A Talking Snake, With Legs?
- stephenstrent7
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
Where Science Meets the Old Testament, for the Come Follow Me lesson January 19-25; Genesis 3-4; Moses 4-5
Genesis 3:1 states, “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made…” The Bible Hub shows the Hebrew as: וְהַנָּחָשׁ֙ (wə·han·nā·ḥāš) the serpent הָיָ֣ה (hā·yāh) was [more] עָר֔וּם (‘ā·rūm) crafty, shrewd, or sensible מִכֹּל֙ (mik·kōl) [than] any, all or every חַיַּ֣ת (ḥay·yaṯ) life, living thing הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה (haś·śā·ḏeh) [in the] field or land. So, why are we told in Genesis 3:1 that the serpent is the most crafty, shrewd, sensible, or subtil of all living things?
Maybe its because the Babylonians believed that serpents or dragons, associated with the astrological constellation Hydra, which looks a lot like the beast depicted on the Ishtar Gate, such as their gods Ninazu, Ningishzida, Nirah, or even Enki, were symbols of wisdom, the earth’s mysteries and divine secrets. Sometimes they were guarding sacred life-giving trees and exchanging the loss of immortality for humans to gain divine knowledge and wisdom.1 Furthermore, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a snake steals the plant of immortality. In Tablet 11 we read, “Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying…‘There is a plant…if your hands reach that plant you will become a young man again.’ Hearing this, Gilgamesh…attached heavy stones to his feet. They dragged him down, to the Apsu…He took the plant…and cut the heavy stones from his feet, letting the waves throw him onto its shores…Gilgamesh…was bathing in the water. A snake smelled the fragrance of the plant, silently came up and carried off the plant.”2
According to the Egyptian creation myth, the original Creator God was the serpent Kematef who emerged spontaneously from the primordial ocean of undifferentiated potential and chaos. The arch-fiend and sun-stealing Chaos Serpent Apophis (Apep) also emerged from the primordial ocean as the antithesis of Kematef and ultimate destructive force in the universe. Apophis represents total disorder in the perpetual battle of good vs evil. Then there is Wadjet, the protective cobra goddess of Lower Egypt and Egyptian royalty.3
The covenant people, who would become Israel, seemed to have a constant struggle between monotheism and polytheism. Even when they were practicing monotheism, polytheism was lurking just below the surface—breaking into the open from time to time.
We know very little about Abraham’s back story. We are told in Genesis 12:4 that, “…Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.” Abram, who was born in Ur of the Chaldees, in the south-east end of the fertile crescent, had moved with his father, Terah’s household, sometime after Abram had married Sarai, to Haran, in the north-central part of the fertile crescent. Terah died in Haran, apparently, at the age of two hundred and five.4 And, at some point, “…Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan…”5, in the south-west end of the fertile crescent.
In his own account, Abraham says, “In the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my fathers, I, Abraham, saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence; And, finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me, I sought for the blessings of the fathers, and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same; having been myself a follower of righteousness, desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge, and to be a greater follower of righteousness, and to possess a greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions, and to keep the commandments of God, I became a rightful heir, a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers. It was conferred upon me from the fathers; it came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning, or before the foundation of the earth, down to the present time, even the right of the firstborn, or the first man, who is Adam, or first father, through the fathers unto me.”6
From these verses, we can understand that Abraham was not happy with his conditions while still living in the “land of the Chaldeans”. None-the-less, he was ordained to be a High Priest by “the fathers”. He doesn’t say that his father ordained him, but there is no reason to believe that he wasn’t ordained by his father from a line through the fathers, back to Adam. He also had the right of the firstborn, being listed as the firstborn son of Terah.7
We actually have very little information concerning Abraham’s early religious beliefs. What we are told is that, “My fathers, having turned from their righteousness, and from the holy commandments which the Lord their God had given unto them, unto the worshiping of the gods of the heathen, utterly refused to hearken to my voice; For their hearts were set to do evil, and were wholly turned to the god of Elkenah, and the god of Libnah, and the god of Mahmackrah, and the god of Korash, and the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt…”8
So, who are the “fathers” to whom Abraham is referring? According to my calculations, based on Genesis 11:10-26, Abraham was born 378 years after the flood (with an estimated range of 290-390 years). Given the stated age of all his “fathers” in those verses, which may be exaggerations; Shem, Arphaxad, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, and Nahor were all still living when Abram was born. Furthermore, Shem, Arphaxad, Salah, Eber, and Serug would have still been alive when Abram was 75.
