The Pentateuch, in Its Progressive Revelations of God to Men

by Henry Cowles

I. Is this description symbolic or historic; i. e. symbolic of all human sinning; or historic as to this first sin, its antecedents and immediate consequents?

II. The moral trial;

III. The temptation;

IV. The fall;

V. The first promise;

VI. The curse, being the first installment of the great penalty upon transgression.

I. The preliminary question as to the character of this record demands a brief notice. In my view it is not to be taken as a symbolic representation of the universalfact that the race yield to temptation and fall before it, but as a historical account of the first human sin—including the person of the tempter and his methods; the working of his temptations upon Eve and then upon Adam and the first group of immediate results.——Under this construction of the narrative, I find here a real serpent, and a real, not a merely symbolical, Satan—the serpent supplying the external guise, the sense-medium; but Satan, the intelligent mind, the malign purpose. The narrative seems to indicate that Satan chose the serpent for his service because of his well known subtlety. It is of small account to push our conjectures on this point beyond what is written (here and elsewhere); but it is supposable that the serpent was Satan’s fittest instrument as being less likely to excite surprise by his uttered words.

That this record speaks of a real serpent and of a personal devil I am constrained to believe, because,

1. This is the obvious sense of the narrative—is the construction which the mass of readers most naturally put upon it, supposing them to be unsophisticated, holding their minds in harmony with the simplicity of the Scripture narrative and so in a mood to take most readily its obvious sense.

2. This construction is implied and thereby endorsed in subsequent scriptures: e. g. Isaiah (65: 25) having said—“The wolf and the lamb shall feed together”—peace and love supplanting violence and cruelty—adds, “And dust shall be the serpent’s meat”—with manifest reference to this primal curse on Satan’s special agent. See also a similar reference in Solomon’s Messianic Psalm (72: 9): “His enemies shall lick the dust.” Also Micah 7: 17.——These allusions presuppose a real serpent in the scenes of Eden.