Yes. It is what the text says.
"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God really say, You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?'"
Talking snake. Not a deceived lady.
It amazes me when intelligent skeptics, thinking the Bible is nonsense of some sort, thinks their baseless criticism can be as ignorant as they imagine the text to be. You read what you've quoted above and think "Talking snake. Not a deceived lady."'
They
want
to
make
it
say
what
they
want
it
to
say.
They don't care what it says. They don't care about an argument. There's no point in debating them. They don't care about the . . .
DATA!
Let me demonstrate. Mark 16:9 says: "When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons."
The Bible says this happened, correct? It didn't. How do we know? It's spurious. There are two later additions to the sudden ending of Mark chapter 16. The later part of verse 8 through verse 20 are spurious. The Codex Regius of the eighth century includes both the short and the long ending adding that they are current in some quarters while not recognizing either as authoritative.
The Greek Codex Alexandrinus, and Ephraemi rescriptus from the fifth century C.E., as well as the Greek and Latin Bezae Codices from the fifth and sixth centuries C.E., Jerome's Latin Vulgate c. 400 C.E., Curetonian Syriac, Old Syriac and Syriac Peshitta, Christian Aramaic both from the fifth century C.E. add the long conclusion, but the Greek Codex Sinaiticus and Vatican ms 1209, both from the fourth century C.E. as well as the Cinaitic Syriac codex from the fourth and fifth century C.E., and Armenian Version from the fourth to thirteenth century C.E. omits them. It would seem, especially when examining the context, that these verses were added sometime during this period.
So reading talking snake in the Bible leads us to what conclusion? 1. The Bible says a snake talked. 2. The Bible was quoting Eve, who was decieved into thinking a snake talked. We read that at 2 Corinthians 11:3, when Paul said "I am afraid, however, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may be led astray from your simple and pure devotion to Christ." 3. The Bible throughout says that the spirit being known as Satan (Hebrew satan meaning resister with the definite article) is blamed for the deception of Eve. Not a literal serpent.
If the book is mythical, then the sepent symbolizes wisdom and we have a reasonable allegory for the costs of the blind pursuit of knowledge as a possession rather than for love of wisdom.
How is the literal serpent described? Cunning, crafty, shrewd, subtil (archaic; subtle), sneaky, clever. Compare translations of
Genesis 3:1.
more crafty
עָר֔וּם (‘ā·rūm)
Adjective - masculine singular
Strong's 6175: Crafty, shrewd, sensible
That is why saying "the Bible says" doesn't necessarily mean "the Bible means" in this case, a snake talked even though it says a snake talked. There are multiple possibilities, including, like Aesop's fables, animals talking is metaphorical, or it is a mistranslation, spurious, someone other than the author's perspective is given, etc.
If it is history, it's a book about talking snakes, and I'll believe it when I meet one. They don't have throats, you know?
Heh. They actually do, you know? They have a small opening called the glottis, which opens into the trachea. They don't have a uvula, and their mouth and throat are one continuous chamber, allowing them to swallow large items whole.
I know virtually nothing about snakes. I did a quick search and there was some answers given in my AI thingy, which I didn't bother to confirm or research in any real way. It may be right or it may be Answers in Genesis. It doesn't matter to me because I'm not putting forth the proposition that, according to the Bible at least one literal serpent spoke to one literal person.
I am, yes. And confidently. Rivers and the land they flow over are in a mutually affective relationship, you cannot change one without the other bearing the signs of it. Rivers flow in channels. They leave deposits. They are physical entities that follow physical laws, no more magical than snakes. Especially events that happened only five thousand years ago! The blink of an eye, in geological time. There are varves from older lake basins not twenty miles from my house, I could take you on a short drive and hike to see one of them with your own eyes.
Videos summary in case the excrement past tense wants to knit pick.
The evidence is clear—massive, planetary-scale floods shaped our world. Yet some still dismiss it as “local flooding.” What would be left of our civilization if it happened again? Not much.
The sheer scale of ancient megafloods in Eastern Washington defies comprehension. These catastrophic flows, triggered by glacial ice dam failures, dwarf all modern rivers combined. Even if the total discharge of every river on Earth — from the Amazon to the Mississippi — were added together, it would represent only a fraction of the water released during one of these events. These floods reshaped landscapes, carving massive features like the Channeled Scablands, and remain one of the most dramatic geological phenomena ever recorded.