There is no personal information in the scriptures about Arphaxad, whether he was good or bad. As for Salah, the genealogy in Luke 3:35-36 says that Sala was the son of Cainan, who was the son of Arphaxad. We know nothing of his character, whether good or bad. Salah’s son, Eber, apparently was the eponymous ancestor of the “Hebrews”, meaning “to cross over”. We have no information about his character or behavior.
Then there is Peleg. According to Genesis 10:25, “And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.” Apparently, his name, Peleg, is derived from the Hebrew: פֶּלֶג, which means “division”, supposedly referencing some sort of unstated division during his lifetime. The most common interpretation, if anyone bothers to propose one at all, is that the “division” refers to the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel, which seems a bit odd to have the origin of languages happen during the lifetime of one person, and even more odd to have a little baby named Peleg, because during his lifetime, Eber thought that God would get mad at the people because of the Tower of Bable and divide the languages. Even mor bizarre, some extremists believe that the “division” refers to a geological division of the continents. All the continents moving apart in one person’s lifetime? Hold onto your hat baby, we’re going for one heck of a ride—the world’s first, and biggest amusement park. No one ever said whether Peleg was good or bad, or even if he was upset that he couldn’t understand what his friends were saying.
The Bible says nothing about Reu, except for sticking him into Abraham’s genealogy. We have no idea what kind of person he was. The same is true for Serug. There are actually two Nahors in the Bible: one was the Nahor who was the son of Serug, listed here, and the other was his grandson, Nahor, who was the son of Terah, and Abraham’s brother. We don’t know if the first Nahor was bad or good.
So, there we have it, a whole line of Abraham’s “fathers” of whom we know almost nothing, other than their place in Abraham’s genealogy, and Abraham’s statement that they “having turned from their righteousness”. All of them, including Shem, the son of Noah, were still alive when Abraham was born, if the given biblical ages can be trusted. We are told that God saved only Noah and his three sons because they were the only righteous ones at the time of the flood. Were all of Noah’s firstborn descendants evil within 378 years after the flood, even with each patriarch, including Shem, being still alive?
God made a covenant with Abraham,9 and God is referred to as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are Abrahamic religions. So, Abraham’s fathers, those patriarchs of old, are not associated with the Abrahamic religion, but what of his descendants—the later patriarchs, especially Isaac, Jacob (Israel), and the twelve tribes?
And, what about the patriarch’s wives? First, there was Sarai, whom Abram gave over to Pharoah, in Egypt, to save his own life.10 Then there was Rebekah, who conspired against her husband, Isaac, to give Jacob the birthright that belonged to Esau.11
We are told a very strange story in Genesis 31. Jacob was told by an “angel of God” to leave Laban’s house and “go to Isaac his father in the land of Canaan”.12 As his household was preparing to leave, “…Laban went to shear his sheep: and Rachel had stolen the images that were her father’s.”13 After Jacob had traveled some distance, “Laban overtook Jacob” and said, “What hast thou done, that thou hast stolen away unawares to me, and carried away my daughters…wherefore hast thou stolen my gods?”14 Then Jacob answered Laban, “With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live: before our brethren discern thou what is thine with me, and take it to thee. For Jacob knew not that Rachel had stolen them.”15 So, “…Laban went into Jacob’s tent, and into Leah’s tent, and into the two maidservants’ tents; but he found them not. Then went he out of Leah’s tent, and entered into Rachel’s tent. Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them in the camel’s furniture, and sat upon them. And Laban searched all the tent, but found them not. And she said to her father, Let it not displease my lord that I cannot rise up before thee; for the custom of women is upon me. And he searched, but found not the images.”16
We are not told in the Bible what Rachel intended by stealing her father’s idols, or what she ever did with them. It seems that she was taking her idolatry with her as her family moved to Canaan. This is the Rachel who was married to Jacob, whose name would be changed to Israel. This is the same Rachel who was the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. What did she teach them?
