BOTR,
Some people, of course, pose questions about one's faith to counter questions that an adult might raise after considering for once a story they have heard read like a fable before bed to a child. The adult says, "Stop for a minute. What is really going on?"
Good question. And it only raises more. As Christians we forget to ask ourselves what would this story have meant to Jews if Paul had not come along? Would it have meant the same to all of them (the covenant that they attested to, being whatever it was ) since they could little agree on whether life ended with death or continued on another plane?
If one puts any stock in the notion of various sources of the OT books and chapters, the editors of chapter 1 through to 2:4 of Genesis were of different view and origin than those that followed for several chapters. Chapter language and description of creation differ significantly in chpater one from what follows. Even the disposition and behavior of the God who had completed a six day labor. But once the second, third and fourth chapter editors complete their account of the Garden, the subject is never broached again in Genesis. Nor does it elsewhere in the Penteteuch or the rest of the OT. Abraham's encounter with God introduces a Covenant and a Promised Land that unifies most of the rest of the text.
I am told that the Eastern Orthodox Church has a different view on the story of the Garden than we have in the west. And I am still curious to have their viewpoint explained. I notice as well, that although the NT Gospels appear to have devils and demons (rather than talking snakes) lurking behind EVERY tree, so to speak, Paul does not take a position of "ransom" being paid. And I think that significant. It is people such as Rutherford or his theological predecessors that seem to make so much of representing Satan at the affair which Paul describes as a breech between God and Adam. Maybe this sounds like splitting hairs, but I think there is more to it than that. I should add that the Paul's epistles came first with the explanation of Christ in terms of the Garden. And then the Gospels were written in a succession that is not clearly known, save that the SECOND destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in a Roman siege was a significant milestone. Did all, some or one write afterwards?
Though is claimed to be the most Jewish in outlook of the Gospel writers, after a geneaology the story begins with the visit of Magi. Magi are Zoroastrians. They certainly believe in devils and a dualistic cosmos. Yet they are absent in the OT and at least one annotated Torah I have notes of 3:14, "... As the curse that follows indicates, this story has to do with the fate of the snakes, not with the cosmic role of a devil. There is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible.... v. 14 states explicitly that snakes crawl on their bellies is the punishment imposed on the snake and its descendants for the offense that it has committed." This is literal minded, of course. But are not alternative explanations for what this story about very literal and discriminating in evidentiary approach as well?
As circumstances would have it, I found myself only a few degrees of separation away from one of the priests that presided over the most famous exorcism in the country. Well, actually, he assisted. And only recently did he pass on after a career both as a high school instructor and as a paratrooper military chaplain. The subject of the rites was a young boy from the Midwest, not a young girl in the District of Columbia. While the presiding priest was more convinced that he was dealing with the devil since he was inflicted with a wound of about a hundred stitches in the midst of the encounter ( a hooked bedspring), the other attending priest said that "all he was sure of was that boy needed help" and that he confronted more evil on the battlefront.
I came away from both reading the Bible and these testimonies with the notion that evil is something more significantly within us and not so much about a dualistic battle over eternity between a demon and God. If I spend my life searching for this demon, I am more likely to spawn one within myself or fire weapons in the dark wounding others taking aim at it. To illustrate, try reading the raving daily entries of the 1934 Yearbook edited by Rutherford. And consider others whose means of exorcism was related more to alighting the strange at the stake. So if there is a question of spiritual triage, that reflects my thinking.
Of course, none of this resolves your dilemma, but I hope it provides some other perspectives.
K