14 On your belly shall you move עַל־גְּחֹנְךָ֣ תֵלֵ֔ךְ
The first element expanding on the remark that the snake is more “cursed” than other animals is a strange one: “on your belly shall you move.” That word gaḥon is not a hapax legomenon, getting in just under the wire with two appearances in the Bible, not just one. The other is in Leviticus 11, the first of the two biblical chapters of food rules:
42 Anything that moves on its belly, anything that moves on all fours — up to multipedes, any swarmer that swarms over the earth — you shall not eat them, for they are abominable.
[“Abominable,” by the way, is שקץ sheqetz; the Americanized Yiddish shiksa is just the feminine of this word. Don’t call yourself this, ladies.]
In his comment to the Leviticus verse, Abraham ibn Ezra simply quotes our verse. Rashi (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) explains the phrase “Anything that moves on its belly” this way:
In plain English, a snake.
He explains further:
The unusual Hebrew word used here, gaḥon, refers to the way the snake twists back and forth on its belly as it moves. “Anything” that crawls in this way would include worms (which resemble snakes) and even anything that “resembles the resembler.”
“Resembles the resembler” is a quotation from Hullin 67b in the Babylonian Talmud; if you’re interested in going deeper, the Koren edition of that tractate has dramatic color photos of the things Lev 11:42 wants you not to eat, along with a detailed analysis of this verse.
I don’t want to get onto a long sidetrack here, but I must note that Lev 11:29–30 has a list of things that would seem to fall into this same category. NJPS (admitting that “a number of these cannot be identified with certainty”) translates it this way:
29 The following shall be unclean for you from among the things that swarm on the earth: the mole, the mouse, and great lizards of every variety; 30 the gecko, the land crocodile, the lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon.
V. 42 is not part of the lists and categories of animals one should not eat, which is why the parallel chapter, Deuteronomy 14, does not have a parallel to v. 42. Leviticus 11, written from a priestly perspective, has a long discussion of ritual impurity which the Deuteronomy version (written for “the rest of us”) simply omits. Lev 11:42 is part of that discussion.
All of which is to say that both Rashi and Ibn Ezra are calling our attention, in different ways, to the fact that Leviticus 11 does not forbid us “in plain Hebrew” to eat snakes. The word נחש naḥash simply doesn’t appear in that chapter. “Gecko” (if NJPS is correct), yes; “snake,” no.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that gaḥon here was indeed intended as an allusion to our Genesis story, “Into and Out of the Garden.” I’ve said before that I understand the Torah as a whole to have been assembled and to some extent composed from earlier sources, just as the two versions of the creation story were. I am a long way from being ready to discuss the implications of the link between Gen 3:14 and Lev 11:42, but I do think it was intended.
… and dust shall you eat, all your life long. וְעָפָ֥ר תֹּאכַ֖ל כָּל־יְמֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיךָ׃
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