Do snakes really eat dust, as Genesis 3 says?

In Hebrew, to eat or lick the dust is a picture of utter defeat and shame, not a description of diet. Of the king’s enemies the psalm says, “his enemies shall lick the dust” (Psalm 72:9). Kings will bow to Zion “and lick up the dust of thy feet” (Isaiah 49:23). Micah takes the picture straight from Genesis: the nations “shall lick the dust like a serpent” (Micah 7:17). The serpent had raised itself against God and against the man and woman. Its sentence is to go on its belly with its face in the dirt, the lowest of the creatures, and the next verse goes on to its final defeat: “it shall bruise thy head” (Genesis 3:15).

The wording also answers the sin. The woman and the man had eaten what God forbade; the tempter who led them to eat is now given dust to eat. Isaiah 65:25 shows the same picture still at work in the prophets. In the new creation, where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together”, the serpent is the one creature left under the curse: “dust shall be the serpent’s meat”, and it will no longer hurt or destroy.

Keil and Delitzsch also note a plain, literal side. The words do not mean that dust was to be the serpent’s only food, but that a creature that crawls with its mouth at ground level takes in dust along with what it eats. Either way, the verse makes no claim that snakes feed on soil.

Snakes do take in dust

Some writers point out that a snake flicks its tongue on the ground and carries the particles to the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of its mouth, its sense of smell. This is true, but most who mention it, including Answers in Genesis, agree that the main sense of the curse is figurative.

A sentence on Satan

Many Christians, among them Matthew Henry and Gill, read the curse as aimed at the tempter behind the serpent as well as at the serpent itself, whom Revelation calls “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Eating dust then speaks of his humiliation and final defeat.

Christians differ over whether the serpent’s form changed at the curse, as Keil and Delitzsch held, or whether the curse gave a new meaning to the way it already moved.