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I am constantly amazed at the “new” things I see in reading the Bible year after year. I read the Bible for the first time in a World Religion class in college in 1978, and I have been reading it ever since. In the last 5 years (6, or 7, I don’t know), I have read the through the Bible from beginning to end – from Genesis to Revelation – in chronological order and in other ways.

At the beginning of this New Year, I am going to try writing some shorter articles, as I have noticed my articles are getting progressively more wordy and lengthy. The Bible is a rich tapestry, but some threads are longer than others, so I am going to try to pull on some shorter threads from time to time.

In this article, I am focusing on Genesis 3:15 inspired by a brief comment in a sermon I heard during the Christmas season. People often credit the following verse in Genesis as a foreshadowing of the coming of Jesus. God speaking to Eve after the fall said:

“And 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.”

Genesis 3:15 niv

I confess that this foreshadowing never seemed crystal clear to me. Jesus is the offspring of Eve, but so are billions of people. Thus, that connection didn’t seem obvious to me. I saw nothing in that verse that seemed to be specifically about Jesus.

I always figured that theologians connect the second phrase of Genesis 3:15 to Jesus: Eve’s “offspring” (Jesus) will “crush” the serpent’s (Satan’s) head, and the serpent will “strike” his heel. Crushing the head and striking the heel is imagery that doesn’t seem to tie in specifically to what happened with Jesus, except in a very general way. It isn’t completely inappropriate (Jesus certainly had the victory!), but the imagery doesn’t closely fit the details of the crucifixion (like Isaiah 53 does, for instance).

Crushing a head is a fatal blow. Striking a heel is not fatal. Satan’s blow wasn’t fatal, though it seemed to be the dramatic end to Jesus. The crucifixion turns out to be more like the striking of a heal, because Jesus rose from the dead! And that “blow” was crushing to Satan and his purposes.

The end!

Mic drop….

While this is generally accurate, the imagery doesn’t remind us of Jesus in the same way that other Old Testament passages clearly foreshadow him, like Isaiah 53 (by his stripes we are healed).

Hindsight helps us see Jesus in these words spoken by Isaiah hundreds of years earlier. Jews before the time of Jesus knew that many passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, and other places spoke of a Messiah to come. Scholars also go back to Genesis 3:15 to see the foreshadowing of the Messiah (an offspring of Eve crushing the serpent that fooled Adam and Eve into sin).

But, there is more in Genesis 3:15 than the crushing of the serpent’s head that may point to Jesus, and it points to Jesus uniquely and poignantly. It also reveals another thread that runs throughout Scripture.

To see the thread I want to pull on today, we need to focus on the first part of the verse:

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers….

Genesis 3:15a

The recitation of Genesis 3:15a above is how the NIV translation renders the verse. I have been using the NIV translation recently, but this verse reads a little differently in other translations. Not that the NIV translation is bad; it just doesn’t lend itself to finding the particular thread that I am pulling on here.

The word translated “offspring” in the NIV is the Hebrew word זֶרַע (zera). It can mean sowing, seed, or offspring. Thus, the NIV translation is accurate, but other translations use “seed” instead of offspring, and the word, seed, gives us a slightly different perspective that opens up some interesting considerations.

The Hebrew word, zera, can refer to actual seeds (from plants), offspring or descendants (of animals or humans), and semen. In fact, zera is a male gendered word. When used in the human context, it often refers to the “seed” by which a woman is impregnated and by which she gives birth to a child.

Such a seed always comes from a man, biologically, but Genesis 3:15 specifically says that Eve’s seed will be at enmity with the serpent, and and Eve’s seed will crush the serpent’s head.

Why didn’t God say that Adam’s seed would do these things? Wouldn’t that be more accurate?

Why did God specifically link the seed to Eve, and not Adam? Doesn’t Eve need Adam to plant the seed in her? Doesn’t a woman need a man’s seed to give birth to this offspring that would gain the victory over the serpent and redeem mankind from the fall?

Wouldn’t this offspring, at a minimum, be a descendant of both Adam and Eve?

To the extent that Mary was a descendant of Adam and Eve, this is generally true, but we need to read carefully what is written. When God is specific about Eve’s seed, it means something. When we read something that doesn’t seem to make perfect sense, we need to pay attention all the more to what is going on.

More to the point, the fact that this verse does not read the way we expect it to read is a reason to take note! We might naturally expect that such a passage written by a man in a paternalistic, patrilineal society many hundreds and thousands of years ago would attribute the seed to Adam. But it doesn’t.

Why not?

I take a high view of Scripture, and I believe that God really did inspire the various authors of the writings of the Bible to write what they did – even if it might not have made complete sense to them. Could it be that the statement about Eve’s seed foreshadowed the virgin birth?

The seed (Jesus) that would crush the serpent’s head didn’t come from Joseph (Adam); it was Mary’s (Eve’s) seed, given directly from God according to the prophecy of Isaiah and the story of the birth of Jesus found in the Gospels. It was Mary’s seed – the seed that God gave her – that would crush the serpent. It wasn’t the seed from a man (Adam) as we would expect.

The description of the virgin birth of Jesus that we find in the Gospels and that was foretold in Isaiah, may echo all the way back to Genesis 3:15. The connection makes plausible sense to me.

The second thread I want to highlight, which is perhaps more of a postscript (but nonetheless significant), also finds its genesis here. (Pun intended!) This thread also runs throughout Scripture: it is the way the Bible elevates the status of women, even in an Ancient Near Eastern world.

Once again, the words of the Bible were passed down by generations of men in ancient times. We do not expect Bronze Age writings to elevate the status of women, but the Bible does that!

Ancient civilizations were dominated by males, who were faster, stronger, and more aggressive than females. In fact, women are still dominated and oppressed by men in many countries, cultures, societies and religions in the 21st Century! This sad truth runs throughout history, and we have not yet flipped that script, even today, in many areas of the world.

Yet, buried (in plain sight) in the ancient biblical text we find the bedrock for modern human rights:

 God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them

Genesis 1:27 (NIV)

That all people, expressly all males and all females, are made in God’s image was the historical inspiration for human rights, including individual rights, human freedoms, human dignity, racial and gender equity, and so on in Western Civilization. This concept and Paul’s famous statement that there is no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female, and no slave nor free (we are all one in Christ) (Galatians 3:28-29) is the root of western values (though modern iterations of those values attempt to sever the fruit from the tree).

That God, who is sovereign, chose to plant the seed for the Messiah into Eve directly, without the involvement of a man, should not be glossed over. That this was the plan from the beginning, should be noticed and acknowledged. (I am not saying that there may not have been other reasons for God to have inserted Himself into His world through a virgin.)

That these things were inspired by God to the men who passed them along and wrote them down (perhaps without fully appreciating their true reach, scope, and intent) is a remarkable testament to God’s sovereignty and ability to accomplish His ends even when people are constantly going their own ways. God implanted the seeds for the elevation of women to a status of equal value to men deeply and early into the Scriptural text – way before cultures, societies, and religions were remotely ready for it.

I have written often about this thread in Scripture of the elevation of women beyond their historical, traditional status. If you are interested, you can read more about how the Bible elevates women here.