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Both Hebrew and non-Hebrew ancient cosmologies envisioned life as a struggle between Order and Chaos, maintained by divine governance. And most world cultures include a serpent who symbolizes Chaos: Azi-Dahaka in Persia, Jörmungandr in Scandinavia, Shesha in India, Tiamat in Babylon, the Python in Greece, Ronin of the Amazon, Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerica, the Horned Serpent of the Cherokee and Ojibwe, Dan and Aidophedo in West Africa, Aida-Wedo in Benin and Haiti, and Apophis in Egypt. In Hebrew, they are referred to as a tannin (תַּנִּין), which can mean serpent, Sea monster, dragon or crocodile, depending on the context.
Serpent symbolism was rich in the ancient Near-East. But by the time the story of Adam and Eve was written the symbolism of Egyptian snakes would have been particularly salient and widely understood due to Israel's slavery in the Egyptian Empire of Pharaoh Ramesses II (1279 BC - 1213 BC). The Egyptian serpent was a symbol for duality or, more accurately, for the power that results in duality. It was simultaneously creative and destructive: creative in the sense that multiplicity is created out of unity, destructive in the sense that creation represents the rupture of the perfection. When it is realised that the serpent bears both a forked tongue and a double penis, the underlying wisdom of the choice becomes clear. As a symbol of duality, the serpent represents intellect, the faculty by which man differentiates. But unchecked differentiation is Chaos. To merely know without synthesising, or to create from knowledge without purpose or limitation, is to parody God — which is why it is an Egyptian symbol for both wisdom and death, and probably why, if it was borrowing the serpent from Egypt, Genesis uses it as symbol for temptation.
Apopis, the Chaos⇆Dragon of Egypt
Nehebkau was the original, primary serpent god of Egypt and initially a Chaos⇆Dragon like his counterpart Apopis. But by the time of Israel's enslavement the symbol of the Egyptian serpent had evolved. The god Ra had come to be known for fashioning Order out of Chaos by taming Nehebkau's chaotic nature, having applied fingernail to snake-spine and thus transforming him from a demonic deity into a benevolent, protective one. Thus snakes had evolved to represent both protection from Chaos and also of Chaos itself (Apopis). This is a reflection of the shared Israelite and Egyptian belief that the potential for Order emerges from Chaos, and, specifically, the potential for protection from what was once feared.
The Egyptians revered the serpent because they feared it for its power and danger, but they also honored the serpent because at times it offered protection. Thus they regarded the snake as both friend and fiend, protector and enemy, and the personification of the sacred and the profane. Some snakes were to be worshiped, others were to be considered incarnations of evil.
John Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament
This idea is depicted in Numbers 21:4-9 when God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent to protect the Israelites from affliction – and this story will emerge again in the Gospels as an explicit symbolic key to understanding Jesus's crucifixion. The Israelites are plagued by poisonous serpents in the wilderness. They are healed by looking upon the bronze serpent Moses is instructed to place on a pole. Jesus references this event: "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, likewise must the Son of Man be lifted up."
The logic of the divine remedy is counterintuitive: God doesn't remove the threat of the serpents but instead provides a mechanism through which the Israelites can confront the threat and be fortified against it. The objective is not to create a safe environment, but to cultivate strength enough to withstand the venom. This is analogous to the modern concepts of inoculation and exposure therapy, which originated with the ancient concept of the pharmakon—the principle that a controlled, voluntary exposure to a poison can serve as its own antidote. This philosophy was central to the Greco-Roman healing traditions of Asclepius, whose symbol, a single serpent coiled around a staff, is the same image as that in Numbers, and still the most widely recognizable symbol of healing to this day, featured in the logos of hundreds of the world's largest health organizations.
In the Asclepeion temples, healing rituals involved the administration of remedies (pharmaka) that possessed both toxic and therapeutic properties. The cure was found by carefully and ritually engaging with the poison. Just as this medical-spiritual practice required confronting the poison to find the cure, looking upon the bronze representation of their suffering immunizes the Israelite.
Jesus's statement elevates this principle to its ultimate metaphysical conclusion. If the bronze serpent is the symbol of a specific threat, the Cross is the symbol of the 'meta-serpent' – an embodiment of the sum total of all that poisons human life. It represents not just physical death, but the full spectrum of existential catastrophe: the agony of betrayal, the tyranny of Empire, the injustice of the mob, evil itself. The crucifixion story posits the spiritual truth that the path to victory over suffering is not through avoidance, but through voluntary confrontation with the worst imaginable. By framing his own death with this image Jesus recommends and then enacts this voluntary acceptance of suffering and the courageous confrontation with mortality as the supreme redemptive act.
What is especially suggestive about Nehebkau’s new identity as benevolent protector god is that in the afterlife he now provides the deceased with their life force and their food. He not only became one of the dead Pharaoh's afterlife meal providers but was also delegated the official protector of the throat – the organ that facilitates eating.
