Serpent

Serpent
    The serpent, with its crested head, glittering skin, fascinating, lidless, gazing eye, shameless lust, tortuous movement, venomous bite and grovelling posture, is well suited to be a type of Satan (see Spiritual powers). Both use camouflage to deceive their prey (Gen. 3:1–4, 6, 13; John 8:44; Acts 13:10; 2 Cor. 4:4; 11:3; 2 Thess. 2:9–10; Rev. 2:9; 3:9). The fact that snakes haunted the same deserted ruins as demons and other threatening beasts (e.g. scorpions and jackels) strengthened their association with evil (Is. 34:14–15; Matt. 12:43; Mark 1:13). Lying hidden in walls (Eccles. 10:8; Amos 5:19), snakes often struck with lightning speed, biting without warning (Gen. 49:17). This ever-present danger served as a metaphor of sudden judgment (Is. 14:29; Amos 5:19). The association between snake bite and divine judgment was not a mere literary device, but a widely held belief (Acts 28:3–4; 1 Cor. 10:9). The names given to different types of snake were used to refer to those who do the devil’s bidding (Matt. 3:7; 12:34; 23:33; Luke 3:7). The plots of the wicked are like snake’s eggs, inevitably hatching greater evils (Is. 59:5); the wicked ‘have sharpened their tongues’ (Pss. 64:3; 140:3) in order to give a deadly wound, ‘like a serpent’ (Ps 58:4). By choosing the serpent to represent the religious leaders of his day (Matt. 12:34; 23:33), Jesus hints that they are to be abhorred and avoided just as one would avoid a nest of vipers.

The Traditional Interpretation of the Place

Of the Serpent in the Fall of Humanity
    The identification of the serpent with the devil appears first in the Apocryphal literature: ‘But by the envy of the devil death entered the world’ (Wisdom of Solomon [written 100 BC – AD 40] 2:24). On logical and theological grounds the early church Fathers and the Reformers believed that Satan fell from grace, entered Eden, used the serpent as his tool, and was cursed (see Blessing/curse) under the form of the serpent, to eternal punishment. It was recognized that there are elements in the judicial curse on the serpent that point beyond it to the figure of Satan; the curse was deliberately prophetic. This is how Paul read the text: ‘The God of peace will soon crush [syntripsei, from triboœ] Satan under your feet’ (Rom. 16:20, NIV). The Hebrew word in Genesis 3:15 translated ‘crush’ occurs also in Job 9:17, where it is translated in the LXX as ektripseœ, the same word used by Paul. It is best to view the post-Fall physionomy of the serpent as the result of deliberate divine alterations to its form, intended to reflect the place of God’s enemy in the divine order. What the serpent represents in the physical world, Satan represents in the spiritual world. Genesis 3 is viewed as the original and prototypical Fall, the cause of all subsequent falls (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:21–22). Because the human race fell with Adam and Eve, no subsequent human fall is a fall from absolute innocence, but is instead only relative, a regression from an already corrupted state. The prophetic curse meant that both serpent and Satan shall eventually eat the dust (i.e. be utterly laid low in perpetual shame); the serpent’s present eating of the dust as it takes food off the ground is the pledge of divine judgment on Satan (Is. 65:25; Mic. 7:17; Is. 49:23; Ps. 72:9).

The Bronze Serpent
    Not all references in the Bible to serpents are negative. The staff of Moses was transformed into a snake which ate the snakes of the Egyptian magicians (Exod. 4:3; 7:10–12). During the wilderness wanderings ‘fiery’ serpents (probably so called because of the inflammation caused by their bite) killed many thousands because of the people’s distrust of Yahweh, but healing could be received by looking at Moses’ bronze serpent. This serpent, lifted up, became a type of Jesus’ crucifixion. The bronze serpent is an historical type rather than a prophetic one. ‘Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up’ (John 3:14), and just as those who looked upon the bronze serpent were healed, so those who look by faith to Christ crucified are saved (John 3:14–15). The bronze serpent typified the Son of Man, in that: 1. it had the form of the deadly serpent without the venom, just as Jesus was ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ yet without sin (Rom. 8:3), ‘made … to be sin for us’ though he ‘had no sin’ (2 Cor. 5:21); the bronze serpent seemed a most unlikely means of curing the serpents’ bites, just as the condemned Christ seemed most unlikely to save the condemned; 2. the serpent was lifted up on a pole so as to be visible to all the Israelites, just as Jesus was ‘clearly portrayed as crucified’ (Gal. 3:1), so that all the ‘ends of the earth’ by looking to him may ‘be saved’ (Is. 45:22); he was ‘lifted up from the earth’, so drawing all people to him (John 12:32–34); 3. the cure of the body by physical looking corresponds to the cure of the soul by spiritual looking; faith is the eye of the soul turned to the Saviour (Heb. 12:2); a look will save, from no matter how far away (Heb. 7:25; Eph. 2:17; Acts 2:39), just as the Israelites were healed by a look from any distance.

