Sunday, July 28, 2019

The interloping serpent

Stephen King, in his short-story "The Gunslinger", had the titular character enter a small decadent town at the edge of a desert. A female preacher controlled this town "Tull", and sought to rile up the Tullfolk against the gunslinger. This she did by a reading of Genesis Two (among others): the serpent in Eden was no natural beast, said she; but an alien from outside.

Such derives from Christianity and maybe even more from Islam, whose Quran nowhere relates the form which al-Shaytan took - unless it were fire.

Genesis Two does, I agree, hint in Stephen King's direction. Especially as an Israelite Torah, God built Eden for the incubation of man, those creatures most resembling Him. God didn't build it for dogs or giraffes or beetles. If some non-human entity was sentient in the Garden, that wasn't part of God's plan. Either the serpent shouldn't be there at all or else something else was speaking through it. Either way: an Interloper.

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