Before we look at the serpent himself, understanding what kind of place the Garden of Eden actually was will help us understand why other talking creatures were around in the first place. Maybe you’ve read the end of Genesis 3 before and wondered why the cherubim (plural) show up with no prior explanation.
…at the east of the garden of Eden he [Yahweh] placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:24 ESV
The talking snake, multiple cherubim, and a flaming sword should be our first clues that the Garden of Eden wasn’t a normal earthly garden as we might experience it today. Heavenly creatures were roaming about with Adam and Eve. Eden was a unique place where heaven and earth overlapped.
The next place that cherubim show up in the Bible is in Exodus 25, when God gives Moses the instructions on building the Tabernacle. Interestingly, God instructs Moses to make the Tabernacle according to the “pattern” which was being shown to him on Mount Sinai (Ex. 25:9, 40). In the previous chapter of Exodus, Moses and the leaders of Israel went up on the mountain and “saw the God of Israel” (Ex. 24:10). When God’s glory descended on Mount Sinai, Moses and the leaders of Israel “went up” and witnessed heaven on earth.
Other parts of the Tabernacle were made to resemble a garden (e.g. Ex. 25:31-40). Once we reach Solomon’s Temple, the garden imagery is off the charts (1 Kings 6-7). In the Temple and the Tabernacle, gold is used extensively to give the shimmering appearance of the heavenly temple that was the pattern for the earthly copy. The writer of Hebrews clearly understood the Temple in Jerusalem to be a copy of God’s heavenly throne room (Heb. 9:23).
Cherubim were emblazoned on the curtains and doors of the Tabernacle and the Temple, a reminder of their role as guardians of the Garden of Eden (a.k.a. heaven on earth) and functioning as symbols of the heavenly reality. Cherubim as guardians were common in ancient imagery, not just in Israel but in other Ancient Near Eastern nations like Assyria and Babylon. This stands as an ancient testimony to what was once a cross-cultural shared understanding of cherubim as the guardians of the heavenly realm.
These strange-looking hybrid human/animalistic creatures (Ezek. 1; 10:15) were heavenly beings, right at home in Eden (Ezek. 28:13) because Eden was heaven on earth. If heavenly creatures were roaming around Eden because it was their home, what other heavenly creatures made their home in Eden? Well, angels, certainly, who seem to look a lot like men when they show up in the Bible (e.g. Gen. 18-19, Dan. 8:15-16, and others), and there is at least one other type of heavenly creature that we’re told about: seraphim.
Seraphim show up in Isaiah 6. Isaiah suddenly finds himself in the Temple, which sure looks like the heavenly throne room (Is. 6:1-6). The seraphim, who each have 6 wings, are flying around doing their job in Yahweh’s service. What we lose in translation from Hebrew to English is that seraphim is a Hebrew word that is not translated into English in most of our Bibles. It is merely transliterated (spelled with English letters to mimic the sounds of the Hebrew word).
And what makes this particularly interesting for trying to understand the Garden of Eden narrative in Genesis 3 is that the Hebrew word seraphim is one of several Hebrew words that could be translated into English using the word “serpent.”
Up next: The Problem of Pain: 7. What’s Up with the Talking Snake? Part 2.
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