The analogy between these myths and the Bible narrative is striking indeed. They are, really, one and the same tradition, only bearing a quite different sense, symbolizing an invention of a material order, instead of dwelling on the fundamental fact of the moral order, and disfigured further by the monstrous conception, too frequent in Paganism, of the Divinity as a formidable and adverse power, jealous of the happiness and progress of man. The spirit of error among the Gentiles had distorted the mysterious symbolic memory of the events by which the fate of humanity was decided. The inspired author of Genesis took it up under the form that it had evidently retained among the Hebrews, as among the other nations where it had acquired a material meaning, but he restored to it its true significance, and made it the occasion of a solemn lesson.
Some remarks are still needed regarding the animal form assumed by the tempter in Bible story, that serpent who, as figured monuments have shown us, played the same part in the legends of Chaldea and Phenicia.
The serpent, or, more correctly speaking, different kinds of serpents, held a very considerable place in the religious symbolism of the peoples of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis. But by the side of divine serpents, essentially benign in character, protective, prophetic, linked with gods of health, life, and healing, we do find in all mythologies a gigantic serpent, who personifies a hostile and nocturnal power, a wicked principle, material darkness, and moral evil.
Among the Egyptians we meet with the serpent, Assap, who fights against the sun and moon, and whom Horus pierces with his weapon. Among the Chaldeo-Assyrians we find mention made of a great serpent called the "enemy of the gods," _aiub-ilani_. We need not introduce here the myth of the great cosmogonic struggle between Tiamat, the personification of Chaos, and the god Masuduk, related in a portion of the epic fragments, in cuneiform character, discovered by George Smith. Tiamat assumes the form of a monster often repeated on monuments, but this form is not that of the serpent. We are distinctly told that it was from Phenician mythology that Pherecides of Syros borrowed his account of the Titan Ophion, the man-serpent precipitated into Tartarus, together with his companions, by the god Kronos (El), who triumphed over him at the beginning of things, a story strikingly similar to that of the defeat of the "old serpent, who is the accuser and Satan," repulsed and imprisoned in the abyss, which story does not, indeed, occur in the Old Testament, but existed among the oral traditions of the Hebrews, and makes its appearance in Chapters xii. and xx. of the Apocalypse of St. John.