Serpent Worship
    In Macalister’s excavations at Gezer a bronze serpent was found; it was probably an object of worship in pre-Israelite Palestine. Many snakes of bronze and terracotta have been found in Palestine, and snakes feature prominently in temple decorations; no doubt they were associated with the cults of various deities. Images of a serpent goddess were discovered by Rowe at Bethshan and by Albright at Kiriath-sepher. In Canaan, the dragon was the symbol for disruptive and destructive chaos. The serpent, as the personification of all evil, was worshipped out of fear, to avert the evil he might do. Figurines of Asherah, the fertility goddess, were often draped with representations of snakes, as were her altars. In various religions the serpent is used as a symbol of both beneficent and hostile supernatural power.
    The worship of the serpent/snake is found in all ancient religions, even in India and further east. In Bel and the Dragon the Babylonians worship a serpent-like creature which Daniel destroys. The Phoenicians worshipped the serpent. Herodotus (Bk II.74) noted that the Egyptians worshipped serpents consecrated to Jupiter. These were small and had two horns. The church Fathers suggested that the devil, who tempted the first woman under the shape of a serpent, took pleasure in deifying it, as a sign of his victory over humankind. But for them, the conqueror’s symbol of the impaled serpent symbolized the overcoming of temporal and spiritual evil.
    Paradoxically, the serpent was also the symbol of wisdom and healing, and Moses’ serpent was an instrument of power against the magicians’ serpents (Exod. 7:10–12). The bronze serpent was preserved for 730 years until Hezekiah (715–686 BC) broke it in pieces because the people were worshipping it (2 Kgs. 18:4). In contempt he gave it the name ‘Nehushtan’ (a play on the word naœhΩaœs¥, ‘serpent’), meaning a ‘trifling thing’ (2 Kgs. 18:4), because it had become an object of worship. (See G. W. Gilmore, ‘Serpent in worship, mythology, and symbolism’, in P. Schaff and J. J. Herzog [eds.], The Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge [New York, 1908], vol. X, pp. 363–370.) There are some indications of serpent-worship in OT Israel (1 Kgs. 1:9, [‘Zoheleth’ = ‘snake’]; Neh. 2:13, NIV fn).

Serpents in Hebrew and Near Eastern Mythology
    In ancient mythology several deities are said to have benefited people by killing a serpent; these snakes include Cadmus, Apollo, the hydra of Lerna, the dragons of Colchis and the Hesperides. Such fables may be traditional echoes of the early promise: ‘The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent’. The serpent was the emblem of Mercury and Aesculapius, the god of medicine; the symbol may derive from the scene recorded in Numbers 21. In the East, as among the Greeks and Romans, the snake, sometimes entwined around a rod, was the symbol of the gods of healing. Hindu mythology represents Krishna as first being bitten in the foot, then crushing the serpent’s head beneath his feet; this tradition may stem from the promise recorded in Genesis 3:15. Many regard Genesis 3 as a myth, attributing it to the J source (2:4b–3:24) and making a connection with the serpent in the Epic of Gilgamesh who robs Gilgamesh of a fragment of the sacred plant which may correspond to the Genesis tree of life, and so of immortality. In the ancient Babylonian creation epic the negative aspect of the cosmos, i.e. chaos, the watery abyss, darkness, evil, etc., is symbolized as a great dragon or serpent.
    The dragon-monster of the great abyss, with whom Marduk, god of light, contended, is sometimes said to correspond to the Leviathan or Rahab of exilic and post-exilic Hebrew literature. But whereas the Babylonian myths place the mythological dragons in the context of the creation of the heavens and the earth, no biblical passage refers to a creation-struggle between Yahweh and a monster. Isaiah (27:1), Amos (9:3) and Ezekiel (29:3; 32:2) announce God’s judgment on his enemies in terms of the overcoming of massive animals: ‘In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword, his fierce, great and powerful sword, Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea’ (Is. 27:1; cf. Pss. 74:13–14; 104:26). ‘Leviathan’ may have been the inspiration for the great red dragon of Revelation 12:3–17.

Figurative and Eschatological References
    The serpent represented a real threat to human happiness. Its removal or extinction was a symbol of life in the new heavens and the new earth. The continuing power of Jesus on earth is seen in the ability of his disciples to handle serpents without using charms and without fear of being hurt (Mark 16:18). Immunity to serpents and poison symbolized for believers the waning influence of Satan and anticipated the age of the Christus Victor (Mark 16:18). Micah 7:17 prophesies that when the nations that have opposed God’s purposes see the mighty deeds that he will perform, ‘they will lick dust like a snake, like creatures that crawl on the ground’. The safety of godly people under Yahweh’s protection is guaranteed by the promise that even if they stand on the cobra or the serpent no harm will come to them (Ps. 91:13). In the eschatological age, ‘The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ (Is. 11:8).

Bibliography
    J. D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 1997); A. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (Chicago, 1951), pp. 83–88; idem, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago, 1949), p. 92; K. R. Joines, Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament (Haddonfield, 1974); G. E. Post, ‘Serpent’, in HDB, pp. 459–461.
L. MCFALL