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My opening remarks are going to be fairly brief (for me), and address the general framework and mindset differences. For any of a number of reasons, the Book of Genesis was written to be clear and easy-to-be-understood by the people at the time it was penned. If the "creation account" and "the fall" of Genesis 1-3 were written for modern sensibilities, it would have been written (for the same number of reasons) with some highly technical details, it would have been far more exhaustive in detail, and would have proceeded in a far more linear fashion. One common mistake, IMHO, in reading Genesis is in refusing to approach it like it was "meant" to be read, that is, with a literary mindset that matches the text and not 21st century books. (The differences between early 20th century books and now can be dramatic- so the idea that, further back, there's GREATER differences, should not be particularly odd. One additional problem, which this writer didn't make, is when people assume that we invented figures of speech or extended figures of speech. We have no difficulty understanding them when they're used in modern settings, but when it comes to old settings, some people seem to think they didn't exist. Example 1: Christopher Lee sang "The Bloody Verdict of Verden." It dramatizes an incident from Charlemagne's life, where thousands of Saxons were killed at Charlemagne's order. Lee plays Charlemagne in the song. "I shed the Blood of the Saxon men! I shed it at Verden! I shed the Blood of the Saxon men! I shed the Blood of four thousand Saxon men!" Nobody takes him to mean that Charlemagne himself stood there at Verden and slew all 4000 personally. Example 2: We have no difficulty imagining the use of animals to METAPHORICALLY describe people now. "The old sidewinder", "that pig", "you cow", and so on. When we do so, we're comparing some attribute of the person (real or imagined) to the animal's attributes (real or imagined). We have no problem with an extended metaphor comparing one to the other, and understand we're not speaking, say, of a literal fox, or a literal wolf, or whatever. Anyway, I haven't connected any of this to the topic yet, but I plan to, if anyone cares. Peace and love.

Indeed. In terms of scholarship, this particular "theory," that Adam was the real serpent, completely misses the notion of that narrative actually being a creation story. I don't buy the original understanding as having literal aspects that could reasonably be parsed in a manner like the bastardization of biblical study into which we were indoctrinated by twi. It seems to me that in order to even approach taking seriously that Adam was the real serpent one has to buy into the idea that humanity was so freaking incompetent at recording it's creation myths/stories, that it would miss figuring out who Adam really was. That's extremely implausible.