Enmity (Gen 3:15)
Into and Out of the Garden
15 And enmity will I place between you and the woman וְאֵיבָ֣ה ׀ אָשִׁ֗ית בֵּֽינְךָ֙ וּבֵ֣ין הָֽאִשָּׁ֔ה
“Enmity” (eiva) is a rare word in the Bible, but the root איב is quite common, so there is no mystery about what the noun means. This is not “dislike” or even “hatred,” but absolute enmity, the kind that urges you to kill your enemy. Num 35:21 and 22 use the word to determine whether or not someone who kills another person did it intentionally. If he struck him “with eiva,” he is to be put to death; if b’lo eiva (NJPS translates this as “without malice aforethought”), a trial decides what must happen.
The word occurs only twice more in the Bible, both times in Ezekiel, who qualifies it each time as איבת עולם eivat olam ‘eternal enmity’ of the kind that characterized the attitude of the Philistines (25:15) and “Mount Seir” (the Edomites, 35:5) toward the Israelites. NJPS translates this expression as “ancient hatred” and Moshe Greenberg (in his Anchor Bible Ezekiel commentary) as “hatred immemorial.”
Greenberg observes:
Long-held ethnic grudges are a feature of the biblical world; e.g., 1 Sam 15:2 (against Amalek), with reference to Exod 17:8–16; Deut 23:4–7 (against Ammon and Moab). (Counterbalancing these are long-held memories of ethnic favors: e.g., Deut 23:8 [Egypt!]; 1 Sam 15:6 [the Kenites].)
I will see your “long-held” ethnic grudge and raise it with a grudge between species dating back to the mythological era at the dawn of human history. Nonetheless, there is something puzzling about this aspect of the curse against the snake (assuming that’s what this is).
Nahum Sarna (in the JPS Torah Commentary) writes:
This curse seeks to explain the natural revulsion of humans for the serpent. Clearly, when it entered into conversation with the woman, it could not have been so regarded; indeed, it posed as her friend, solicitous of her interests. The imprecation may also carry antipagan undertones, as if to say that the serpent is neither a fertility symbol, as in Canaan, nor a protective emblem, as among Egyptian royalty, but a hostile object of aversion.… [The woman] is singled out because she conducted the dialogue with it, but she is here representative of the entire human race, as the reference to her “offspring” shows.
Sorry, not buying it. There are lots of things, animal and otherwise, that humans find revolting, and I find it hard to believe that the woman represents the whole human race here because she was the other character in Scene 1. What’s happening is something literary: The woman passed the buck to the snake, and now the retribution YHWH is handing out will go back in that same direction.
We’re still faced with the problem of why the interaction in this story is between the snake and the woman, not the man or both humans. Ronald Hendel in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible points to something that I think is important:
