Bereishit: Snake

a Torah monologue by Melissa Carpenter, Maggidah

I was created in Chapter Two. The first creation story in the Bible didn’t even mention me. I woke up on damp dirt under bare sky. No plants, no animals. Just a clump of dirt next to me, slowly changing shape as if somebody invisible were modelling it.¹ I knew who: God. I watched the hands form, and then the face. As the creature developed, beams of light appeared around it.

“Hey, God, what are you creating?”

“Adam.² Humankind. Or a model of it.”

I tried to look at my own body, for comparison, but all I saw was a squiggle of light between the adam-in-progress and—what? My mind?

“Hey, God, what am I?”

“An archetype. Of the snake. You are the kind of snake that slides into the human mind. Not the real-world animal that slithers over the ground or hangs from trees.”

“Wow. Do all archetypes slide into human minds?”

“In a way. Archetypes will inspire different groups of humans to invent their own myths about each of you: the healer, the king, birth, death, various gods—”

“Gods? Hey, am I an archetype of a god?”

“No. Oh, some humans might invent a snake god, why not? But you, Snake, are unique. I created you because humans are going to be complicated. They’ll operate mostly by instinct and habit, like other animals. But I’m giving them a bit a free will, to make things interesting. And humans will need a lot of doubts and questions and temptations to make them use their free will. Your job is to make them think, so they can choose to change.”

I had a job. God created me for a purpose. It made me feel tight inside my skin. Ready to shed and be a bigger snake.

“Ssso then, are you an archetype of a god?”

God laughed. I think. I couldn’t see God’s face, and I realized the sound of laughter was something in my mind. Like words. I found out later that real snakes are deaf. Not a problem for an archetype.

“I’m not that kind of god. But humans will invent myths about me, too.”

“That what are you, God? Are you some other kind of archetype?”

“That, Snake, is a trick question. It depends on how you define archetype. And reality. And creation.”

God finished the human’s eyelashes, then breathed into its nostrils. The dirt figure sighed, sat up, and looked straight at me.

I crawled out of my skin.

I woke up the second time in a garden. Eden. It didn’t look real. Every leaf, every fruit, looked as if God had just painted it. There was no decay, no dust.

I knew the real world could never be that perfect. Maybe this garden was another archetype.

The two trees in the middle of the garden sure looked like archetypes. They had bark, branches, leaves, fruit, like all the other trees; but they glowed meaningfully. I looped myself around the trunk of the first one and stuck my neck out, pretending to be an extra branch, but I had no bark. Only bite. So I tasted a fruit, and then I knew it was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.

That gave me a lot to think about. But I was distracted by the second tree. I stretched my neck out farther and bit into one of its fruits. And I knew it was the Tree of Life.

After that I wasn’t hungry any more. I slinked around the garden, hissing to myself, looking for the exit. But there was no exit. I was stuck in the garden of archetypes.

Still, I didn’t have to do the job God gave me. I could go on strike. Thanks to the Tree of Knowledge, I knew I had a choice. Which meant I had a share in the human’s bit of free will.

Going on strike was boring, so I decided to look for the adam. Animals were starting to appear in the garden; they were all perfect, without a single scratch or scar, and they all ate fruit.³ But they never went to the middle of the garden.

When I headed back that way, I came face to face with the adam. It frowned, then said: “Nachash!”⁴ Snake.

I followed the human around while it named other things, hoping it would invent verbs soon. Maybe someday it would build up to complete sentences, and we could have a conversation.

But before the adam thought up verbs, God dropped by. Of course I couldn’t see God, but I could tell by the wind. The adam slumped down into a coma, and the wind really picked up. Then Eden was still again, and there were two humans lying on the ground. They both looked like the original, except for a few minor details. They sat up and stared at one another. Then they started talking in complete sentences. I guess it takes two humans to invent a language.

After a while they started touching one another, and they had a really good time. At least that’s how it looked to me, from my perch in the Tree of Knowledge. The man dozed off afterward, and the woman wandered over toward me. I felt a little push, like a gust of wind.

Right. God. I was here for a purpose.

The woman stopped in front of me and put her hands behind her back, as if she were afraid she might accidentally touch the tree.

I hung a loop of myself from a branch, and started talking. “Pssst! Did God really say that you shouldn’t eat from any tree of the garden?”⁵

Sure enough, she couldn’t resist explaining. “Oh, we can eat the fruit of the trees of the garden. Except for the tree in the middle of the garden. God said: You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, lest you die.”⁶

Then her eyes shifted, and I knew she wasn’t as sure of herself as she sounded. After all, she was remembering something God had said when she was only half of the adam. Maybe she was missing something?

