2024-09-04_The Fall of Man, which is to say, “the serpent beguiled me, and I ate.”

Genesis 3:1: Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

In the ancient world, the serpent represents the cycle of rebirth, renewal, and death, for the serpent continually sheds and regrows its skin. The cycle is not static, though, for with each of the rebirths there is a renewal that incorporates lessons from past experience into a deepening consciousness. In essence, some of the old skin persists and then is incorporated into the new skin. Thus, the shedding of the old skin is identified with the forward progression of the serpent as if pushing out and away the old skin, while at the same time holding onto some of the older skin with the new, is what propels the serpent in the other direction.

In this way, the serpent is more subtle than the other beasts of the field. For as a beast of the field, its time is cyclical: Beasts, for the most part, do not know the progression of the years in terms of linear chronology so much as a repeated cycle of seasons (spring rebirth, summer and autumn renewal, and winter death). And yet, because a serpent progresses forward linearly in its cyclical shedding of its past, it has an awareness of linear chronology closer to what humans know than what other beasts know. The serpent, therefore, is symbolic of the twilight between human and animal consciousness: It is below human reason but above animal instinct. We can call this the base subconsciousness of the human mind: It is base, not in the sense of evil, but in the sense of not including those higher elements of reason by which moral restraint is imposed. Evil implies an intended malevolence for its own sake (see St. Augustine’s Confessions), but the base subconsciousness identified with the serpent is more akin to the inquisitiveness natural to a thinking mind that is insufficiently formed morally and, therefore, more susceptible to mental trickery or spiritual temptation.

Now, the serpent seems to be both inside the mind and coming from outside the mind. This is better indicated in the original Hebrew, where the word arumim can be translated as “now the two (the woman and the serpent) were both naked.” Nakedness in Eden implies more than just innocence. It also implies an intrinsic identification between the two, for there is no obstruction literally between them. Adam and his wife (not yet named Eve) are “one flesh,” and so they are naked with each other. So, the arumim shared between the woman and the serpent implies the union of the two: The serpent is the symbol of her base subconsciousness, which at this point is the fertile soil from which is grown the inquisitiveness that tests her thinking mind. At the same time, because the woman lacks experience in entertaining challenging questions born from her own base subconsciousness, these questions arise in her conscious mind as if challenging tests or temptations coming from outside the mind. The serpent’s subtlety is a sudden leap forward in the woman’s intellection of the world: Where before she might ask, now suddenly she might ask to deceive. Where before she might speak plainly, and so mean exactly what she says, now suddenly she might speak tactically, saying or omitting X to insinuate Y, to acquire some real or perceived advantage to herself at the expense of the listener. In essence, she is aware suddenly of an apparent capacity to outsmart the world, and that is so new to her intellection that it will seem as if an awareness coming from outside the mind. Interestingly, the Hebrew world that is used for “subtle” here is arum, which is the root of the word arumim. In Hebrew, nakedness is the same underlying concept as shrewdness or subtlety: When man is naked, and seen as he is without obstruction, he is seen to be shrewd and subtle. Thus, when the women entertains the question posed by her own base subconsciousness, a question meant to make her aware of her own apparent capacity for shrewdness and subtlety (and a question that is at first so startling as to seem to come from outside the mind), more deeply she becomes aware of her own humanity distinctive from the beasts (beasts having no subtlety) and from God (God demanding that we know Him in our obedience to Him, and not in our subtle dissimulation of Him). She sees herself as properly existing between God and the beasts, rather than as existing for the purpose of her ascent to God, just as the serpent exists between man’s higher reason and beasts’ instincts. In embracing a humanity that is subtle, the woman must step away from a humanity that obeys, for there can be no conniving, dissimulation, and tactical deceit in remaining obedient to God.

Thus, the serpent’s question is really the woman’s question, except that for the first time she is asking a leading question meant not to elicit a straightforward answer but to excuse connivance and dissimulation at the expense of her obedience to God. She is challenging her obedience and giving herself a rationale to follow through with an act of disobedience. In itself, this is not a sin but rather a natural progression of intellection, for the emerging self-consciousness of a person who can reason inevitably is going to be tempted to establish her self-regard not in her fidelity to God but in her subtle reasoning. The question is: Does she have the moral clarity to step back from the intellectual (and spiritual) precipice and then to embrace wisdom from self-restraint?

Genesis 3:2-5: And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree, which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For 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.

Notice that as the woman first tests her capacity for intellectual connivance and dissimulation, so she sees God as exhibiting these same traits. She is imagining a “God” who is not the actual God who created her and who walks with her in Eden. This false “God” is an anthropomorphic idealization of herself and her newly discovered intellectual subtlety. In a sense, she is setting herself up to disobey this false “God” on the pretense that this false “God” already had lied to her and, therefore, is not worthy of obedience. For this rationale to work, though, she must try to forget the actual God who speaks plainly and lovingly.

