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Eve Opened the Gate of Paradise and Let the Serpent Inside

He would not hand her the fruit until she swore by the throne of God that her husband would eat it too. Then he climbed the tree and poisoned what grew there.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. She Would Not Touch It
  2. She Opened the Gate Herself
  3. The Question That Was a Door
  4. Nobody Pleads for an Inciter
  5. Ten Things Taken Off the Serpent
Eve Opened the Gate of Paradise and Let the Serpent Inside Click for full size

She Would Not Touch It

The serpent kept at her through the bars of the garden gate, and the thing he had to sell was a motive.

God knows what happens the day the two of you eat from that tree, he told Eve. You become what He is. That is the whole reason for the prohibition. It was never about your safety. He is protecting his position.

She heard all of it and would not go near the tree.

He pushed. He flattered. He explained the jealousy of heaven to her in detail, at length, from several angles, and she stood on her own side of the gate and would not put a hand on the trunk.

So he changed the offer. If she would not pick it, he would pick it for her.

She Opened the Gate Herself

She lifted the latch and let him in.

Nobody breached the wall of Eden. Nothing came over it or under it. The serpent walked in through an open gate because the woman inside drew the bolt for him.

He was barely through it when he stopped and changed his mind.

Actually, he said, forget what I told you. I have thought better of it. I would rather not give you anything off that tree at all.

It was a trick and it worked the way a hook works. Now she wanted it. Now she was the one asking, and he could set the price, and the price was an oath. He would not touch the fruit until she swore by the throne of God, and by the cherubim, and by the tree of life standing a few steps away from them, that she would put the fruit into her husband's hand and make him eat.

She swore it.

Then the serpent went up the tree and injected his poison into the fruit, the poison of the evil inclination, the yetzer hara (יצר הרע), and he bent the loaded branch down until it touched the ground in front of her.

She closed her hand around it. That was all it took. Before she had lifted it off the branch she knew that the righteousness she had been wearing like a garment was gone off her body, and she stood there holding the branch and crying, partly for what had been stripped off her and partly because of the oath, which was still binding, and which had her husband's name in it.

The Question That Was a Door

In the cool of the day God came walking and asked Adam where he was.

Adam answered from behind the trees, and then came the question that was not a request for information. Have you eaten from the tree I told you not to eat from.

The woman You gave me, Adam said. She gave it to me. I ate.

And you. What have you done.

The serpent deceived me, Eve said. I ate.

Both of them handed it on. Neither of them said the one thing that was being waited for, and it was being waited for. Had either one confessed and asked to be pardoned, the pardon was there to be given. God did not hand down a single sentence until the two of them had stood in front of Him and proved they would not bend.

Then the sentences came. Sorrow multiplied, and children brought into the world through pain, and a woman turning toward the husband who would rule her. Ground cursed for the man's sake, so that everything he ate afterward had to be dragged out of soil that fought him for it.

Nobody Pleads for an Inciter

God did not ask the serpent anything.

No question, no hearing, not even the chance to deflect that the other two had been given and wasted. The rabbis noticed the silence and read it as procedure rather than temper. There is a rule in the courts that when a man is on trial for inciting others, nobody argues on his behalf, and the first defendant it was applied to was the serpent in Eden.

He had an argument ready and it was not a bad one. You gave them an instruction, he would have said, and I gave them the opposite one. Why did they listen to me instead of to You? Ask them that.

The answer that kills it is one line long. When the master says one thing and the student says another, the master is the one who gets obeyed. Nobody needed to hear the serpent say it out loud for the reply to be sitting there.

He was still tried properly. Counting the divine Name from the opening word of the Torah down to the verse where God turns to him gives seventy-one, and seventy-one is the number of a full court, so the sages concluded that the serpent had the entire high court of heaven sitting on his case, the way a capital charge is heard.

The order of the sentencing carries its own rule. Honor starts with the greatest and disgrace starts with the least, so the serpent was cursed first, then the woman, then the man. And of everything God ever addressed, only three were spoken to directly, face turned toward face. Adam. The serpent. And the fish that swallowed Jonah.

