Serpent: You should eat the fruit.
Adam and Eve: Whoa! A talking snake!
Genesis 3
The Serpent
The serpent may be Satan, but needn’t be according to the text.
Ancient Israelites did not have a concept of a personification of evil, or of evil occurring because of a singular event. “Satan” appears in Job, a text older than Genesis. However, the Hebrew for “satan” means “accuser”, and is used as a description. The word is used of King David’s human enamies, even the angel that stops Balaam is described with this word (Numbers 22:22, 32). When scripture calls someone “a satan” or “the satan”, we needn’t assume that it is Satan himself. The early Hebrews at the time Genesis was written had no such ideas.
John 8:44, Revelation 12:9 – Eve was tempted of the devil. But this isn’t necessary for our understanding of the text of Genesis alone.
In Genesis, however, the writer is still contrasting this story with that of the other nations. God did not have some adversarial being fighting against him, as in the other stories the serpent is just one of his creatures that he himself created, like the Sun and Moon.
In ancient myth, a serpent cursed to crawl on its belly meant that it could not raise its head to strike. It may also be called “cursed to keep its head on the path”. Egyptians had curses for snakes to crawl on its belly to protect them. This does not necessarily mean it once had legs. It means this serpent was rendered harmless. Eating dust was an activity of the underworld (Gilgamesh and Enkidu), because corpses were seen as being filled with dust. Consider “bite the dust”. It means the serpent is cursed to die, probably because it is unable to strike and kill prey.
Genesis 16:10 and 24:60 show that once a seed is implanted in a woman, it is HER SEED. There is nothing unusual about a seed of a woman.
The Seed
This Hebrew word is collective, and does not have a plural, just as Abraham’s seed is collective in Genesis 12 and 17. When Paul refers to seed in Galatians 3:16, he is pointing out the collective nature of the word. In his argument, Jesus represents all of Israel collectively. We are not a collection of individuals, but a unit. Galatians 3:16 does not refer to this passage, however. The only other passage in all of scripture that alludes to this verse and can help with interpretation is Romans 16:20, where it is under OUR feet that GOD will crush Satan.
This MIGHT be a Messianic promise, but we cannot say for sure that it is based on the text.
The Curse
A woman’s desire to be a mother and her inability to do so alone puts man in a position to potentially oppress her.
What was LOST in the garden was the continual presence of God. The rest of the narrative of the OT does not concern itself with regaining a garden, but with regaining the community with God.
The snake is cursed. The ground is cursed. The people are never cursed.
Death occurs because they are separated from the Tree of Life, their source of eternal youth. This is not a curse, but a consequence.
Another consequence of death is that the entire process of birthing from conception onward will become more anxious for the woman. Her instinct to desire to be a mother carries this consequence because of death. This does not necessarily mean that labour was without pain before this point, or that the pain of birthing labour is a curse.
The ground is cursed, but the threat of mortality is what causes working it to be an anxious one. Without fear of death, working the ground would have been only a pleasure.
No comments:
Post a Comment