We are told in Genesis 37:9-10, “And he [Joseph] dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” Joseph’s brothers sold him to a group of Ishmeelite, Midianite traders, who took him to Egypt, and sold him to “Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, and captain of the guard”.17 God is not mentioned at all during this part of the story, which is one of a dysfunctional family.
There is an interlude in the story of Joseph, and in Genesis 38, there is a very lurid story of Judah, where God is certainly not involved. Then Genesis 39 returns to the story of Joseph. We are told in verses 2 and 3, “And the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian. And his master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand.” We are not told here that God said He had blessed Joseph. Later writers, in telling this story, apparently, assumed that because Joseph prospered, God had blessed him to prosper. We are not told here anything about Joseph’s relation with God, or of his religious beliefs or practices.
Furthermore, we are told in Genesis 39:4-6, “And Joseph found grace in his [Potiphar’s] sight, and he served him: and he made him overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his hand. And it came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer in his house, and over all that he had, that the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; and the blessing of the Lord was upon all that he had in the house, and in the field. And he left all that he had in Joseph’s hand; and he knew not ought he had, save the bread which he did eat. And Joseph was a goodly person, and well favoured.”
We only assume here, with no scriptural evidence, that Joseph was monotheistic at this point, and was worshiping God the way we would want him to worship God. Indeed, in my opinion, the scripture suggests just the opposite. Potiphar, who was captain of Pharaoh’s guard, was certainly a polytheist, like every other Egyptian. It seems very unlikely that if Joseph was openly practicing monotheism, whatever that may have looked like at the time, he would certainly not have found favor with Potiphar, especially to be trusted with all that Potiphar owned.
Joseph was sold into Egypt, supposedly, around 1683 BC. Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt from approximately 1353 to 1336 BC, tried to transform Egypt to monotheism, without much success.18
The first mention of God in Joseph’s story is in Genesis 39:7-9, where we read that when Potiphar’s wife asked Joseph to lie with her, he said, “There is none greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” If Joseph referred here to “God”, singular, Potiphar’s wife would have had no idea to which god Joseph was referring. Joseph then refers to God in Genesis 41:15-16: “…Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it: and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it. And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.” And, again, in Genesis 45:4-5, “…Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life.”
We are also told that Joseph married an Egyptian woman, in Genesis 41:45, “And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnath-paaneah, which means, “the [a?] god speaks and he lives”;19 and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Poti-pherah priest of On.” Certainly, Joseph’s wife would have been a polytheist, being the daughter of a priest. One also wonders about Joseph’s relations with his priest-father-in-law.
Actually, Joseph’s religiosity is less important to the story of Israel than the condition of the Israelites at the time of the exodus. Moses was raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter,20 certainly, as a polytheist. He fled Egypt, not because of his religion, but because he had killed an Egyptian. He fled to the house of Reuel (Jethero), “the priest of Midian”, certainly a polytheist, and married one of Jethero’s daughters, Zipporah.21 It appears that Moses was converted to monotheism when he saw the burning bush on Horeb, “the mountain of God”.22
In Exodus 3:13-15, we read the following exchange between God and Moses: “And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”
I find three things in this passage to be quite interesting, in light of monotheism vs polytheism. First, Moses asked God what he should tell the children of Israel when they ask “What is his name?” In other words, the question seems to me, “Which of the gods sent you?” Second, this is the first time in the scriptures that the idea of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is introduced. Third, God does not go farther back in the Israelite genealogy than Abraham to state whose God He is.
