the sinner any exoneration and to avoid any contamination
by dualism. Their greatest care was to show God’s wisdom
in the sovereign government of world and history.
Temptation, uncomfortable as it may be, is an ingredi-
ent of life. Those who put their trust in God will overcome
it, and it serves moral growth in their life. God does not in-
cite to evil, but he allows both suffering and temptation as
tests for the virtuous. “God has put them to the test and
proved them worthy to be with him; he has tested them like
gold in a furnace, and accepted them as holocausts” (Wis.
3:5). The sinner has no excuse, since he falls because of lack
of love and fear of God. Those who truly adhere to God will
make good use of freedom.
This is succinctly expressed by Jesus, son of Sirach: “Do
not say, ‘the Lord is responsible for my sinning,’ for he is
never the cause of what he hates. Do not say, ‘it was he who
led me astray,’ for he has no use for a sinner. The Lord hates
all that is foul, and no one who fears him will love it either.
He himself made him in the beginning, and left him free to
make his own decisions.... To behave faithfully is within
your power” (Sir. 15:11–16).
The serpent and the woman in Genesis 3. The narra-
tive of the fall is an anthropological myth of great depth and
complexity. Its symbols express ancient Israelite reflections
on the origin of evil. It depicts in a lively way the diversionary
rhetoric of the sinner, who always needs a scapegoat for his
own vindication. Adam attempts to use Eve as his scapegoat,
while Eve blames the serpent. Some see in the role attributed
to Eve a deeply ingrained misogyny in the Yahvistic authors.
Paul Ricoeur may come closer to the intention of the narra-
tive when he writes in his La symbolique du mal (Paris, 1960)
that the woman here is not so much the “second sex” as, rath-
er, an expression of the human being’s frailty, man’s as well
as woman’s (vol. 2, p. 239). The story exposes the sin of
Adam more than that of Eve, because it unmasks Adam’s
domineering attitude toward the woman (Gn. 3:16). In the
fall, man too must confess: “This is flesh of my flesh.” There
is a solidarity in both salvation and perdition.
Why is the serpent introduced to allow man to exoner-
ate himself? We can respond that the very mechanism of ex-
culpation is part of sinful man, since when he confesses his
sin humbly before the merciful God, he finds no need to ac-
cuse others. Yet there is still more in this anthropological
metaphor. The serpent is also a creature, one that is “the
most subtle of all the wild beasts God has made” (Gn. 3:1).
It becomes a metaphoric presentation of man’s subtle pursuit
of his egotism and his no less subtle self-defense and self-
belying mechanisms (cf. Philbert Avril, Délivre-nous du mal,
Paris, 1981, p. 23).
Ricoeur thinks that this is also the way James’s epistle
explains the self-deceptive concupiscence. The serpent is a
part of ourselves as long as we have not the strength of truth
to unmask the shrewdness of our exonerating maneuvers. It
might also symbolize “the chaotic disorder in myself, among
us and around us” (La symbolique du mal, vol. 2, p. 242).
That would bring into the whole vision of the first twelve
chapters of Genesis a sharper awareness of the various dimen-
sions of solidarity in either good or evil, including the cosmic
dimension and the need for humans to decide one way or
the other.
While theologians and preachers during the last centu-
ries frequently identified the serpent of Genesis with Satan
or the devil, there seems to be a growing consensus among
biblical scholars and theologians that in the early tradition
reflected in Genesis 3, nobody thought or spoke of Satan, the
personified Evil One. In his 1937–1938 work Creation and
Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3 and Tempta-
tion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was insisting already that this nar-
rative has no need of diaboli ex machina. The serpent symbol-
izes the ambiguity of people, their human relationships, and
their environment.
Satan and his helpers. Satan interests us here only in
relation to temptation. What does the tempter add to the un-
derstanding of temptation? In the older tradition, Satan
never appears; it is God who tests man and calls him to deci-
sion (Seesemann, 1968, p. 25). In the Book of Job, we find
God testing man in much the same way as he tested Abra-
ham. The successful end is decisive: the person who counts
on God will overcome temptation. What is new in Job is that
God acts through intermediary forces.
The nebulous Satan here has nothing to do with the
super-Satan of the Persian religion or with the apocalyptic
and threatening “prince of darkness” of later writings in Ju-
daism and Christianity. This Satan is a not very effective lit-
erary effort meant to exonerate God from appearing as the
source of evil. Such a Satan becomes a real threat to the suf-
ferer through those “friends” who, having a false image of
God, judge the sufferer to be one who deserves such punish-
ment. For the sufferer, these friends are indeed Satan’s cruel-
est helpers. Even Christ on the cross was exposed to them:
the pseudo-religious people who insulted him. Job’s victory
over this temptation occurs because of his trustful adoration
of the ever greater God.
The shrewd Satan who tempts Jesus in the desert em-
bodies the insidious temptation put to Christianity in the
first and following centuries. The misuse of the Bible by clev-
erly twisting its words to create false meanings tempted peo-
ple away from the faith.
Satan represents also the terrible temptation of a too
earthly understanding of the messianic hope of Israel and the
mission of Christ. This is seen strikingly when Jesus rebukes
Peter for refusing to believe in a suffering and humble ser-
vant-Messiah: “Away with you, Satan; you are a stumbling-
block to me, because the way you think is not God’s but
man’s” (Mt. 16:23).
Satan at his most shameless—asking Jesus to adore
him—mirrors the vain self-glorification of the earthly powers
of the time, particularly in the divinization of the RomanTEMPTATION 9071