Poetry and More

Into and Out of the Garden

¹⁴ YHWH said to the snake, “Because you did this, you are cursed, more than any livestock animal or any field animal. On your belly shall you move and dust shall you eat, all the days of your life. ¹⁵ And enmity will I place between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. They will shove you headwise; you will shove them heelwise.”

In this post, I’m going to Zoom our camera out just a bit to be able to look at vv. 14–15 together, and then at vv. 14–17. (See starting here for our detailed discussion of vv. 14–15.) We’ll be looking at three different topics that all (believe it or not) will illuminate our subject:

• why the rhetoric of God’s response to the snake rises to the level of poetry

• how Ancient Near Eastern treaty language illuminates the “enmity” between snake and woman

• how God’s response to the woman is paragraphed differently than the other two responses

First, poetry. I’ve said a number of times that our text has been composed with an eye not to reporting facts journalistically but to telling them with an eye toward literary value — what might be called belles-lettres, words chosen not just for their meaning but also for esthetic reasons. “Poetry” is a shorthand way to say that. Let me open the discussion by quoting the NJPS translation of vv. 14–15:

¹⁴ Then the LORD God said to the serpent,

         “Because you did this,

         More cursed shall you be

         Than all cattle

         And all the wild beasts:

         On your belly shall you crawl

         And dirt shall you eat

         All the days of your life.

¹⁵       I will put enmity

         Between you and the woman,

         And between your offspring and hers;

         They shall strike at your head,

     And you shall strike at their heel.”

As you see, the prosaic first words of v. 14 are followed by words arranged in short lines. In English, that’s how we indicate that something is poetry, not prose. In the Hebrew of the Bible, that occurs quite rarely; here’s an example of one place the Bible does the same. Our passage, by contrast, is laid out like prose, as are most of what we would call the “poems” of the Bible.

The most notable feature of biblical poetry, and the easiest way for most people to begin to appreciate it, is called “parallelism.” In the old days, it was actually called “thought-rhyme.” I don’t want to join the argument about whether this is real poetry; let’s just say that it clearly indicates language that is rhetorical and literary, not colloquial and conversational. The point is that there’s a kind of rhythm between words in matching phrases:

• on your belly … you crawl

• dirt … you eat

The object noun comes first, the verb second (as they do in the original Hebrew).

If you look at the second half of v. 15, you will see it quite clearly:

• they strike your head

• you strike their heel

Just compare the four parts of each line:

- they / you … the two pronouns for the two characters

- strike / strike … the same verb repeats

- your / their … the pronouns repeat in reverse order as possessive adjectives

- head / heel … the two places that are “struck”: head and heel, the very top and very bottom

As we said last time, in real life snakes are not restricted to striking our heels. They can attack whatever they can reach. This is how things are said in a literary way.

Next, Ancient Near Eastern treaty language. There is a tremendous amount of research pointing out the resemblance of the covenant between God and Israel to the “covenants” reflected in treaty language of the ancient Near East. I’m not going to get into that subject for now, and the word “covenant” is certainly not used here. (We’ll discuss it when we get to Gen 6:18.) Nonetheless, YHWH is imposing a condition on the snake here that might be called a unilateral covenant: You agree to do this, and I … will make sure you do so.