will all play a part in our understanding of the bigger picture. We want to understand how the two snapshots are different, but also how they contribute to describing the same figure.
In this article, we will focus on the devil in Genesis 3 and will try to resist incorporating other biblical portraits of the devil into our interpretation. This text suggests that the devil is a schemer who deals in leading questions, insinuations, and half-truths. If the devil always uttered bald-faced lies and spoke in complete falsehoods, it would be easy to see through his schemes. But the most effective lies contain partial truths, and that is where the real danger lies.
What’s in a name?
The biggest issue with everything I’ve said so far is that the word “devil” doesn’t occur in the Hebrew Old Testament at all. It ultimately comes from the Greek diabolos and the Latin diabolus (think of the English word, “diabolical”). We do, however, find the Greek word in both the New Testament and the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). The root of the word has to do with making malicious accusations, uttering slander, or having a prejudicial state of mind.
But even if some of those ideas are relevant to the text we’re looking at, there is no text in the Hebrew Old Testament that actually calls the figure “the devil.” The Septuagint uses the word diabolos, where it almost always translates the Hebrew word śāṭān. But even when the Hebrew text uses the word śāṭān, it is not identical to the way we use the English word “Satan.”
Genesis 3:1 introduces “the snake” as one of the many wild animals that God had created (cf. Genesis 2:19, 20), but it emphasizes that he is the cleverest of all. The narrative that we’re familiar with as the Fall doesn’t explicitly call this snake “the devil” or “Satan.” Literature between the Old Testament and New Testament, and the New Testament itself, will later interpret the snake spoken of in this story as “the devil” (Wisdom 2:24) or as “Satan” (Rom 16:20). But even if we agree that is how we should understand things in the end, the beginning of the story doesn’t put it exactly that way. It just says “snake.”
Talking Snakes
Remarkably, the snake talks. Like Balaam and his talking donkey in Numbers 22, the woman doesn’t seem surprised by this, and she talks back. Their conversation illustrates well the character and role of the snake in Genesis 3. In light of the witness of the whole Bible, it also illustrates the character and role of the devil that this snake comes to represent.
It is important that the snake can speak in this narrative, since misleading speech is central to what we call the Fall. The discussion between the snake and the woman centers around God’s command in Genesis 2:16–17: “The Lord God commanded the human, ‘You may certainly eat from all the trees of the garden, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — you shall not eat from it. For on the day when you eat from it, you will certainly die’” (author’s translation here and throughout).
This command is clear and generous. But when the snake talks, it starts asking questions that imply that God is not so generous. It says, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). This is not a flat-out lie, but it is a leading question that raises doubt.
The short answer is, “No. God said ‘all the trees,’ not ‘none of the trees.’” That’s how the woman should have responded. But when she attempts to correct the snake in Genesis 3:2–3, she doesn’t get it right, either: “The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat from the fruit of the trees of the garden. But from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said, “You shall not eat from it, and you shall not touch it, lest you die.”’”
God said nothing about not touching the tree. Where did she get that idea? Maybe she’s being exceedingly cautious, like later Jewish rabbis who would put a “fence” around the law. Maybe Adam has not communicated God’s command to her properly, since it was given to him before she was created in Genesis 3:21-22. Or maybe it shows that she thinks God’s command is petty and that God is just making up nit-picky rules for no reason. In any case, it is not what God said, and the snake’s question seems to have played a part in that discrepancy.
The snake speaks again in verse 4, but this time with a statement instead of a question: “You all will not certainly die.” The language is nearly identical to God’s command in 2:17, but with a “not” before it. The snake is saying precisely the opposite of what God said, if they both mean the same thing when they use the same word, “die.”
The problem with dismissing the snake’s statement as a clear lie is that the man and the woman do not die immediately, at least in the medical sense. They are kicked out of the garden and lead long lives outside of Eden. The tension between what God said in 2:17 and what the serpent says in 3:4, along with the fact that the man and woman are still alive at the end of chapter 3, are some of the main reasons that readers begin to ask the question, What does ‘death’ mean in the Garden of Eden narrative? Could it somehow be symbolic of something bigger than medical death?