The conversation between the woman and the serpent is really a self-conversation, and so it is the woman fundamentally who answers her own implicit leading question by maintaining firmly that “Ye shall not surely die.” This self-conversation is implicit in the fact that the serpent in the ancient world also symbolized man’s enlightenment through discursive reasoning. The snake is symbolically a scavenger of many ideas, philosophies, and cultures. It is the ultimate syncretist. Like any syncretist, the serpent lures the mind away from tradition to seek new insights in what is unknown or known but forbidden. From the perspective of tradition, this is diabolical, and for this reason principally many over the years have identified the serpent with Satan, even though the original Hebrew never makes that connection. Nevertheless, a mind incapable or unwilling at least to question tradition is not going to grow very much in moral discernment, let alone in wisdom (see 1 John 4:1: Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world). Questioning what is traditional is the same as questioning what is novel, for “false prophets” can hide themselves in the cloak of tradition as much as in a newer garment. So, discursive reasoning can lead one to higher moral discernment and greater wisdom, and so the voice of the serpent within the self-conversation of an intellectual or spiritual seeker is not in itself problematic if the standard of what turns out to be true is that which is from God. The problem here is that the woman is not testing the spirits (meaning seeking the truth from her discursive reasoning) by the standard of what conforms to God but rather by the standard of what conforms to the false “God” that she is imagining and to which she is attributing her newly discovered intellectual subtlety. Thus, in her self-conversation, she is simply reasserting to herself that “God” is a subtle liar like herself and that, therefore, God’s commandment is no more authoritative than her inquisitiveness.

From this perspective, knowing good and evil is the same as blurring good and evil, for if “God” is a liar, and if “God” is the standard by which good is separated from evil, then actually there is no standard between good and evil. Lying obfuscates, while standards clarify, and so the “God” who lies is obfuscating while pretending to clarify. Thus, knowing as this false “God” knows is in effect knowing that objective truth is not really objective at all, for the objectivity of truth is just another lie. The next step is to say that truth has power not in its objectivity but in the power of the person insisting that it is true – what is true is what is said by the man thrusting the bayonet against the man who is defenseless. This is why knowing good and evil comes directly after the assertion “Ye shall not surely die,” for “Ye shall not surely die” is an expression of great power, even power over life and death. This is a divine power, for the God who warned them that they would die if they ate of the forbidden fruit presumably has the power to make them die if they do so. The woman is convincing herself that she can have this same power, for she already has substituted in her mind the false “God” for the real God, and the false “God” is no more than an anthropomorphic idealization of herself. Because she can have the same power as the “God” in her mind that lies as she does, so that standard by which good is separated from evil is subject to the same subtle dissimulation she exercises in herself, which is to say, that there is no actual line between good and evil. In idealizing her newly discovered capacity for subtle dissimulation, the woman has replaced objective truth and divine authority with intellectual – and, therefore, moral – relativism and exaltation of self. This is the end of the serpent’s questioning when that questioning is not restrained by sufficient piety to God’s Word.

Genesis 3:6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Notice the order of events: First, the woman becomes self-conscious in a manner that exalts her own humanity at the expense of obedience to God. She identifies herself apart from her prior relationship with God by her capacity for subtle dissimulation. Only after that happens within in her mind – first startling her as the subtle voice from within her base subconscious, but then as a more familiar self-conversation in her conscious mind – through her discursive reasoning is she tempted by the fruit. She had noticed the forbidden fruit before this event. God had pointed it out to Adam, and Adam presumably had pointed it out to her. She knows that God has forbidden them from eating of the fruit. Moreover, she knows that the tree is in the midst of the garden, which is to say, in the most prominent place. These are generalized statements with God’s placement of the tree, and His commandment not to eat of it, being in each of these statements the chief reference point. Now that she has embraced her capacity for subtle dissimulation, she sees the tree in much more detail. She sees that the tree is good for food and pleasant to the eye. God is no longer the chief reference point here. She is, since she is the one determining by her own standard that the tree is good for food and pleasant to the eye. We can see in this her reasoning mature, since she is able to deduce what God is not specifically revealing to her. Nevertheless, what is important here is that she is reasoning out to conclusions that are contrary to God’s commandment. After all, how can fruit be good for food, when God has said not to eat of it? How can something be pleasant to the eye that God orders to be avoided? This implies a goodness and a beauty apart from God’s will. If indeed apart from God’s will, then by what standard is the woman able to say that it is good and beautiful? It must be by her own standard, or by the standard of the false “God” imagined as an anthropomorphic idealization of her own mind.

