The serpent is a complex figure, featuring prominently throughout Jewish literature. In Genesis, the serpent in the Garden of Eden is described as cunning and deceitful, ultimately becoming cursed for encouraging Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. In The Book of Numbers, we see serpents attack the Hebrews in the desert, causing death and suffering – however, the cure could not be curiouser: Moses receives instructions from the Divine to construct a bronze serpent statue on a pole, and all who look upon it are mysteriously cured.
In the Kabbalah, the Path Of The Serpent up the Tree of Life, touches each of the Sephirot, and is a path of gnosis and self-transformation, from the bottom of the tree to the top. Paradoxically, looking back to Eden, the Serpent’s role was the opposite, hastening Eve and Adam’s descent down the Tree of Life, from the Garden in Da’ath to the Earth in Malkuth.
The serpent is good and bad, harmful and helpful, two sides of the same coin… and round and round it goes.
