1 … He said to the woman וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־הָ֣אִשָּׁ֔ה
That verb וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ va-yomer tells us a couple of things:
First, the action is resuming. We have had another short section, our third, of background information. The reappearance of a consecutive verb form tells us that we have now jumped back on the narrative timeline of our story.
Second, it is masculine singular, because נָחָשׁ naḥash 'snake' is a masculine noun.
Third … uh … it is telling us that this snake said something to the newly grown woman.
Excuse me? It’s a snake, for God’s sake! But there you have it.
Or perhaps we are wrong? There are, after all, two other masculine singular characters in the vicinity, or at least in the story, at this point: the (original) earthling and YHWH. So the Greek text adds ὁ ὄφις (yes, that’s ophis, as in ophidian), so it’s clear that “the snake said” something to the woman. The Peshitta — an Aramaic translation in a non-Aramaic form of the alphabet — also adds this “explicating plus.” That’s a technical expression meaning, “We don’t think this was originally in the Hebrew text. We think the translations added it to clarify who was doing that verb.”
The verb would have been masculine in any case, as I said, because naḥash is a masculine noun in Hebrew, which doesn’t have a grammatical way to avoid using “he” or “she” in such a case. Even though English does have a way to do that, if this snake is going to strike up a conversation with a woman, I am going to call it a “he” rather than an “it.” A rabbinic tradition assumes this snake saw the two humans having sex and is masculine enough to want to have sex with her too.
Something worth noting here is the way this verb has singularized the snake. If the story had taken another turn at this point, we would have remembered that the animals have all been made with singular, collective nouns, and it would have been perfectly correct to translate the beginning of 3:1 this way:
Snakes were shrewder than any field animal that YHWH God had made.
In Genesis 1, even ha-adam was a collective noun, “the earthlings” who were created male and female. “Let’s make” of 1:26 even leaves open the possibility that elohim might suggest plurality. In Genesis 2, however, we have already been conditioned to see a story with individual characters, so we naturally imagine that this naḥash too is “a” snake. Except, of course, that snakes do not speak Hebrew.
Abraham ibn Ezra (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) presents some of the suggestions traditional exegetes have been prompted to make:
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. 14? Or do they think Satan crawls on his belly and eats dirt? Not to mention v. 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 [in Numbers 22] 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.)
How the snake spoke was in fact a major question for Jewish thinkers. To summarize the main suggestions presented by Ibn Ezra:
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