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 there was an earlier form of the legend in which he figured as a god or a demon.

The ascription of supernatural characters to the serpent presents little difficulty even to the modern mind. The marvellous agility of the snake, in spite of the absence of visible motor organs, its stealthy movements, its rapid death-dealing stroke, and its mysterious power of fascinating other animals and even men, sufficiently account for the superstitious regard of which it has been the object amongst all peoples. Accordingly, among the Arabs every snake is the abode of a spirit, sometimes bad and sometimes good, so that ǧānn and ġūl and even Shaitān are given as designations of the serpent (We. Heid. 152 f.; cf. Rob. Sm. RS$2$, 120$1$, 129 f., 442). What is more surprising to us is the fact that in the sphere of religion the serpent was usually worshipped as a good demon. Traces of this conception can be detected in the narrative before us. The demonic character of the serpent appears in his possession of occult divine knowledge of the properties of the tree in the middle of the garden, and in his use of that knowledge to seduce man from his allegiance to his Creator. The enmity between the race of men and the race of serpents is explained as a punishment for his successful temptation; originally he must have been represented as a being hostile, indeed, to God, but friendly to the woman, who tells her the truth which the Deity withheld from man (see Gres. l.c. 357). All this belongs to the background of heathen mythology from which the materials of the narrative were drawn; and it is the incomplete elimination of the mythological element, under the influence of a monotheistic and ethical religion, which makes the function of the serpent in Gn. 3 so difficult to understand. In later Jewish theology the difficulty was