If the P source – having deliberately reimagined Babylon's creation story in order to compare and contrast with Yahweh – had adopted this narrative strategy from the earlier J source – who wrote with Egypt in mind (at a time when Israel had come to understand itself as an "anti-Egypt") then it's possible that J had similarly written the story of Adam and Eve at least in part as a similarly understood theological critique and declaration of independence from Empire, with its serpent portrayed as antithetical to all its original Egyptian characteristics.
One of his divine titles, the "Bringer of Dignity," is similarly understood when defined as its opposite: the Edenic serpent is the bringer of shame.
Nehebkau's most common representations in Egyptian art were as (1) a half human, (2) two-legged and (3) two-headed, representing his dual divine histories as both good and evil. It was a popular notion that the serpent originally walked erect and was often represented in the art of the ancient Near-East. In Babylon, Marduk was represented as a Chaos⇆Dragon with a snake's head, four legs, scaly body and tail, lion's forepaws and rear talons.
Babylonian god Marduk as the mušḫuššu ("furious snake"), 1500s BC
Winged Egyptian snake with legs on the Mythological Papyrus of Amenhotep, 1100-950 BC
Two of three snakes with legs holding a snake which tows a ceremonial Egyptian boat on the Mythological Papyrus of Amenhotep, 1100-950 BC
These characteristics present an intriguing possibility gestured at in the Genesis Rabbah, one of a collection of famous rabbinical interpretations from the early centuries of Christianity. Noting the extremely similar Hebrew words for "serpent" (nâchâsh, נָחָשׁ, when in noun-form) and "knowledge from sorcery" (nâchash, נָחַשׁ when in verb-form), the Jewish sages interpretively paraphrased God's words as he searched for Adam:
Where are you? Before, you were with [Me and] My knowledge. And now, you are with the knowledge of the snake...
Genesis Rabbah 19:9
The etymological connection to sorcery and imagistic associations with Nehebkau are indirectly referenced later in Exodus. In a key Egyptian myth, Nehebkau eventually becomes all-powerful by swallowing seven cobras. So when Moses and Aaron's staffs turn into snakes in Pharaoh's court and swallow the snakes of all the Egyptian sorcerers (Exodus 7), this would have been recognized by all Egyptians as echoing the myth of Nehebkau. Worship of this snake-god was prominent during the period traditionally associated with the Exodus and Pharaoh Ramesses II's coronation day had been celebrated during Nehebkau's festival. Pharaoh had in fact dedicated a temple in Heliopolis to him. Did the memory of slavery in Egypt permeate Genesis so deeply that the Tree of Life became exclusive to Yahweh while the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil became exclusive to Nehebkau? the imperial snake deity whose divine biography included both the knowledge of good and evil – the "knowledge of the snake"?
This would almost certainly be too historically reductive, considering the fact that these stories are meant to be interpreted on different scales of reality and not simply as historical allegory. But if we add to Genesis what can be gleaned from the meaning of this Egyptian snake – linked, as he is, to the very Pharaoh who enslaved God's people – it is possible to interpret the serpent in the Garden with a wider array of symbolic possibilities.
One that immediately arises is the characterological similarity between Pharaoh Ramesses II and Cain: both were builders of cities who didn't know how to stop building. Ramesses started and finished more monumental projects than any other Pharaoh before or after him, and would even replace earlier Pharaohs’ monuments with his own. The sheer magnitude of his projects has been noted by modern Egyptologists as possibly indicative of a kind of compulsion. Cain – whose name means "the acquirer" – builds the Bible's first cities, with the Hebrew emphasizing the present tense: not that Cain "built a city," but rather: Cain "was building" a city. Preeminent 13th-century rabbi and philosopher Nachmanides suggests that this present tense indicates Cain never finishes these projects; he is desperately trying to acquire an artificial home now, being a rootless wanderer on an earth divorced from his influence. Now in the civilization business, his life force has degenerated into addictive cycles of unresolved acquisitions – he has the soul of Pharaoh, but is without his capacities. Both he and Pharoah are eternally and compulsively building anti-Edens of human-made "order" as means of securing their own legacies and pride, ever exacerbating their separations from God and assertions of selfish will.
… what prevents us from accepting death is less our attachment to life than a kind of blind, indestructible urge to persist in our existence, which can be called either libido or the death drive, and of which Arthur Schopenhauer’s horrifying Will is the supreme image. It is this grisly parody of immortality that deprives us of the capacity to die, and the sinful are those who inhabit this liminal, zombie-like zone between life and death, incapable of embracing their mortality (which for Christian faith would be the condition of eternal life) and thus condemned to a living death that knows no end. Because it represents a form of ersatz immortality, the death drive is hostile to the body – to the local, sensuous and particularised, to the organic and reproductive, to love and sexuality – which it can see only as so many fleshly obstacles to its own futile, compulsive, virulently abstract persistence.
Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice
NEXT: Good & Evil
= Creative Drive?
NEXT: Good & Evil
= Creative Drive?
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