Ten Things Taken Off the Serpent

His mouth was shut and his speech taken out of it, so that the most persuasive creature in the garden lost the only thing he was good at.

His hands and his feet were hacked off him.

The earth was assigned to him as food. Enmity was set between him and every human being. Pain was put into the shedding of his skin. His females were given a pregnancy seven years long. Men were made to want to kill him the instant they catch sight of him. Even in the world to come, when the blessing goes out to everything alive, the sentence on him still stands, and he will be cleared out of the Holy Land altogether on the day Israel walks the way it was told to walk.

And one more, which is the cruelest of them and the least discussed. He can still eat whatever he likes. He can take the best fruit in the world into his mouth, or the sweetest thing anyone has ever drunk. It turns to dust between his teeth.

EveSerpentEdenConfessionDivine PunishmentAdamSin
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From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Legends of the Jews 2:62Legends of the Jews

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909) · Public Domain

It goes way back. Way, way back to the Garden of Eden, and a story that's less about apples and more about blame. Adam takes a bite of the forbidden fruit, and what's his first move? He points the finger at Eve. And Eve? Well, she's got someone else to blame too: the serpent. Now, according to Legends of the Jews, Eve wasn't exactly rushing to confess her sins and beg for forgiveness. If she had, Ginzberg tells us, God, in His infinite mercy, would have probably granted it. He was waiting for a sign of remorse, a little humility, but they were too busy passing the buck.

The serpent? Ah, that's a different story altogether. God didn't even bother asking for his side. Boom. Judgment delivered. Why the rush? Because, as the tradition teaches, the serpent is a "villain, and the wicked are good debaters." Can you imagine the serpent's defense? Something along the lines of, "Hey, You gave them a command, I gave them an alternative. Their choice! Why are I being punished?". It's a pretty slick argument. And maybe God knew that getting into a debate with pure evil was a losing proposition. So, He cut to the chase.

The punishments? Oh, they're doozies. Ten of them, in fact. First, he loses his power of speech. Imagine, being cursed into silence. Then, his hands and feet are chopped off. Hence, the slithering. And his diet? Forget gourmet meals; he’s sentenced to eating dust. As Ginzberg recounts, even if the serpent manages to snag the most delicious meal, it turns to dust in his mouth.

It doesn't stop there. The curse extends to the serpent's very existence. He's doomed to suffer pain when shedding his skin. He's forever at odds with humanity – a constant state of enmity. And even the female serpent gets a raw deal. Their pregnancies are said to last seven long years!

Plus, humanity is hardwired to kill him on sight, and even in the Messianic future, when blessing is universal, the serpent won't escape his punishment. Finally, the serpent will vanish from the Holy Land when Israel follows God's path.

Wow. Talk about a complete and utter downfall. A cosmic demotion of the highest order. It’s a stark reminder that actions have consequences, and that sometimes, admitting our mistakes is the first step toward redemption. Perhaps if Adam and Eve had taken responsibility, the story – and the world – would be very different. But that, as they say, is a story for another time.

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Legends of the Jews 2:109Legends of the Jews

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909) · Public Domain

Paradise. Just the two of them and the lush, vibrant world around them. As it says in Legends of the Jews, God essentially told them, "The Lord has put us here to cultivate it and eat of its fruits." Sounds idyllic. Except for that one little caveat: the tree in the middle of the garden. "Concerning it alone," God warned, "God has forbidden us to eat of it, else...ye will die."

Enter the serpent. Now, this wasn't just any snake. This was a master manipulator, and he had his sights set on Eve. According to Ginzberg's retelling in Legends of the Jews, the serpent tried everything to convince her she had nothing to fear. He even went so far as to suggest that God was just jealous! "God knew that in the day that Adam and I ate of the fruit of the tree, we should be as He Himself," the serpent hissed. "It was jealousy that had made Him say, 'Ye shall not eat of it.'"

Eve was strong. She resisted. She refused to touch the tree. So, what did the serpent do? He upped the ante. He offered to pluck the fruit for her. Sneaky. Eve opened the gate of Paradise – can you – and the serpent slithered in.