It is well known from the scriptures that Moses had a gigantic struggle getting the children of Israel to believe in and worship one God after they were liberated from Egypt, perhaps around 1280 BC. In the desert, the Israelites were plagued by poisonous snakes, and Moses raised the brass (more likely, bronze) serpent.23
However, long after the Israelites were established in Canaan, some were apparently snake-worshipers. We read in 2 Kings 18:1-4, that “…Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem [around 715 to 686 BC]…He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan [a brazen thing].”
Then, the Israelite intelligentsia (of the Kingdom of Judah) were taken captive to Babylon, back to where Abraham had started, from 597 BC to 538 BC, where the Babylonians attempted to convert them back to polytheism, if many of them had ever left it in the first place.24 It is highly unlikely that any written copy of what would become Genesis was taken with them, only what they had memorized, and that was probably modified by their sixty years in Babylon. It is little wonder, then that the version of Genesis that came out of the captivity would say that the serpent is the most crafty, shrewd, sensible, or subtil of all living creatures.25 That idea is a very pagan, polytheistic one. That serpent, then, spoke to Eve, telling her to eat of the forbidden fruit, “And the serpent said unto the woman, ‘God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’”26 This scripture makes the serpent the perpetrator of the fall, with no mention of Satan.
The Brass Plates would have contained a more correct version of the story of the serpent, as given, by revelation to Moses. We can read in 2 Nephi 2:18, “And because he had fallen from heaven, and had become miserable forever, he sought also the misery of all mankind. Wherefore, he said unto Eve, yea, even that old serpent, who is the devil, who is the father of all lies, wherefore he said: Partake of the forbidden fruit, and ye shall not die, but ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” Again, we read in Mosiah 16:3, “For they are carnal and devilish, and the devil has power over them; yea, even that old serpent that did beguile our first parents, which was the cause of their fall; which was the cause of all mankind becoming carnal, sensual, devilish, knowing evil from good, subjecting themselves to the devil.”
Joseph Smith, in translating part of Genesis into the book of Moses rendered this version, as recorded in Moses 4:3-6, “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down; And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice. And now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which I, the Lord God, had made. And Satan put it into the heart of the serpent, (for he had drawn away many after him,) and he sought also to beguile Eve, for he knew not the mind of God, wherefore he sought to destroy the world.”
Joseph said that he never finished Moses during his lifetime, and that there were many things therein he would like to go back and change. One wonders that, if he had made those changes, the talking snake, apparently with legs, would have been completely replaced by Satan, as it was in the Book of Mormon and in the Temple accounts.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Wiggermann, Frans A. M. Transtigridian Snake Gods, In, Finkel, I. L.; Geller, M. J. (eds.). Sumerian Gods and their Representations, 1997.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs, Electronic Edition by Wolf Carnahan, 1998; uruk-warka.dk/Gilgamish/The%20Epic%20of%20Gilgamesh.pdf
3. Jackson, Lesley, The Cobra Goddess & the Chaos Serpent: in Ancient Egypt, Avalonia, London, UK, 2020
4. Genesis 11:27-32
5. Genesis 12:5
6. Abraham 1:1-3
7. Genesis 11:27
8. Abraham 1:5-6
9. Genesis 12:1-3
10. Genesis 12:10-20
11. Genesis 27
12. Genesis 31:11-18
13. Genesis 31:19
14. Genesis 31:25-30
15. Genesis 31:32
16. Genesis 31:33-35
17. Genesis 37:18-28, 36
18. Hill, Marsha, Art, Architecture, and the City in the Reign of Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten (ca. 1353–1336 B.C., The Met, 2014;metmuseum.org/essays/art-architecture-and-the-city-in-the-reign-of-amenhotep-iv-akhenaten-ca-13531336-b-c
19. Bible Hub: Genesis 41:45
20. Exodus 2:10
21. Exodus 2:15-16, 21
22. Exodus 3:1-15
23. Numbers 21:8-9
24. 2 Chronicles 36
25. Genesis 3:1
26. Genesis 3:1-5