The snake adds in 3:5: “For God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God [or: gods], knowing good and evil.” This is not a lie, either. At the end of the story, the Lord God says, “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22). What is wrong about what the serpent says in 3:5 is the insinuation that God has made a rule simply because he doesn’t want the humans to become like him. It implies that he’s jealous and that he is trying to keep something good from them.
The snake continues to raise these issues to tempt the woman (and the man, who was apparently there the whole time, see 3:6) to view God’s command as ungenerous or ambiguous — which is the opposite of what it actually was. Once they see the Lawgiver as someone who cannot be trusted, they are already well on their way to disobedience.
Their eating of the fruit does indeed give them the knowledge of good and evil. But for the man and the woman, this knowledge does not bring enlightenment but shame. And from here on out begins the breakdown of all the relationships that had made life in the Garden good: man and woman, the human and the ground, humans and God. This breakdown begins to answer the question we often ask about what “death” means when we read this text. God confronts the man and the woman, and they start blame-shifting, until God finally addresses the snake directly.
God never directs a curse explicitly toward humans in this text. Instead, the curse the humans must bear relates to God’s direct curse of the ground (3:17), the very thing from which humans were made (2:7). God does, however, use the word “curse” of the snake (3:14). When God asked the woman what has happened, she blamed the snake: “The snake deceived me, so I ate” (3:13). As in other biblical texts, deceit here is especially connected to misleading speech (cf. 2 Kings 19:10, Isaiah 37:10). And it is this misleading speech that leads to the unraveling of relationships between the man and the woman, between humans and the ground, and between humans and God.
The man and the woman are presented in this text in just those words. Sometimes the man is called “the human,” other times he is called “the man.” The woman is always referred to as “the woman,” until the human names his wife in Genesis 3:20: “The human called the name of his wife ‘Eve,’ because she was the mother of all the living.” But even if we were to use the personal names, “Adam” and “Eve,” these names themselves suggest that the characters they represent stand for a larger group. The name Adam means “human,” while the name Eve means “living one.” This indicates that the consequences of the Fall reach beyond the first rebellion and that they also characterize all humans. And just as Adam and Eve must live out their days outside the Garden, so also all humanity now lives and toils east of Eden (3:23–24).
The fact that these characters not only represent the first humans but also represent all humans takes us back to that passage in Genesis 3:15. In the late second century A.D., Irenaeus of Lyons interpreted this passage as representing Christ’s victory over Satan (see his treatise, “Against Heresies”). In Genesis 3:15, God speaks to the snake about what the woman’s offspring will do: “I will set hostility between you and the woman, and between your descendants and her descendants. He will crush [or, strike] you on the head, and you will crush [or, strike] him on the heel.”
Given the larger symbolic nature of the passage, where “death” includes but goes beyond medical death, and where the man and the woman stand as representatives for the fate of all humans, it makes sense to understand the descendants of the woman and of the snake as standing for something bigger than simple animosity between humans and snakes. That is to say, something about the nature of the text itself presses toward a larger symbolic meaning.
Ancient Christian interpreters saw in Genesis 3:15 the earliest telling of the gospel, and so this text is often known in theology as the “first gospel” (in Latin: protoevangelium). That interpretation seems also to have had some precedent in the New Testament (e.g., Romans 16:20). By defeating the serpent, Jesus — who is the offspring of Eve and of Mary — will deliver a fatal blow to the head of Satan. Christ will be severely wounded in the process, but the deceitful snake will be killed. This is indeed good news for humanity. But until that victory is complete, the devil continues to scheme (Ephesians 6:11) and to deceive the whole world (Revelation 12:9).
The devil is indeed a liar, and “whenever he speaks a falsehood, he speaks his natural idiom” (John 8:44). It is in the devil’s very nature to lie and deceive, and that is why he is called “the devil” (i.e., “the slanderer”). But the narrative of Genesis 3 teaches us that he is exceedingly cunning and deals in half-truths, implication, and insinuation. Those who are Eve’s descendants through Christ must be sober-minded, alert (1 Peter 5:8–9), and resist the devil (James 4:7), trusting that God is good and that his commands are good.
Scott C. Jones is a professor of biblical studies at Covenant College and is currently writing a book on monsters in the Bible for Baker Books.