He will bruise your head
14 Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed above all livestock, and above every animal of the field. You shall go on your belly and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. 15 I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.” 16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. You will bear children in pain. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” 17 To Adam he said, “Because you have listened to your wife’s voice, and have eaten from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ the ground is cursed for your sake. You will eat from it with much labor all the days of your life. 18 It will yield thorns and thistles to you; and you will eat the herb of the field. 19 You will eat bread by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground, for you were taken out of it. For you are dust, and you shall return to dust.”
The sentences fall in the order the sin was committed, and the first one contains a promise that the whole of Scripture unfolds.
The questioning stopped at the serpent; the sentencing begins with him. He is not asked anything — the pattern of interrogation runs man, woman, serpent, and the pattern of judgment runs back the other way, serpent, woman, man.
The serpent is cursed, and the terms are of humiliation and defeat: on the belly, eating dust. Whether the animal's form changed is not stated; what is unmistakable is the posture the image describes. To lick the dust is Scripture's phrase for a beaten enemy Psalms 72:9.
Then, in the middle of a curse, comes the promise. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.
Four things are stated. God himself puts the enmity there — the alliance formed in verse six is broken by an act of God, which is mercy in the form of a rupture. The conflict runs through generations, between two lines of offspring. It is settled by an individual: the offspring of the woman is spoken of as he, a single figure. And the outcome is asymmetrical. A crushed head and a bruised heel are not the same injury; one is fatal and the other is not, and both are real.
That is the whole gospel in outline, spoken before anyone is expelled from the garden, and the first word God says about the future of the human race after its ruin is that the ruin will be undone at cost. Everything the rest of Scripture narrates is the working out of this sentence, and the New Testament closes the loop when it speaks of the God of peace crushing Satan under the feet of his people Romans 16:20.
The woman's sentence concerns childbearing and marriage, and the two halves belong together. Pain is multiplied in the very thing the promise just ran through — the offspring by whom the serpent is defeated will come through the sorrow she is now given. And your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you is a description of what the relation will become, not a command establishing what it should be. The identical construction appears in the next chapter, where sin's desire is for Cain and he is told to rule over it Genesis 4:7, and there it plainly names a struggle rather than an ordinance.
The man's sentence falls on the ground rather than on him: the ground is cursed for your sake. His work, which was good, becomes toil against resistance. And it ends where the second chapter began, with the arithmetic reversed: you are dust, and you shall return to dust. The dust was formed and the breath was given; now the breath goes and the dust returns. The serpent had said they would not die. God says what dying is.
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