Ha! Native skepticism wins again! 
Thanks for the support, Dan Norder and welcome to the boards. Here’s hoping you stick around. If you think you might, don’t forget to subscribe soon before the price goes up.
Thanks for the help on this, Alan, Dan and Jomo. I hope I haven’t been getting on anyones nerves with this.
Dan, thanks for your input. Lots of a very good points.
devilsknew, now that you mention it, my lit teacher did mention intertwining snakes from Greek mythology. I’ll have to ask him, but it was my impression he thought that there were either images or engravings of these intertwining snakes that traced back to this supposed earlier religion that accounts for the snake in Genesis. (Yeah, I’ve found that several of these communtity college teachers never check there facts)
Alan, I will check the library for the NRSV. After I read Job in the KJV I read it in the New Jeruselem version. All I can say is that its not an easy book in any version.
I don’t really remember if I had a point about Abraham either. It seems like something you said just triggered that memory. It probably was that it is evidence of a historical figure that Abraham was based on.
As for the snake, I have always thought that he was Satan, but now I have to agree with those who say that the notion of Satan hadn’t developed yet. In the essay I wrote for the class, I described him as “a representation of evil.”
Graves seems to have this completely backwards. In all the middle Eastern traditions, it the serpent who is female and a male god who crushes her. For instance, in the Enuma Elish , the serpent is Tiamat and it is Marduk who vanquishes her, while in the Ugaritic texts , the sea-serpent is Yamm (= “sea”) and the conquering god is Baal of OT fame. (Both of these are from about 1400-1200 BC)
Now, it is true that this kind of war in heaven often reflects a religious conflict, in which a new god who is replacing an old one gets a myth where he conquers the older god. This naturally gives an excuse for switching gods. Maybe this is what Graves is using to deduce an earlier worship of the female goddess (I haven’t read Graves). But it’s still the female who is the serpent in these stories.
Is the snake in Eden a reflection of these earlier myths? Possibly, but it seems a stretch. There are more direct influences on the OT, tho. One of the Psalms says Yahweh “split” Yamm. This was originally a straight rip-off of the Baal myth. Later, Judaism went through a demythologizing that reinterpreted the myth in terms of the crossing of the Red Sea, which God “split” for Moses.
In the creation story, God separates (“splits”) the heavens and the earth. In the Enuma Elish, after splitting Tiamat Marduk uses the two halves of her body to create the earth and the sky (see Tablet IV).