Historical References to Serpent’s Seed

I took this excerpts from Mark Strohkorb’s writing on the Serpent’s Seed doctrine. They are historical references to what Jewish historically viewed as what caused the fall.

In several tractates of the Talmud a contamination of the race is spoken of, which is ascribed to the serpent’s intercourse with Eve, and to the poison which she derived from him . . . We thus have a Jewish doctrine of inherited corruption, which, derived from Satan, was transmitted by Eve to all her seed.
F. R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin, London, 1903

Dr. N. P. Williams (of Oxford University) defines inquinamentum this way:
The Adamic doctrine of the origin of sin, which regards the “Fall” as consisting in the seduction, in the restricted sense of that term, of Eve by the serpent, or by Satan appearing as the serpent; from which was later deduced a theory of the inherited taint as an inquinamentum, a gross physical pollution so communicated to her and through her to her posterity.

Dr. F. R. Tennant notes:
It is beyond question . . . that various legends concerning the monstrous intercourse of . . . Eve with the serpent or Satan, were both widespreadand ancient among the Jews; and this is rather the sense in which as Edersheim observed, the Fall is associated in rabbinic writings with evil concupiscence.
The curious belief just mentioned is of some importance because it supplied Judaism with a doctrine in some respects similar to that of original sin and hereditary corruption [within Christianity] . . .

It is deeply significant that, in the earliest Fall-story evolved by the ancient Church of God, the primal sin is one which, if the Decalogue [the Ten Commandments] could be supposed to have been in existence at the time of its alleged occurrence, would be described as a transgression of the Seventh Commandment [“Thou shalt not commit adultery,” Ex.20:14; i.e., a transgression of sexual origin]. Though it is impossible now to develop the inferences suggested by this fact, it is worth while noting that, in the very beginnings of the idea of Original Sin, there emerges a tendency which has profoundly influenced the course of Christian speculation on the subject, more particularly in its Augustinian phase: and that is the tendency to regard the flaw or weakness inherent in the structure of human personality as caused by, or at least closely connected with, what is known in the language of technical theology as “concupiscence.” NP Williams