And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good,

Question

The Beginning

Genesis 1:1-5

¹ In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day...

finally, God rested on the seventh day.

Why did the serpent deceive Eve? How could a serpent talk with a human being?

Answer 1

We are told later in the Bible that the serpent is the devil Rev 12:9 I believe the devil and his angels were cast down when Jesus was a baby. God was in Christ, multitasking, and a war broke out in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the devils army, and the devil was cast out.

Why the devil possessed the snake is because he wanted Adam and Eve to die, he wanted them to make the wrong choice concerning the fruit. Eating from the tree of life they would have become immortal. [Gen 3:22-23] But how he possessed the snake we can only speculate. It likely has something to do with the spiritual realm.

If we notice, before they ate the fruit they could communicate with the snake, but afterwards the snake does not speak. The fruit is literal the garden is literal, eating the wrong fruit, they lost a hold of instinctive spiritual knowledge that they had, knowledge including talking with animals. We can glean that they lost spiritual knowledge, because the Bible demonstrates that we are spirits inside of flesh, 1 Kings 17:17-22, Luke 24:37-39, and so Adam and Eve were spiritually clothed, their physical bodies being containers of their spirit. We are told that before they ate the fruit they were naked and not ashamed, but afterwards they knew they were physically naked. They could no longer sense the spiritual, everything became physical only. And so the ability to communicate with the snake, was lost when they ate the fruit, they lost instinctive spiritual knowledge that they had. What they ate was for the knowledge of good and evil, not knowledge in general, but Eve was tricked to believe she would gain knowledge in general, and such is still the teaching in some circles today, that the devil gave knowledge in general. But he did not, spiritual knowledge was stolen from us on that day.

Answer 2

"Why did the serpent deceive Eve? How could a serpent talk with a human being?"

It should be noted that the term נָּחָשׁ֙ which is translated as "serpent" can also be rendered as "shining one". In the ancient near east that was commonly a term for "a divine being". Going with that rendition:

The Shining One (SO) would have been one of God's angels. At this point in the narrative, God is described as walking in the Garden:

And they heard the sound of YHWH-Elohim walking in the garden in the cool of the day

That God here is plainly in physical form -- He made sound when walking -- suggests that at least some of His heavenly servants could also come into the Garden in physical form; both had spiritual forms in heaven but took physical form on Earth. So this SO is one of God's creatures with whom Adam and Eve were presumably familiar, since its appearance is not pointed to as having been a surprise. That means this was a being whom Eve knew already and (also presumably) would have trusted as one of God's servants.

We learn elsewhere in the scriptures that this is indeed not just any divine being, this is the top divine being, whom we might describe as "head Prince of the Angels". The SO is accustomed to being God's "number one", His "executive assistant", so to speak. Then here in the Garden he is faced with something new that God has done, making physical beings -- and not just physical beings, but physical beings whom God has appointed His representatives on the Earth. So why did the SO deceive Eve? Well, jealousy is a good guess: he saw God spending time with them in the Garden, and how they (presumably) adored God, and he saw it as cutting in on his special relationship with God.

We know from Isaiah 14 that the SO declared

"I will make myself like the Most High"

which suggests that he was jealous enough that he wanted to cut in on this and get the newcomers loyal to himself -- and that required disrupting their loyalty to God. This is the point where the SO becomes "the father of lies" as he chooses to twist just a little what God had said and thus persuade these humans into in essence giving their loyalty to him.

"How could a serpent talk with a human being?"

Because the SO may not have been a serpent at all, given the other possible meaning for the word used. But if he did take the form of a serpent, as a heavenly being -- what we would call an angel -- making that form able to talk wouldn't have been difficult.