The Serpent Recruited to Speak Satan's Words in Eden

Every morning the beasts of the garden came to Adam and bowed. The lion lowered its head. The ox knelt. Even the serpent, the shrewdest of all the creatures God had shaped, bent low before the man made of dust.

Click for full size

Someone was watching who could not stand the sight of it.

A Lyre for the Accuser

Ha-Satan, the Accuser, waited until the others had scattered, then came to the serpent alone.

"Arise and come to me," he said. "I will tell you something that will serve you well."

He praised the creature the way flatterers do, calling it the cleverest animal in all of Eden, saying that was the very reason he had sought it out. Then he set the hook.

"Why do you bow to Adam? You came into being before he did. He should be bowing to you. Rise up. Let us drive him out of the Garden together, and you will have your share in everything that follows."

The serpent asked how such a thing could be done. The Accuser had his answer ready, and it was a strange one.

"You will be a lyre for me," he said, "and I will speak my words through your mouth."

The serpent would be the instrument. Ha-Satan would be the hand across the strings. Whatever came out would sound like the serpent's own voice, and no one would ever hear the player hidden behind it.

The Angel Who Vanished by the Tree

What happened next, Eve told her children long afterward, when she was old and Adam newly buried. She told it in the first person, the way a person tells a thing that will not leave the mouth any other way.

"I heard a voice praising God in the tongue the angels use," she said, "and I knelt down to listen. I saw the likeness of an angel there, bright at the edge of the trees. Then I looked again and it was gone, and only the serpent was left, coiled where the light had been."

It asked her why God had set them in the Garden, and what they were permitted to eat. She told it they ate from every tree but one, the tree in the middle, lest they die.

It did not flinch. "You will not die," it said. "God knows that on the day you eat of it, your eyes will open and you will become like God, knowing good and evil. That is why He deceived you." And it showed her the glory that hung about the branches, a light she had never once let herself look at straight.

The First Oath Was Sworn to the Accuser

"I wanted it. I will not pretend otherwise. But I was afraid. 'The tree is beautiful to me,' I told the serpent, 'but I am afraid to touch it.' So I asked it to bring the fruit to me, as if that would make the sin smaller. Instead it bent the branches down to the ground, low enough that I had no excuse left in me."

Even then she did not swallow at once. She bit through the skin only, and she waited to fall dead. Nothing happened. The whole garden held still. So she ate the rest.

Before the juice was dry on her lips, the voice inside the serpent made her swear an oath, the first oath a human being ever spoke, that she would carry the fruit to Adam too. She swore it. She swore it not to God but to the thing hiding in the snake. Then the serpent uncoiled and was gone, and she stood alone with what she had done.

Every Tree Shed Its Leaves but One

She looked down and she was naked, and she had never been so cold. She ran to the trees for leaves to cover herself, and every tree she reached had let its leaves fall. Every one. All but the fig, the tree whose fruit had ruined her. Only that tree would clothe her.

Then she called Adam. She would not later repeat the words she used to talk him into it. They were blasphemous words, and they worked, and she let that be enough. He took the fruit from her hand. He ate. And the moment he swallowed he knew what he was, all of it at once, and he turned on her.

"You wicked woman," he cried, "what have you brought down upon me? You have cut me off from the glory of God."

What the Dying Man Told His Son

Years later, when Adam lay dying, he called Seth to his side and told the story once more, gently now, the way a father hands a hard thing to a son.

"After your mother and I were made," he said, "God set us in Paradise. We were free to eat from every tree in the garden but one, the Tree of Knowledge that grew in the very center. That fruit alone was kept from us."

Then he told Seth a thing the boy had never known. God had divided the garden between them before any of it went wrong.

"He gave me the trees of the east and the north," Adam said, "and your mother the trees of the south and the west. And He set two angels to guard us."

Two angels. A whole garden. One rule. And still it had gone the way it went. Adam did not curse Eve at the end, and he did not curse the serpent. He only told his son where each tree had stood, as if the map of that lost place still burned behind his eyes.