y in Genesis cannot be construed by any reasonable rules of
interpretation to mean or involve any other punishment on Adam or his
posterity, for his sin, beyond physical death. "Dust thou art and unto
dust shalt thou return" is the final climax of the penalty. There is
no hint, so far as I can understand it, of immortality or any future
life. There is not the remotest hint of it in this story. All the
punishments for sin from Adam to Noah, and long afterwards, culminated
and ended, so far as Genesis is concerned, in physical death. The
Hebrew Hades, Sheol and Gehena, were creations of a much later period.

And who, or what was the serpent? A real snake, or the devil? I know
the current belief is that the serpent is a mere figure for the devil,
or that at least the spirit of the devil was incarnated in the serpent.
But there is not a line of Scripture to support either assumption. In
the story itself it is stated only that the serpent was "more subtle
than all the beasts of the field." He is classed with them, not above
them, except in subtlety. The whole fabric upon which this idea of the
identity of the serpent of Eden and the devil is based seems to be a
single verse in Revelation (xii, 9): "And the great dragon was cast
down, the old serpent, he that is called the devil and Satan, the
deceiver of the whole world; he was cast down to the earth, and his
angels were cast down with him." There are one or two other passages
in the same book that speak of "that old serpent, which is the devil
and Satan," but they have no more connection with or relation to the
story of Eden, than Homer's "Iliad" has to the nebular hypothesis. And
yet upon these few passages is built up the whole fabric of the
identity of the serpent of Eden and the temptation, with the devil,
Satan or Lucifer, that is so graphically portrayed in "Paradise Lost."
This whole story of the serpent in Eden is very likely but an
adaptation, in another form, of the old Babylonian myth of "Marduk and
the Dragon."

All this shifting of the penalty for Adam's sin from physical to
spiritual death and identifying the serpent with Satan, was an
after-invention, to try to make it harmonize with later developed
doctrines of immortality. Any candid reader can see that no such
interpretation can be placed upon the natural and simple language of
the story itself. In fact immortality for man, according to the story,
is forever inhibited, according to verses 22