Temptation first works on her senses – hence, the focus on the fruit being good to eat and on the aesthetic beauty of the tree. This is because temptation works to pull the mind down from godly to base things. Before this moment, Adam’s physicality (made from dust) and spirituality (God’s breath breathed into his nostrils) implies that body and spirit are equally good and also made to be in harmony with each other. Now, the movement of the mind from godly to base is a downward movement. The sensual is losing its equality of goodness with the spiritual, if not in the eyes of God, then surely in the perverted eyes of men. That is the only explanation for how the woman can find sensual pleasure apart from God’s will – the sensual pleasure must be of a lesser modality than the spiritual, and she must be preferring what is lesser to what is greater. What we see here then is the birth of Gnosticism, the dualistic philosophical school at war with God’s Word that says that the sensual is intrinsically evil and incapable by definition from being spiritual. The Gnostic forgets (or chooses to ignore) how the perversion of the sensual came as a result not of its intrinsic badness but by the woman’s subtle dissimulation: She finds pleasure in her ability to lie, and then falls for her own lie, namely the lie that the sensual is intrinsically incompatible with the spiritual, and that the sensual is to be preferred over the spiritual.

If the tree is to be desired to make one wise, rather than God being desired to make one wise, then this is a false wisdom. It is unclear if the woman knows that she is embracing false wisdom as a kind of rebellion against God’s wisdom, or if she is confused already about what wisdom is by her own subtle dissimulation. Whether perverse or ignorant, the woman is lost already, and she has not even plucked the fruit from the tree yet.

Keil & Delitzsch Biblical Commentary: As distrust of God's command leads to a disregard of it, so the longing for a false independence excites a desire for the seeming good that has been prohibited; and this desire is fostered by the senses, until it brings forth sin. Doubt, unbelief, and pride were the roots of the sin of our first parents, as they have been of all the sins of their posterity. The more trifling the object of their sin seems to have been, the greater and more difficult does the sin itself appear; especially when we consider that the first men stood in a more direct relation to God, their Creator, than any other man has ever done, that their hearts were pure, their discernment clear, their intercourse with God direct, that they were surrounded by gifts just bestowed by Him, and therefore could not excuse themselves on the ground of any misunderstanding of the divine prohibition, which threatened them with the loss of life in the event of disobedience. Yet not only did the woman yield to the seductive wiles of the serpent, but even the man allowed himself to be tempted by the woman.

Notice that the woman does not just taste of the fruit. She eats it. The connotation is that she is hungry for this experience. Indeed, we may presume that her first experience of hunger is being hungry to consummate the sin in her flesh that she had started in her mind. Sin creates hunger, and the consummation of sin exacerbates hunger. Grace overcomes hunger, not just physically, but spiritually. The woman eating the forbidden fruit is the opposite end of the spectrum then of the Feeding of the 5000. Notice also that the first time Adam is specifically referred to as her husband is when the woman brings the fruit back to him, so that the two will consummate this sin together as a kind of second marriage of their own making. In the first marriage, God brings the woman to Adam as the father of the bride. Now, in this second marriage, the bride brings sin to the groom, and they consummate together this awakening born of disobedience to God. Notice finally that the serpent has departed suddenly from the scene, for the self-conversation is over. Instead, discursive reasoning has given way to spiritual hunger and a perverse focus on the sensual as separated from (and to be preferred to) the spiritual.

Genesis 3:7: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

The opening of the eyes calls to mind Adam awakening from his deep sleep, when God made the woman from his side. In a sense, this is a second awakening, except instead of the joy of recognizing in the woman a partner who is proper to a man, there is the guilt and the fear of seeing in one another a partner in crime. Not only are they conscious of their sin, they are at the same time conscious of how they aided and abetted each other in this sin. The result is a divide between Adam and the woman that effectively breaks apart their “one flesh.” Now, in this state of consciousness, their nakedness reminds them of what they have broken, and for this reason they are ashamed to see each other naked. They lost their innocence, but what is most problematic for them is that they traded in their innocence not for a more mature love, but rather for a second marriage born of mistrust and calculation. Rather than stand together they will be looking to throw the other one to the wolves if needed for their own advantage.

The fig leaves represent shame, separation, and continued dissimulation, for what we wear – how we present ourselves to one another – will be the first method by which we endeavor to outsmart our spouses, our families, our friends, and the world at large for our own perceived benefit. In making aprons, they are associating their consummation in sin with consummation of marriage. This indicates that they have a sense already that their sin will spread beyond the two of them. Their sin will be intimately tied to their descendants. The ripple effect is going to be far reaching. There is a kind of self-deception in the aprons as they try to cover up, and one may presume to forget over time, just how far reaching their sin will be.