I whispered: “Which of the two trees in the middle was God talking about?”

She had no answer. But I knew eating from the Tree of Life would make her immortal, and then she could never live in the real world. If she ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, she’d find out she could make choices.

Maybe the humans even had to disobey God, so they could experience inner conflict. You can’t make a serious choice without inner conflict.

I said, “Oh, you will not die for certain. Actually, God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and bad.”⁷

I figured God must know the concepts “good” and “bad”, since God created the archetype of that tree. But God couldn’t chew over the fruits of knowledge. That was for human minds—and the archetypes inspiring them.

So does God have free will?

Trick question! Depends on how you define God.

The woman thought for a while, gazing at the nearest fruit, and I knew I’d done my job and tempted her. She wanted to become like God. Finally she touched the fruit. It fell into her hand.

She took a bite, swallowed, and smiled. Then she ran back to the man, nudged him awake, and held out the glowing fruit. He bit right into it.

After that, the two humans were more thoughtful. When I threw out a question, they’d argue about the answer. Life was more interesting.

When I asked them about the details that made their bodies different, they got self-conscious. They sewed together fig leaves and made themselves aprons to hide the most obvious differences. Silly, if you ask me, but they got satisfaction out of it.

Then one afternoon the wind came back. God. The humans must have remembered that God comes in the wind, because I saw a new expression on their faces. Inner conflict! They ran behind a tree with a lot of low branches. As if they could hide from God, the way they wore aprons to hide from one another.

The voice of God rang through the garden. “Where are you?”⁸

Good question. Where were they now? How much had they changed? But the man took the question literally, and said, “I heard your sound in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid.”

“Who told you that you are naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

“Uh, the woman that you put by my side, she gave me something from the tree, and I ate.”

What an answer! Instead of taking responsibility, he blames both God and the woman. Can you believe that idiot ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad? I realized that once humans know there are such things as good and bad, they spend the rest of their lives figuring out what’s what.

God asked the woman what she had done, and she admitted she ate the fruit, but she blamed me.

Now, I was ready to own up to what I said, and explain why I said it. But God didn’t ask me. I guess God figured I was just doing my job, and went directly to the curses. It became clear that real snakes and real humans were going to have a hard time in the real world.

After the cursing was over, the two humans didn’t look so fresh anymore. They even had some scabs where they’d pricked themselves sewing the leaves together. As if God had already clothed them in real human skins.⁹

Also they both looked depressed.

God spoke again. To me, I think. “Hey, the adam has become like one of us, knowing good and bad. And now, lest it stretch out its hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever—”

Then God made an opening from the Garden of Eden into the real world, and a wind pushed the humans through. I guess they were finally complicated enough.

I thought of going into the real world too, but God set up this flaming, whirling sword at the gate. And besides, my skin was feeling tight again. I shrugged it off.

When I woke up the third time, I was in the book of Exodus, in the middle of a story about Moses and Pharaoh and magic.¹⁰ The real world was crawling with real snakes, but I was still an archetype, hanging out with Knowledge and Life.

I know where the exit is now, but I’m not going to leave the Garden of Eden. I’m going to keep whispering doubts and questions into all your dim human minds. After all, the more you humans stop to think, the more you make real choices. And the world is slowly getting better.

But it’s still not good enough, not by a long shot. Bad things keep on happening to good people. So I’ve got a question for you. Does God understand good and bad?

Trick question!

—

After Genesis 1:1-2:4a, in which God creates the universe in six days and rests on the seventh, is a second creation story begins. In this story, God makes earth and heaven (Genesis 2:4b), and fresh water wells up from the ground and waters the surface of the earth (Genesis 2:6). Then, before creating rain or plants, God shapes a human out of the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:5, 2:7) and blows into its nostrils the breath of life.
adam (אָדָם) = humankind; a human being. (From the same root as adamah, אֲדָמָה = ground, dirt; and adom, אָדֺם = red-brown.)
Genesis 1:29-30.
nachash (נָחָשׁ) = snake, serpent. (Probably from the same root as nichash, נִחַשׁ = read omens, practiced divination; and nechoshet, נְחֺשֶׁת = copper, bronze.)
Genesis 3:1
Genesis 3:2-3.
Genesis 3:4-5.
Genesis 3:9.
Genesis 3:21.
The next appearance of the word nachash in the Bible is Exodus 4:3, when Moses’ staff first transforms into a snake.