Other sources deny the angels’ role in the conspiracy. They claim the initiative came from the serpent himself. He fell in love with Eve and planned to kill Adam and marry his widow. Better yet: to arrange for God to kill Adam, then to abscond with Eve and her fortune—with the heiress and her inheritance. He aimed too high, a legend tells us, and he was punished; he obtained nothing of what he coveted and lost everything he could call his own. God told him: No longer will you reign over the animals; rather, from now on your fate will be lowlier than theirs; no longer will you walk erect or run; from now on you will crawl in the dust.

Whatever the serpent’s motivation may have been, one fact remains: his first target was Eve. Why? Rightly or wrongly, he assessed the woman as being more vulnerable, more gullible, more malleable than her husband. He expected that of the two, she would offer the least resistance. His intuition proved right. Under his influence, Eve agreed to bite into the forbidden fruit, she even succeeded in turning her husband into an accomplice. (The moral of the story? Perhaps that everybody can be seduced: woman by Satan and man by woman.)

Here again, something in this episode will almost certainly disturb the careful reader. Is it conceivable that Eve could have hesitated even one second between the voice of the Creator of the Universe and that of the serpent, albeit a serpent on an extraordinary mission? We would find it easier to accept such a reaction from Adam; between the demand of heaven and the promises of woman, man may well hesitate or else not hesitate at all. But Eve, how could she possibly disregard God’s will and submit to the will of a serpent?

Here is what happened, according to legend. Obviously, it was all Eve’s fault: she talked too much. Even before she tasted the forbidden fruit, she was guilty of exaggerating the facts. And as we all know, exaggeration leads to digression, which in turn leads straight to transgression.

Let us reread the text in the Book of Genesis: God instructs Adam and Eve not to eat of a certain fruit. Yet in her conversation with the serpent, Eve added something of her own to the prohibition: We were told not to eat from the tree and not even to touch it, for to do either would bring death upon us.

Lesson number one: fiction is dangerous business. Lesson number two: one must choose one’s conversation partners with care and not talk to just anyone and surely not about theology. Eve’s mistake was to enter into a dialogue with the serpent in the first place. Lesson number three: she was wrong in committing not only herself but her absent husband as well. Lesson number four: Adam should not have left his house; had he stayed home with his wife, the serpent would have had no chance of success. Eve had been an easy prey. The serpent knew just how to manipulate her. He knew that sin was one subject sure to interest Eve.