The devil is described as the crafty serpent in Genesis 3, and he approaches Eve to tempt her into disobedience. People have speculated that this narrative is an allegory rather than literal. How can a serpent talk? God allowed a donkey to speak to Baalam the prophet in Numbers 22. The Apostle Paul believed the literal interpretation of Genesis 3 in 2 Corinthians 2:3; John the Apostle believed this also, in Revelation 12:9 and 20:2. Peter the Apostle accepted the miraculous account of the speaking donkey in 2 Peter 2:16.

The devil (Satan) disguised himself as an animal. Logically this would make sense, because only two humans had been created at that point. Adam and Eve also had no offspring yet. We get a hint of the serpent’s appearance from Genesis 3:14, where God tells the serpent:

“Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.”

One interpretation suggests that if the devil were to ever disguise himself again as a creature, he would be only a serpent crawling on his belly. The appearance of the serpent in the garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve, was that of an upright animal, or capable of mobility above that of crawling on his belly. This changed by God’s command when Satan tempted Eve to sin. This brings up the possibility of incarnation now being unlikely, as the devil would be relegated to presenting himself as a snake; by extension, his demons would probably be just as low as the devil if they were to present themselves as incarnated creatures. However, under such an interpretation, demon possession of people is not ruled out. We are considering the reality of supernatural forces of evil, which the Apostle Paul called “the powers of this dark world,” or “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12), for which the Gospels quote Jesus’ remedy for Christians, such as prayer and fasting (Matthew 17:21; Mark 9:29). Looking further at Ephesians 6, we see Paul’s metaphor of the full armor of God to use against the powers of evil; and in James 4:7 we read of resisting the devil so that he even flees from us.

The garden of Eden became the test case for humanity’s faithfulness to God. The test continues between God and Satan depicted in the book of Job, in which God allows Satan to strike Job and his family, but places limits to the damage Satan could do. Even in Job, the earliest written book of the Bible, Job pronounces the Gospel of a Redeemer in Job 19:25:

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.”

We should reasonably assume that the all-knowing God had foreknowledge of man’s fall. Why do I say this? He already had a plan for the solution, the redemption of humanity, as shown by continuing God’s speech to the devil in Genesis 3:15. After meting out punishment to Satan, he said to him:

“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head,

and you will strike his heal.”

The New Testament interprets this as the relationship between Eve’s offspring, who is Christ, and the devil’s offspring, who are his agents. As I said in the blog post on Genesis (“Masterful Beginning”), the devil’s bruising of Jesus’ heel came at the cross, and Jesus’ bruising of Satan’s head occurred when Jesus finished His work on the cross and at His resurrection. Genesis 3:15 is therefore called the protoevangelium, the first hint of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In the realm of science, a recent DNA discovery traces all human life to one woman, which Genesis 3:20 asserts when Adam named her Eve, “the mother of all living.” Eve is from Hebrew, Chavah, interpreted as “to breathe” or “to live.”