3:14-15 — 14So the Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, "Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
[T - OL ]
Yahweh was done with the questions.1 The first indictment in human history opens with a curse, a word that stands in contradistinction to all that Yahweh had intended for creation. Recognizing that the serpent had been the "more crafty ('arum mikkol)" than all the wild beasts of the field (3:1), now Yahweh pronounces It the "more cursed ('arur mikkol) than all the cattle and more than all (mikkol) the wild beasts of the field; the word-play on the two adjectives serving to heightening the effect of the sentence.
Many Christians think that snakes had legs before this pronouncement, and began a slithery existence only as a result of this curse. This idea first appeared during the inter-testamental period and has gained popularity since. The word gachon, 'belly,' occurs only twice in the OT; this restricts us severely in our search for a satisfying explanation of its significance, and it is best not to be dogmatic whatever view we take.2 No biological studies, however, support such a view. It is also possible to make perfect sense of the sentence without resorting to such un-scientific explanation. Just as to tell a wicked hunchback, "A hunchback you will always be," is not a prediction but an emphatic curse on him who is already hunchback, so to curse the serpent that it will always crawl on its belly is to say to it that there will never be any other existence possible for it other than what it is.
The next sentence has also been taken literally and, again, there is no scientific studies that show that snakes feed on dust ('apar). But if the snake were to crawl on its belly all its days from now onwards, it would have been so reduced that it would be eating dust—what is worthless—with no hope of reprieve ("all the days of your life"). That has to be the most abject fate anything can possibly be made to suffer. Is Yahweh exercising a wry sense of humour here: for bringing down those formed from 'apar the serpent is sentenced to feed lifelong on that very 'apar? However we make of these details, taken together they paint a proverbial Oriental picture of abject humiliation.
The second half of the pronouncement is the most amazing thing yet in the panorama of Yahweh's feast of grace. It is not so much a pronouncement of judgement as it is a prophetic declaration. First, it declares a state of enmity between this agent of chaos and the woman. This is not surprising, but the declaration of just five words of the enmity between "your offspring and hers" is earth-shattering. The woman would bear children before she dies! Her line would live! In judgement Yahweh remained merciful. If the serpent should lie to the woman that "surely you will not die" then Yahweh was prepared to take its lie and turned it to work for the good—not, as Paul says, for "those who love him" (Rom 8:28), but for those who were sinners. Here already was the seed of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ! "For Christ died for sins . . . the righteous for the unrighteous . . ." (1 Pet 3:18). What glory!
Of this enmity two things may be said. First, the NIV's use of two different verbs for what would eventually happen, "bruise" and "strike," may make for more pleasing reading, they are the same verb, shup, in the Hebrew (as reflected in most other versions). The verb, however, is problematic, occurring as it is only 3x in the OT. Though the general sense is clear; it means 'bruising' or 'crushing,' using the same verb for what the snake would do to the seed of the woman and for what he would do to the snake, and both aimed to equally vulnerable spots, makes it only a lose-lose battle (only the fact that the curse is on the serpent suggests that the fight is weighed against the snake). As a consequence translators and commentators through the long ages of the Christian church have sought to more clearly distinguish between these actions by means of different verbs, or by suggesting different roots for the verbs. In the end the results is not much improved. More significant than the meaning of the verb, however, is its tense. "The imperfect verb is iterative. It implies repeated attacks by both sides to injure the other. It declares lifelong mutual hostility between mankind and the serpent race. Of more moment for interpretation is the question of whether one side will eventually prove victorious in the battle, or whether the contest will be never-ending."3 What difficulties there may be with the language of the pronouncement, however, all commentators—both Jewish and Christian—see here a "proto-evangelium," the germ of good news that the strife will eventually end with the advent of the Messiah. Though the ancient readers would not have understood it with such clarity, the NT makes it clear that the serpent has been mortally crushed and defeated by Jesus on the Cross at Calvary. It has also been suggested that Jesus chose for himself the name 'Son of Man' with this in mind; 'Son of Man' is, of course, the idiomatic equivalent of 'Seed of the Woman.'
A considerable amount of ink has been spent debating whether zera', 'seed,' but translated "offspring" in NIV, should be understood as singular or plural. In form, the word is singular in the Hebrew text, but—as in all languages—some singular words can be collective in meaning (fish, e.g., can refer to many individual fishes of the same kind). So it is with zera'; it never appears in the plural in the OT, but is often used in a collective sense. But why is this debate necessary or important? If, it is argued, the referent is singular, then it points specifically to the prophecy of an individual person, born of Eve, who will crush the serpent's head. It is suggested that this may be what Paul had in mind when he spoke of God, in the fulness of time, "sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children" (Gal 4:4-5). If the seed here is plural in sense, then it can only refer to the descendants of the woman in general. In the end the result is, of course, the same. Luke traces Jesus' genealogy all the way back to Adam, the father of Seth, while Matthew traces it back to Abraham, whom Genesis traces back to Seth, the Woman's Seed.
You may wish to read the following commentaries-expositions:
You may wish to read the following articles:
Jack Collins, "A Syntactical Note (Genesis 3:15): Is the Woman's Seed Singular or Plural?" Tyndale Bulletin 48.1 (1997): 139-148. Pdf N 8-9 (Open on Phone)
T. Desmond Alexander, "Further Observations on the Term 'Seed' in Genesis," Tyndale Bulletin 48.2 (1997): 363-367. Pdf N 7-8 (Open on Phone)
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2016