Parshat Bereshit5 min read

Seventy-One Angels Sentenced the Serpent in the Garden

The serpent still had legs when the angels sat down. God did not strike it where it stood. The court took its feet.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Seventy-One Angels Took Their Seats
  2. The Serpent Heard the Charge
  3. The Verdict Came in Pieces
  4. They Cut Away Its Hands and Feet
  5. The Cry Had Nowhere Left to Go

The serpent still had legs when the angels sat down around it.

Seventy-One Angels Sentenced the Serpent in the Garden Click for full size

The fruit was already eaten. The man and the woman were already hiding among the trees. God did not raise a hand and strike the creature dead where it stood. He called a court.

Seventy-One Angels Took Their Seats

Seventy-one of them came down. Angels who had never sat in judgment took places in a ring, the number of a full Sanhedrin (סנהדרין), the court that would one day try a man for his life. Creation was six days old. No one had been accused of anything. No sentence had ever been passed. Now the first courtroom in the world closed around a single defendant.

The being in the dock stood upright, tall and bright, the cleverest creature God had made. It had used that cleverness to talk the woman into the one act that unmade the garden.

The angels knew the charge before they sat. They had watched the serpent coil close to Eve. They had watched it lower the branches so the fruit hung within her reach. They had heard it promise her that her eyes would open and she would not die.

She had died a little. So had the man. So had the ground under their feet, which would now grow thorns. The angels weighed all of it. They did not hurry. A court that hurries is a mob, and this was not a mob.

The Serpent Heard the Charge

The case was not complicated. The serpent had been the shrewdest of the beasts, and it had turned that shrewdness against the two creatures placed above it. It had not eaten the fruit. It had done something the court found worse. It had arranged for someone else to eat, and then it had stepped back to watch.

God spoke the wrath that would not cool. He cursed the serpent, and was wroth with it for ever. Not for an afternoon. Not until the creature bowed. For ever. Eden stayed broken.

The same bench would soon hear the woman's sentence in ten parts, and the man's, and the curse laid on the ground. Eve would hear her ten parts through an interpreter. God would not speak to her as He would later speak to Sarah. The serpent heard Him without a go-between. It went first, because it had moved first.

The Verdict Came in Pieces

The judgment took the creature apart, one gift at a time. Its legs were forfeit. The upright beast that had stood eye to eye with Eve would crawl on its belly for the rest of time and eat the dust it crawled through. Its speech was forfeit too. The mouth that had reasoned the woman into ruin would never frame a word again.

A permanent enmity was set between the serpent and the children of the woman it had deceived, heel against head, for as long as either kind drew breath. (Genesis 3:14-15)

Then the court rose. The verdict had been spoken. What remained was the carrying out of it, and that work was not a word. It was hands.

They Cut Away Its Hands and Feet

The angels came down from heaven to execute the sentence on the body of the condemned. They took hold of the serpent. They chopped off its hands and its feet, the limbs that had let it stand among the upright creatures and walk into Eden as their equal.

The serpent screamed. The pain was past bearing, and the cry did not stay in the garden. It carried out past the walls of Eden, out over the new and grieving earth, until the whole world heard it. Every creature alive heard the first sentence of the first court land on the first defendant. The sound rolled across the entire face of the ground, and then it stopped.

The serpent lay in the dust it had been condemned to swallow, voiceless now, legless now, lifting its head only to strike.

The Cry Had Nowhere Left to Go

The man and the woman would be sent out past a turning sword. The serpent dragged itself away on a belly it had never had before. The garden did not come back.

Seventy-one angels rose from the first dock in the world. The number would one day fill the Chamber of Hewn Stone, where a king could not overrule a capital court. It began here, over a serpent, in a garden that no longer exists.

The cry it had thrown across the world had nowhere left to go but forward, into every generation that would walk with a heel uncovered.

SerpentEdenAngelsJudgmentSanhedrinGenesisPunishment
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From the tradition

Sources

2 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 2:65Legends 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

Compiled by Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, the pronouncement of the serpent’s doom wasn't a solitary act. God convened a Sanhedrin – a court – of seventy-one angels to sit in judgment. Think of it: a heavenly court, deciding the fate of the creature who brought about humanity's fall.

The execution of that judgment? That, too, was entrusted to angels. They chopped off the serpent's hands and feet. The suffering was immense. So great, in fact, that his cries of agony echoed across the entire world. A truly epic moment of divine justice.

What about Eve? What was her fate?

The verdict against Eve, we are told, consisted of ten curses. These weren't just words; they were pronouncements that shaped the very essence of womanhood, impacting her physical, spiritual, and social existence, even down to this very day.

The Legends of the Jews tells us that God didn't speak directly to Eve. The only woman God ever addressed directly was Sarah, Abraham's wife. In Eve's case, He used an interpreter. Why? We can only speculate. Perhaps it highlights the gravity of her transgression, or perhaps it reveals something deeper about the relationship between the divine and humanity. Either way, it adds another layer of complexity to this foundational story.

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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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