Why didn't Adam and Eve find it strange that a serpent was talking to them?
Answer: Interestingly, the serpent/snake speaking to Adam and Eve is not the only instance in the Bible where an animal speaks. The prophet Balaam was rebuked by his donkey (see Numbers 22:21-35). We have to remember that while animals are not capable of speaking (*human language), there are powerful * spiritual beings out there (God, the angels, Satan, the demons) who are capable of the impossible, including enabling animals to speak (*or communicate with humans). Most scholars hold that it was Satan in the Garden of Eden who was speaking through the snake, not the snake itself speaking on its own. Thus, the Genesis 3 account it is not suggesting that snakes were of an intellect that would have enabled them to speak coherently.
Still, why didn’t Adam and Eve find it strange that an animal was speaking to them? It is unlikely that Adam and Eve had the same perspective we do on animals. In our era, we know from experience that animals are incapable of speech on the same level as humans. Adam and Eve did not have a childhood, nor did they have other humans to learn from. Given that Adam and Eve had probably only been alive a matter of days, it is not unreasonable for them to believe that animals were capable of speech. It is also possible that this was not the first talking animal Adam and Eve had encountered. Perhaps Satan or even God Himself had used animals to communicate with Adam and Eve before. There are so few details given in the account that much is left to speculation and presumption.
Lastly, it was not unreasonable for Eve to answer the snake. After all, the snake was evidently speaking in a language that she understood and asking an intelligible question. It is also likely that Adam was nearby and could verify that she was not imagining things. It was not the serpent speaking that should have alarmed them. Rather, it was the fact that he was causing them to doubt God’s instructions (Genesis 3:1), contradicting God (Genesis 3:4), and calling God’s motives into question (Genesis 3:5). That should have been enough to cause both Eve and Adam to stop talking to the serpent.Recommended
Resources: The Serpent of Paradise by Erwin Lutzer and Logos Bible Software.
Further connection I dug out the link below:
Who was the serpent?
...What Jesus said
On one occasion Jesus said to some Pharisees who were trying to kill Him,
‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’ (John 8:44).
To what event, involving lying and murder, from the beginning, could Jesus have been referring?
The temptation of Eve certainly qualifies as being in the beginning, as it is the first recorded event involving Eve after her creation. The serpent lied to Eve when he said, ‘You shall not surely die,’ and as this is the first lie recorded in Scripture, the title ‘father of it ’ [‘it’ = lies or lying] would seem to be a very apt description of the person doing the lying on this occasion.
Eighteenth century Bible commentator Matthew Henry comments on the passage,
‘He [Satan] is the great promoter of falsehood of every kind. He is a liar, all his temptations are carried on by his calling evil good, and good evil, and promising freedom in sin.’1
Finally, the serpent’s efforts resulted in the penalty of death falling not only on Adam and Eve, but on the whole human race. Jesus’ term of ‘murderer’ therefore certainly applies to whoever tempted Eve.
The work of the serpent is thus the enactment of everything that Jesus ascribed to ‘the devil ’ in John 8:44. Furthermore, there is no other event in recorded history that better fulfills this description of the devil than does the account of the temptation by the serpent in Genesis 3.
The serpent identified
Was the serpent then Satan? Although the Bible tells us that ‘Satan himself is transformed into an angel of Light’, or ‘masquerades as an angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14), there are difficulties in assuming that something like this happened in the Garden of Eden. Theologian Henry C. Thiessen comments:
… the serpent is neither a figurative description of Satan, nor is it Satan in the form of a serpent. The real serpent was the agent in Satan’s hand. This is evident from the description of the reptile in Genesis 3:1 and the curse pronounced upon it in 3:14 [… upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy Life ].’3
The Bible tells us that, just before Judas left the Upper Room to go and betray Jesus, ‘Satan entered into him’ (John 13:26–27). Likewise demons can, under certain conditions, indwell either human bodies or animal bodies—for example, the time when Jesus cast out a legion of devils from a man, and they then entered a herd of pigs which ran down a steep place into the sea (Mark 5:1–13). It is therefore proper for us to conclude that Satan appropriated and used the body of a specific serpent on this occasion to carry out his subtle purpose of tempting Eve to sin.
It is also clear that the use of euphemisms about the serpent, such as calling him ‘the personification of evil’, or labelling the whole incident ‘myth’ or ‘theological poetry’, will not do. The Bible presents this episode as a personal encounter between Eve and Satan, as real as that between Christ and Satan in the wilderness.
The identification of the serpent as the one whose body Satan used raises further questions, such as does Satan speak audibly?
Satan speaking?
When Satan tempted Jesus, he did so with words. Jesus replied and their conversation is recorded for us in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), although we are not told anything about the way Satan appeared on this occasion.
In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress , the description of Christian’s conversation and fight with Apollyon is no surprise to many Christians, who have had similar spiritual experiences. It is said that Martin Luther found conflict with the devil so real that on one occasion Luther threw an inkwell at him.
Concerning the temptation of Eve, Christian writer and expositor J. Oswald Sanders writes:
‘It has been suggested that just as the speaking of Balaam’s ass was a divine miracle, so the speaking of the serpent was a diabolic miracle.’4
Was Satan the serpent in Genesis chapter 3?
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