EVE.

(Extraordinary traditions, concerning.)

I should never have done, if I were to relate all the Actions that are to be found in books concerning Eve and the serpent. Some have said that it was a true serpent which tempted Eve, and they suppose that, at that time, the serpent conversed familiarly with man, and that he lost the use of his speech as a punishment for his malice, in abusing the simplicity of the woman; but this opinion is so absurd, that it is surprising such an author as Josephus should not be ashamed to

advance it. Some Rabbins agree with Josephus that the tempter of Eve was a true serpent; but instead of saying, as that Historian does, that the serpent tempted the good woman, pushed on by a spirit of envy, by considering the happiness promised to man in case of obedience to God, they say he was urged to it by a spirit of lust. He wished to be in Adam’s place, and hoped he should enjoy that happiness, if she should become a widow; now he believed that his ambush would be fatal only to the husband, because the husband would be the first to eat the apple; therefore he resolved to lay this snare for them. Is it possible to vent more inconsistent impertinence than this? If we believe Abrabanel, the serpent became a tempter only by the ill consequences that were drawn from his own conduct. He had no design to do barm; he did not say a word to Eve; he only had the faculty, which other beasts had not, of climbing up the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and eating the fruit. Eve, seeing that he was not the worse for it, concluded there was nothing to apprehend from that tree, and eat of it without the fear of death. Is not this to despise holy scripture more than Eve contemned the command, to explain in this manner an account, in which so particular a mention is made of a dialogue between the woman and the serpent? Some ancient Heretics have dreamed that the tempting serpent was a virtue, produced by Jaldabaoth under the form of a serpent. This Jaldabaoth was vexed that a Deity greater than himself had made man walk upright, who before was but a worm, and had also given him the knowledge of the superior Deities; for Jaldabaoth would willingly have passed for the only true God. Therefore, out of spite, he produced the serpent of Paradise, to whose word Eve gave credit, as if it had been the word of the son of God. These Heretics had a great veneration for the serpent; “for it is he,” say they, “who having taken the fruit of the tree, communicated the knowledge of good and evil to mankind." They were called Ophites. If we believe St Augustin, they carried their stupid reveries a great deal further; for they pretended that the tempting serpent was Jesus Christ; and for that reason they fed a serpent which, at a word from their priests, would creep upon the altars, and twist about the oblations and lick them, and then return into his hole again; and then they believed that Jesus Christ was come to sanctify their symbols, and they celebrated their communion. The opinion that Eve was seduced by the Devil, concealed under the body of a serpent, has had a thousand suppositions added to it, by the liberties which human invention has taken. There are rabbins who say that Sammael, the prince of the devils, got upon the back of a serpent of the bigness of a camel, and with this equipage he came to Eve to tempt her. Some say the tempter took an advantage from Eve’s not declaring the prohibition in the same terms that God had delivered it to them. God had forbidden them to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; but Eve told the serpent God had forbidden them to eat of that tree or to touch it. Now, as she passed near the tree, the serpent took hold of her and pushed her against it, and made her observe that she did not die, and thence inferred, that neither would she die if she eat of it. Several fathers and some modern divines condemn Eve, for not exactly reporting what she had heard from God, and it may be said it was an ill omen of the memory of mankind. This probably was the first time that what had been heard said was told again to another; great alterations were made in it, though they were yet in the happy state of innocence. Is it then to be wondered at, that every day, fallen man gives unfaithful accounts of things, and that a matter of fact cannot pass from hand to hand for a few hours without being disguised? This, by the way, as also what I am going to add, which is, that some authors pretend, that Eve knew the prohibition only from what Adam told her, and that Adam made her believe, out of his own head, that they were not allowed so much as to touch the tree; that he made her believe this, that she might be the more circumspect. Useless precaution! Some deny that the serpent spoke at all to Eve. “He made himself understood,” they say, “either by his hissing or by signs; for, at that time, man understood the voice of all the beasts.” Cajetan will not acknowledge in the tempting of Eve, the intervention of a voice; he pretends the serpent made use of nothing but internal suggestions. A rabbin named Lanjado has so subtilized the expression, “you shall surely die,” that he imagined the serpent presupposed a double death was contained in the threatening of one, which was to depend upon the quality of the forbidden fruit, and the other upon the command not to eat, or that one should be caused by the wood of the tree, the other by the fruit: whereupon the serpent, by a true sophistical turn, and as if he would have shunned a lie, by an equivocal expression, denied that the threatening would have its effect with respect to the wood of the tree: therefore he persuaded Eve to taste of the wood, and as she found it of an agreeable taste, she concluded that the fruit would be still more so: so that she eat of it. Ye distillers of the sacred letters, you would be much less to blame if you threw away your time in the chemical distillations, or in seeking for that phantom the philosopher’s stone! It has been feigned that the serpent assumed the face of a beautiful maid, when he would tempt Eve. Nicholas de Lyra makes mention of this idle conceit, and in the German Bibles printed before Luther, among other figures may be seen that of a serpent with the face of a very handsome maid.

The Syrens were also a monstrous composition, with their upper part resembling a virgin. Their

treacherous and deluding voice may well be compared to that of the serpent; but would to God Eve had done as Ulysses did. She listened too much to the discourse of this seducer: not that we are to believe all the fine compliments that Alcimus Avitus reports to have passed on both sides; for, according to the narrative of Moses, this great affair was ended in a very few words. Never was an enterprise of such importance. It concerned the fate of mankind, for all future ages; the eternal felicity, or eternal damnation, of all men depended upon it, without reckoning all the follies and vanities of the present life; and nevertheless, never was any affair so speedily dispatched, never, perhaps, had die devil so cheap a bargain of man as this was. In all probability, the criminal thoughts of particular persons, which are of no comparative consequence, cost him more than a deed, which was decisive for the whole world; and, it must be confessed that the two heads with whom God deposited the salvation of the human race kept it so ill, that nothing could be worse: they delivered up the place to the enemy, almost without a blow; and instead of fighting for so precious a trust, at least as much as sinful man will fight for his religion or his country, “pro aris et focis,” they made less resistance than a child will make for a toy that is taken from him. They acted as if a pin had only been at stake: “sic erat in fatis.” Nevertheless, we must be far from thinking, either that Moses has too much abridged that narrative, or that, according to the oriental taste, he conceals the fatal event under the veil of fable. This would be too much exposing the interests of our fundamental truths; and after all, the great innocence of Eve, and her want of experience in all things, ought to lessen our wonder at her short and feeble resistance. There is nothing like being excessively wicked and deceitful, to prevent being imposed upon. Men of probity are those that fall easiest into the snare. Incapable of fraud, they hardly escape the artful designs of others. An open heart cannot suspect in another the malice and collusion which he is not conscious of in his own breast. Therefore it was a conquest infinitely more profitable than glorious, which the devil made over the first of all women, and one might almost, in this manner, expostulate both with him and the serpent who was his second:

Egregiam vero laudem et spolia ampla refertis
Tuque puerque tuus, magnum et memorabile nomen,
Una dolo divum si fœmina victor duorum est.
Virg. Æn. lib. iv, ver. 93.

High praises, endless honours, you have won,
And mighty trophies with your worthy son,
Two Gods one silly woman have outdone. Dryden.
Art. Eve.