Then, another twist! Scarcely was he inside when he suddenly said, "I repent of my words, I would rather not give thee of the fruit of the forbidden tree." This, of course, was just another ploy, a cunning device to tempt her even more.

The serpent only agreed to give her the fruit after she swore an oath – a powerful, binding oath – to make her husband, Adam, eat of it too. And this is where things get really intense. The oath, as described in Legends of the Jews, was no small thing: "By the throne of God, by the cherubim, and by the tree of life, I shall give my husband of this fruit, that he may eat, too." The weight of those words must have been immense.

With the oath sworn, the serpent ascended the tree. According to the legend, he injected his poison – "the poison of the evil inclination," or the yetzer hara (יֵצֶר הַרַע) in Hebrew – into the fruit itself. Then, he bent the branch down to the ground. Eve took hold of it, and in that instant, she knew. She was stripped of her righteousness, her innocence. "I began to weep," she said, "because of it and because of the oath the serpent had forced from me."

It's a story filled with temptation, manipulation, and a single, fateful choice. But what does it all mean? Perhaps it's a reminder of the power of our choices, the weight of our oaths, and the ever-present struggle between good and evil within us all. ..

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Book of Jubilees 3:38Book of Jubilees

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Sefaria Community Translation · CC-BY

The familiar story is this: in broad strokes, but some ancient texts give us a deeper look into the consequences, the divine anger, and the curses that followed.

The Book of Jubilees, a text considered canonical by some but relegated to the Apocrypha by others, fills in some of those gaps. It paints a vivid picture of God's reaction and the repercussions for the serpent, the woman, and the man.

First, the serpent. And God, according to Jubilees, "cursed the serpent, and was wroth with it for ever." This wasn't just a slap on the wrist. This was a permanent severing, a declaration of eternal antagonism.

Then comes the woman, Eve. Remember, she was the one who initially succumbed to the serpent's persuasion and then offered the fruit to Adam. As Jubilees tells it, "He was wroth with the woman, because she hearkened to the voice of the serpent, and did eat." The punishment? A starkly patriarchal one: "I shall greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy pains in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy return shall be unto thy husband, and he will rule over thee." Ouch. It reflects the social realities of the time it was written, a time when female submission to male authority was the norm.

Finally, Adam. He wasn't spared, either. "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat thereof, cursed be the ground for thy sake." The earth itself, the very source of sustenance, would now become a source of hardship.

What strikes me most about this passage from Jubilees is its starkness. It’s a raw depiction of divine anger and the cascading consequences of disobedience. These aren't just punishments; they're fundamental shifts in the relationship between humanity, the divine, and the natural world. The sweetness of the Garden is gone, replaced by pain, toil, and a hierarchical structure that would define human society for millennia.

How one act, one moment of yielding to temptation, can reshape the entire course of history. And even though these curses feel harsh, perhaps they also serve as a constant reminder of the responsibility that comes with free will.

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 30:1Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

Translation of the source text.Torat Emet (Yalkut Shimoni) · CC-BY-NC

"And the LORD God said to the serpent" (Genesis 3:14). Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: From where do we know that one does not plead on behalf of an inciter? From the primeval serpent. For Rabbi Simlai said: The serpent had many arguments to make, and he did not make them, and why did the Holy One, blessed be He, not make them for him? Because one does not plead on behalf of an inciter. What was there for him to say? "The words of the master and the words of the disciple - whose words does one heed?" [If God said do not eat and the serpent said eat, you should have heeded God.] It was taught: Rabbi says: In matters of honor one begins with the greater, as it is written, "And Moses said to Aaron and to Eleazar"; and in matters of disgrace one begins with the lesser, for first the serpent was cursed, and afterward Eve, and finally Adam was cursed. All who are addressed turn their face toward the back of the one speaking, except for three, because the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke with them directly. And these are: Adam, the serpent, and the fish. Adam, as it is said, "And to Adam He said" (verse 17); the serpent, "And the LORD God said to the serpent"; the fish, "And the LORD spoke to the fish" (Jonah 2:11). "Because you have done this." All that you did was for this; your every act was not for this. From the beginning of the book until here there are seventy-one mentions of the divine Name, telling that he was judged by a full Sanhedrin.

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