DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
One of the wild animals God made. Genesis 3:1 says the serpent was "more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made." The chapter never calls it Satan, the devil or an angel. Those names for the snake come from later books, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Revelation 12:9.
Why it’s interesting
The Hebrew word for crafty is arum. One chapter earlier, Genesis 2:25 calls the man and woman naked, and the Hebrew word there is arummim. A study Bible, the New Oxford Annotated Bible, sets the snake's craftiness against the couple's innocent nakedness.
Scholarly consensus
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