There is so much we do not understand about intended meaning of the Bible narrative as we tend to make assumptions and judgments based on irrelevant concepts we come up with as we read the scriptures with our 'educated' minds.
Tetrapodophis is a creature which purportedly existed around 100 million years ago, according to dating methods used on at least one fossil found in Brazil.
The name identifies it as a four legged snake in terms of its meaning in Greek.
The idea that snakes had legs prompts an idea which gives new meaning to the scripture which reads:
Gen 3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent: 'Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou from among all cattle, and from among all beasts of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.'
The Hebrew word as found in the Torah is Nachash which means serpent or snake or deceiver or diviner - soothsayer.
I noticed a heading to one of the images of this fossil, the idea - Why, if God removed legs from snakes at the fall, are there fossil snakes with four legs?
Well my views on that are :
The Earth was not made Ex Nihilo but from preexistence materials ( create means organise material into a new format) and those materials may well have included fossils from previous epochs, if I may use that word loosely.
Thus any fossils predating sentient Man may actually relate to a time before the organisation of this world into its current form, which the Bible says was organised for us.
We read in Job that 'ALL the sons of God shouted for joy' as they watched this Earth formed. That means we were all present, i.e. as spirits, before assuming mortal bodies, whilst the first humans were of course immortal until after the utilization of knowledge of good and evil resulted in a planned change in the nature of things as they were at the time, which was a preparatory time.
or
The meaning of the narrative in Genesis is more complex than we tend to imagine as is fitting since God speaks of the mysteries of the Kingdom and the means by which we may come to understand them.
In this vein, the 'creation' may well have included the entire evolutionary history of the planet as we know it and of course, all that we still do not know and that the 'serpent' alluded to, possessed or not, actually had legs in the context indicated by the narrative.
In any event, the idea that the snake had four legs was hardly something Moses or whoever we imagine the author of a fictional Bible may have been would know of and the concept is therefore of interest.
Here is a video in which a suitably qualified presenter introduces the fossil.
Sources : Pixabay, Wikipedia, The video(Youtube), The KJV Bible
