These are all reasonable questions and of course someone who believes in the Bible as God's Word will have a hard time answering them without making up details that aren't in the account. From a secular perspective, though, if we view the story as akin to an Aesop's fable, then it becomes a very consistent and straight-forward story:
Why didn't God blame the more sophisticated, well travel
serpant..
He did! That's why he zapped the legs off the snake. It's true that the account doesn't say the snake definitely had legs before this, so we can only guess, but the fact that God cursed him to go on his belly and lick dust indicates that he was a salamander-like animal that had his legs removed as punishment. Of course from the Christian standpoint it makes no sense that God would punish a snake if the Devil made him do it, but that's okay, because the Christian believes this is really God talking symbolically to Satan, right? I mean, it's definitely not a story that intended to explain why there's this odd animal called a snake that looks like a salamander but somehow doesn't have legs
What was God doing when EVE was talking to the serpant??
That's where the story is marvelously self-consistent. If we note from 3:8, 9 that YHWH is not omniscient, then he didn't see this conversation simply because he was somewhere else. Some trees were in the way. Or he may have been seated on his throne in the heavens-above-the-firmament at the time. Of course the Christian believes that God saw everything and allowed this to happen as a test, which seems a bit crueler, doesn't it?
Unless all the other animals were talking in the garden, I would
think if a serpant spoke to me, I would have called on God.
God, something weird is going on..
I think you hit on the truth here. It's possible that for the storyteller, animals could talk. It's not that ancient people were ignorant and thought that animals talked to each other when humans weren't looking, or that they were gullible and believed the storyteller when he said animals could talk.
When we read an Aesop's fable about a fox talking to a mouse, we don't say, "Okay, hold on, I gotta call BS on this, animals don't talk." We understand that the story is intended to illustrate something, not be taken literally. There's evidence that in ancient times, many of the accounts that literalists now take seriously were viewed by ancient man as interesting stories which had varying degrees of factualness.
The gist of the Garden of Eden story is primarily just to say, "Why are things so rough for us humans if they're the pinnacle of creation? Because our first parents sinned." The details of the story were less important, and there were probably lots of versions of this story that weren't written down.
