Genesis 3:1

And the serpent was wiser unto evil than all the beasts of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Is it truth that the Lord God hath said, You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

And it said to the woman. Some say that Chavah understood the gesticulations of the animals. According to Rav Sadyah Gaon, however, whenever speech is ascribed to an animal it is actually an angel that is speaking on its behalf. Alternatively, it is possible that these verses are to be taken literally, since it is no more difficult for Hashem to give intelligence to a serpent than to human beings.

והנחש, another word for Satan, which itself is a way of describing the evil urge. (Baba Batra 16). The reason why this evil urge is compared to a serpent is that just like a serpent which makes itself as invisible as possible, blending in with its environment, and yet causes more damage than the most prominently visible obstacles, so the evil urge lurks where one does not suspect to find it. It is a common practice to name phenomena according to other well known phenomena, such as calling the king “lion,” to show what is expected of a king, i.e. strength, fearlessness, etc. (compare Jeremiah 4,7 “the lion has come up from his thicket,” a reference to King Nevuchadnezzar) Also in Jeremiah 8,17 Israel’s enemies are referred to as נחשים צפעונים אשר אין להם לחש, “adders which cannot be charmed.” G’d, using a metaphor, calls the evil urge נחש, in our verse. Anything or anybody who leads Israel into sin is termed נחש. The reason why a serpent has been chosen for such a metaphor is that it is a creature whose potential harm is huge, whereas its potential benefit to man is minimal. Moreover, seeing that its visibility is minimal, it is similar to the evil urge who never attacks frontally, and often poses as friend rather than as enemy. Our sages in Pirkey de Rabbi Eliezer chapter 13 already enlarged on this metaphor by describing Samael as riding the serpent, meaning “taking advantage of this power of imagination.” The insidious nature of the evil urge consists of the fact that it conjures up in our imagination something desirable, which because of its desirability we rationalize into considering as harmless, harbouring no physical or spiritual danger for us. Greed, lust, combined with one’s imagination is a powerful tool for leading man into sin. Unless man is able to harness the power of reason against such insidious attempts to trick him into disobedience against G’d by giving in to his desire for gratification of his senses, he will fall victim to the evil urge’s machinations. When our sages (Jerusalem Talmud Berachot 1.8) said עינא ולבא סרסורי דחטאה, “the eyes and the heart are agents of sin,” they referred to the warning against the evil urge we recite twice daily in the last section of the keriyat shema. (Numbers 15,39).

והנחש היה ערום מכל חית ה שדה אשר עשה ה' אלוקים, It is in order to ask in what fashion the serpent conversed with Chavah. If G’d had opened the serpent’s mouth by means of a miracle, as He did when Bileam’s ass started speaking to him (Numbers 22,28), why did the Torah not report, as it did in that verse that “G’d opened the mouth of the serpent?” If, on the other hand, if, as in the view of Rabbi Saadyah gaon, the conversations reported in the Torah between both the ass and Bileam and the serpent and Chavah were conducted by an angel on their behalf, why was the serpent punished and cursed for all times? Besides, how is it possible that G’d assigned to an angel the task to seduce Chavah to sin against G’d? Furthermore, what reason was there to introduce the serpent into the story at this point? Why did the Torah have to write: “and the serpent was the wiliest of all the beasts of the field, etc.?” If the serpent was unable to speak, i.e. to communicate with Chavah in his own right, how do we know that it was such a clever creature? If we are to assume that the angel was dispatched to subject the woman to a test of her faith and obedience, how was the serpent to blame for the outcome? Besides, it would have been so much more appropriate for the angel to test Adam himself, seeing it was he who had been commanded by G’d not to eat from the tree of knowledge? Chavah had heard of this only second hand from her husband!
The whole subject is extremely confusing, when we look only at what has been revealed to us by the text. We need to resort to the writings of the Kabbalists to make better sense of this whole episode.(Pirkey de Rabbi Eliezer chapter 13)[in that chapter’s introduction, the point is made that jealousy and envy, some of the most destructive character traits, exist also in the celestial regions, and that when the angels who had not been delighted at man’s creation in the first place, saw how clever Adam was, and how he had named the animals immediately upon looking at them, they became afraid that their dominant role in G’d’s entourage would be jeopardized now. They therefore schemed to seduce man into sinning against His Creator in order to safeguard their role as being closest to G’d. Thereupon, Samael, the most powerful angel, the one who had 12 wings whereas all the others had only 6 wings, took his underlings with him to take a closer look at what went on in the terrestrial regions. He found that in those regions the serpent was by far the …

And the serpent was cunning, and it said at first: 'They were both naked,' because it wanted to say after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, 'They realized that they were naked.' The Scripture reveals that they were not ashamed of their nakedness and did not recognize that it was disgraceful until they ate from that fruit, and their understanding expanded. It is common for a person to engage in actions considered disgraceful by the wise without feeling their disgrace. But after receiving education and broadening his knowledge, the ugliness of his actions becomes clear to him, and he refrains from them