15 … and between your offspring and hers. וּבֵ֥ין זַרְעֲךָ֖ וּבֵ֣ין זַרְעָ֑הּ
We saw last time that the first word in v. 15, “enmity” (איבה) occurs just four more times in the Bible, and that two of the four are in a phrase used by Ezekiel: אֵיבַ֣ת עוֹלָ֔ם eivat olam ‘eternal enmity’ or in Moshe Greenberg’s translation “hatred immemorial.” Now we’re told that our eiva too is an eternal one, genetically encoded (if the biblical writers had had the concept) in the descendants of this snake and this woman.
They will shove you headwise; you will shove them heelwise.
הוּ֚א יְשׁוּפְךָ֣ רֹ֔אשׁ וְאַתָּ֖ה תְּשׁוּפֶ֥נּוּ עָקֵֽב׃
A note about pronouns. The Hebrew literally says “he/him,” not “they/them.” I’ve translated in the plural to take in the multiple generations; Hebrew frequently uses the singular to refer to a collective that may include many individuals. (We know this phrase refers to the multiple future offspring, not our two friends, because if the phrase referred specifically to the woman it would have said “she” and “her,” not “he” and “him.”)
Now for the verb used twice in this phrase: It is far more mysterious than standard, confident-sounding Bible translations would have you believe. Here’s a sampling:
KJV: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
NETS: he will watch your head, and you will watch his heel.
NRSV: he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel
Richard Elliott Friedman: He’ll strike you at the head, and you’ll strike him at the heel.
Notice, first off, that standard translations say “your head” and “his heel” when “head” and “heel” are actually used adverbially here. “You” and “them” are really the objects of the verb, not attached to the nouns.
Only Richard Elliott Friedman and Everett Fox, of the translations I checked, were careful to preserve this nuance. That’s no knock on the others. This is an idiom that is more natural in Hebrew than in English. I’ve used the awkward-sounding “headwise” and “heelwise” specifically to call your attention to this idiom. The standard way to translate it into English would be with a prepositional phrase, as Friedman and Fox have done.
Robert Alter, interestingly, splits the difference, connecting the first pronoun to the “head” as the standard translators do, and the second to the verb, as the Hebrew does:
He will bite your head and you will boot him with the heel.
He explains:
bite . . . boot. The Hebrew uses what appear to be homonyms, the first verb probably referring to the hissing sound of the snake just before it bites, the second, identical in form, meaning “to trample.”
Leaving aside the extraordinary inanity of this literarily brilliant translation — try to picture, if you can, a human biting a snake on the head, and a snake using his heel to boot a human — Alter has put on the table the fact that we don’t really know what this verb means, or even whether it is a single verb or two homonyms.
I’m running out of space for today, or I’d quote in full the 222-word introduction to this verb in the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. That seems like a lot of verbiage for a verb that occurs just four times in the Bible. The other two occurrences are in Ps 139:11 and Job 9:17, and, as one might expect from poetry, they are not extremely helpful in telling us what the verb means in our verse.
All the translations above use a verb of attacking except for NETS, which is translating not from the Hebrew (of course) but from the Greek verb τηρέω used in the Septuagint. Per my dictionaries, this word really seems to have a primary meaning of “watch over protectively,” which is quite inappropriate here.
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, which loves to split things up, thinks there are five different שׁוף homonyms. That’s a lot for four biblical uses of the verb. (To be fair, they are also responsible for the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this verb occurs in the Damascus Document.) Robert Alter might think there are at least four, since he translates the verb in Ps 139:11 as “swathe,” which doesn’t seem much like either “bite” or “boot,” or like “crush,” which he uses in Job 9:17.
Ed Greenstein will one day publish his long-awaited Job commentary (and by long-awaited I mean decades). In the meantime, he has published a translation that’s quite affordable and highly recommended. He translates Job 9:17 this way:
He would push me on the hair-line.
In his Jewish Study Bible commentary to Job, he explains that this is …
a gesture of dismissal similar to one known in ancient Syria.
He does not explain why he uses the verb “push” for שׁוף, but one of the reasons must be that push is shuph backwards. So I’ve taken the liberty of choosing the English word shove, which is almost a homonym of the Hebrew verb. I’ll just put on record here that I don’t know what this word really means.
Since I’ve said a number of times that I think a writer with literary sensitivity has composed this story, shaping the earlier materials for theological purposes and also for esthetic ones, I’m going to suggest that the precise meaning of this verb was not necessarily the most important aspect of it for our author.
There’s a certain level of poetry in this composition that may sometimes have overridden exactitude. No one, as far as I’m aware, has collected data about what we do to snakes’ heads and what they do to our heels. Would a snake that shuph’ed you on the toe instead of the heel have to answer to the Creator for stepping out of line? The enmity here can be presumed to be real, but the way it is expressed is literary and not scientific.
Not to lose sight of the forest for the trees, the snake’s curse seems to be twofold:
It is condemned to be low to the ground, with all that entails.
It is condemned to eternal enmity / “hatred immemorial” with humanity
Before it is the woman’s turn, in v. 16, we’re going to stop and have a look at the bigger picture.