According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was… mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. “Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
So that’s exactly the point of people saying “ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it”
That’s a stupid point, of the same kind as “the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb”. It’s just agitprop. I don’t see any reason to pay attention to such “points”, do you?
“Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar
For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was… mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. “Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
That’s a stupid point, of the same kind as “the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb”. It’s just agitprop. I don’t see any reason to pay attention to such “points”, do you?
For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.