CRUSHING THE SERPENTS’ HEAD

(GENESIS 3:15)

The great human tragedy—the curse of sin that fell upon all humans through the acts of Adam and Eve—is told vividly yet quickly in just seven verses (Gn 3:1-7). However, the consequences of that first sin are portrayed in more than twice that number of verses (Gn 3:8-24). When God confronted our first parents, He told them and the deceiving serpent of the curses that they had brought upon themselves and all creation (Gn 3:14-19).

The serpent and the woman together, apart from Adam, defied God. (Although Adam was present, he did not participate in the conversation with the serpent [see Gn 3:6].) Therefore, the curse on the deceiver began with the penalties he would suffer (Gn 3:14). However, the second part of God’s address to the serpent focused on his future relationship with the woman:

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall strike your head, and you shall strike his heel. (Gn 3:15, author’s translation)

While the serpent had sought an alliance with Eve in defying God’s order not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Lord now made them hostile to each other. The antagonism would be played out between the offspring (literally seed in Hebrew) of the serpent and the woman. The woman’s seed is often explained as a collective singular used to denote all her descendants. This would be like how we speak of grass seed in English, meaning not a single seed but a mass of seed collectively. However, the context does not allow that. The following pronoun He is singular and points to a particular offspring of the woman who will strike the serpent’s head—the Messiah (see Gal 3:16, which references a similar meaning for seed at Gn 22:18).

Thus, the curse on the serpent was also a promise to Adam and Eve that someone would come to undo the tempter’s work. That coming Savior would be the Messiah, who would have to suffer (“you will strike His heel”) to deliver humanity. While Adam and Eve would be sent away from Eden and its tree of life (Gn 3:24), they had the prediction of access to the tree of eternal life through a better source—the One who would come from the woman’s offspring to bring everlasting life to many (Rv 2:7). It is no surprise, then, that many early Christian interpreters of Genesis 3:15 referred to it as the protoevangelium—the first Gospel.