St. Didymus the Blind and Ibn Ezra on Genesis 3:14
Two great readers of the Bible, centuries distant from one another, ask similar questions about the same mysterious verse.
St. Didymus the Blind was a monk and scholar in the 4th Century. He reads Genesis 3:14 thus:
The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, accursed are you beyond all the beasts and all the wild animals of the earth. Upon your chest and belly will you travel, and eat dirt all the days of your life. To both Adam and Eve God put the question, Why did you do it? He was told by them who was responsible, Adam blaming the woman, and the woman the serpent. Up to this point he had not yet asked the serpent; as the chief villain it could not transfer responsibility to anyone else. Hence, instead of the question, Why did you do it? he immediately imposed retribution in the words, Because you have done this, accursed are you beyond all the beasts and all the wild animals of the earth. It is clear, however, that it is not this serpent to which God applies retribution; it was not naturally able to proffer deceitful words that would encourage God to inflict retribution on it. Paul, for example, in writing to the Corinthians, realizing that it was not an irrational animal, said, “I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from sincerity.” Paul in fact is comparing to the serpent’s deception of Eve the deception committed by loose-living and cunning people who had appeared claiming that there was no resurrection of the dead and that the Savior had not been born of a virgin, and deceiving the neophytes in Christ at Corinth whose faculties of the heart had not been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil. The comparison shows that instead of a serpent, it was a hostile force, which Scripture normally calls a devil; it is not referred to simply as “a serpent,” as in the text referring to them, “Serpents, brood of vipers,” but “the serpent,” a term suggesting the devil in person, who is responsible for evil in others as well; it is “at work among the sons who are disobedient,” and does its work by implanting its own attitudes in them by a clever deception.1
Centuries later, Ibn Ezra considered similar questions about this verse. Read him in the translation by teacher Michael Carasik (whom I interviewed):
Some say the woman was capable of understanding him because she knew the language of the animals. (This implies that “he said” is metaphoric: he “signaled” to her.) Others think this “serpent” was Satan. Have they forgotten v. 3:14? Or do they think Satan crawls on his belly and eats dirt? Not to mention v. 3:15—how exactly does one strike at Satan’s head? According to Saadia, once we realize that no creature but man has intelligence and the ability to speak, we are forced to conclude that neither the serpent nor Balaam’s ass really spoke; an angel did the speaking for them. Samuel b. Hophni says it did speak, to which Solomon ibn Gabirol, the Spanish poet (who was also a great scholar), replies, “If the serpent could speak, why do they not speak nowadays?” (Scripture does not say anywhere that this ability was taken away.) Rightly, however, we must assume that these words have their straightforward meaning. The serpent spoke in language and walked upright: the One who gave intelligence to human beings gave it to him as well. If it was an angel speaking through the serpent’s mouth, the serpent certainly committed no sin. And an angel who would make the serpent say such things was certainly no agent of the Holy One; an angel cannot rebel against God’s orders. (As for those who ask how the serpent managed to find the woman—what a stupid question.) … Many people have been confused enough to inquire why the serpent was cursed. Did he have intelligence and free will? Had he been commanded not to tempt the woman?2
Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis, trans. Robert C. Hill, vol. 132, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 94–95.
Michael Carasik, ed., Genesis: Introduction and Commentary, trans. Michael Carasik, The Commentators’ Bible (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2018), 38-42.