Ben Thomas
The early chapters of the Bible present stories that seem distant from our experiences, difficult to comprehend, even disturbing. Yet in them there is a logic that is foundational to understanding the whole of Scripture.
Paradigm of the Good
The creation story of Genesis 1–2:4 moves from the dark, formless, and empty to rest and a fruitful land. God addresses the three pre-creation problems by declaring, “Let there be light;” then with three days of separating to form heavens, waters above and below, and land; and with three days of filling each newly formed domain.1 God sees what he has made as “good” or “very good” seven times.
God considers his purpose for people and shares it with them:
“Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”
God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” (Genesis 1:26–29, NET)
In the opening chapter of Scripture, God declares the role he has for people: we represent him to his creation—with responsibilities toward animals, plants, and the land (though without intrinsic authority over other people)2—and we are to increase. God speaks light into being, forms, fills, and, finally, sets the example of rest on the seventh day.
In Genesis 2’s creation account, there is also movement from the uninhabitable to a fruitful land.3 God forms a man in a place without plants or rain, then places him in a well-watered garden of fruit trees.
The Lord God took the man and placed him in the orchard in Eden to care for it and to maintain[/guard] it. Then the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.”
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion for him who corresponds to him.” (Genesis 2:15–18, NET)
After God forms the woman from part of the man, the author notes, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become one family. The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:24–25, NET)
Together, these and other Genesis 1 and 2 elements constitute a paradigm—God’s original intent for his creation, for people.
| Proposed Elements | Genesis 1–2 Paradigm | Reference |
| Representing God to his creation | “Let us make man in our image” | 1:26–27 |
| Responsibilities toward creatures | Rule over the fish, birds, cattle, creeping things | 1:26 |
| Fruitfulness without shame or abuse | “Be fruitful and multiply”; clothing/covering nakedness | 1:28; 3:22 |
| Responsibility for the land | Fill the land and subdue it | 1:28 |
| Rest | “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation.” | 2:2–3 |
| Cultivating and guarding the garden | “Then the Lord . . . put him into the garden . . . to cultivate it and keep[/protect] it.” | 2:15 |
| Ordered liberty | “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” | 2:16–17 |
| Man-woman as whole | “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” | 2:24 |
| Walking in the garden as relationship with God | “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” | 3:8 |
The Turn
In Genesis 3, the woman and man choose the opposite of God’s purpose for them. Prompted by the snake, the woman sees as good the very thing God told the man not to eat, and then she takes it:
When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. (Genesis 3:6a, NET, emphasis mine)
This is a phrase worth remembering because variations on it return in story after story,4 alerting us to temptation scenes.5
| Seeing and Taking—Selected Echoes of Genesis 3:6 | |
| “the sons of God saw that the daughters of humankind were beautiful[/good]. Thus they took wives for themselves from any they chose.” | Gen 6:2 |
| “When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. When Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. So Abram’s wife was taken into the household of Pharaoh . . . .” | Gen 12:14–15 |
| “When Leah saw that she had stopped bearing, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife.” | Gen 30:9 |
| “When Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he took her and lay with her by force. He was deeply attracted to Dinah the daughter of Jacob . . . .” | Gen 34:2–3 |
| “when I saw among the spoil a beautiful[/good] mantle from Shinar and two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold fifty shekels in weight, then I coveted[/desired] them and took them” | Josh 7:21 |
| “Now when evening came David arose from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful[/good] in appearance. So David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” David sent messengers and took her . . . .” | 2 Sam 11:2–4 |
The man also eats the fruit. Both realize they are naked and attempt to cover themselves.
God walks in the garden and questions them. They imperfectly acknowledge what they’ve done. He responds with poems for the serpent, woman, and man. In the serpent poem, God declares an enduring conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman:
The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all the cattle
and all the living creatures of the field!
On your belly you will crawl
and dust you will eat all the days of your life.
And I will put hostility between you and the woman
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:14–15, NET)
The generational conflict reveals the serpent to be not merely an animal but a spiritual force in opposition to God’s purpose. This is the central conflict of Scripture evident from Genesis to Revelation, later authors recognizing and incorporating the work of earlier ones in narrative, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, Gospel, epistle, and apocalypse.
In Hebrew, the word for the serpent’s cunning (arum) resembles the word for nakedness (arom).6 We might receive the pun as linking the serpent to the man and woman’s exposure. In contrast, God provides skin clothing to replace the humans’ feeble attempts at covering themselves. Uncovering nakedness will return as a euphemism for sexual abuse in subsequent passages. We learn here first that it is in the character of God to cover nakedness—and in the character of the serpent to expose it.
To prevent access to the Tree of Life once the man knows of good and evil, God exiles the man from the garden “to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken” (Gen 3:23).
Losing Battles and The Paradigm of the Bad
In Genesis 4–11, the conflict continues. There are few glimmers of good against a dark backdrop, a backdrop we might synthesize as a paradigm of the bad—example after example of “seed-of-the-serpent” behavior. Actions opposite those God requires in Genesis 1–2 lead to outcomes opposite those God desires.
In Genesis 4, Adam and Eve have a son named Cain, then another named Abel. A naïve reading would lead us to wonder whether Cain, the first seed of the woman, will prevail in the central conflict.7 God visits Cain after an incident in which God receives Abel’s offering but not Cain’s, saying, “Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it” (Genesis 4:7b, NET). Despite God’s direct admonition, Cain kills his brother. God hears Abel’s blood crying from the ground and exiles Cain from the ground he had worked.
Cain builds a city and names it after his son. That Cain founds a city after being exiled from the fruitfulness of the ground suggests an initial opposition between city and fruitful land, each aligned with a side in the serpent-versus-woman conflict. At this early point in the larger narrative, city-building and naming after oneself or family may seem benign, but they are seeds of ongoing and expanding rebellion that will become evident through following stories.
Cain’s descendant Lamech takes two wives and speaks/sings to them in a poem focused on his own name and capacity for escalatory violence. Rather than being normative, stories of multiple wives in Genesis result in family conflict.8 They are a departure from the Genesis 1–2 paradigm.
In a brief respite, Enoch walks with God as God had walked in the Eden garden looking for the man and woman.
Genesis 6 introduces us to “the sons of God” who, echoing Eve’s failed temptation in Genesis 3, see that women are attractive and take them. There is debate about their identity, with some commentators perceiving sons of God as descendants of Adam and Eve’s son Seth, some positing they are kings who claim association with the gods, and others viewing them as spiritual beings who transgress their place in heaven and role in creation to pursue sexual relationship with human women. As bizarre as this may sound to modern ears, it is a common story in the ancient world. Kings in Egypt and Babylon claimed to be part human and part god. Ancient authors wrote of similar hybrid warrior figures such as Gilgamesh, Achilles, Hercules, and Perseus. In other cultures, these were venerated as heroes. The biblical account presents them as violently corrupt.
In contrast to the creation he repeatedly saw as “good” in Genesis 1, when God looks at the land in Genesis 6, he sees that it is “ruined” and that “every inclination of the thoughts of [people’s] minds was only evil all the time” (Gen 6:5, NET). Without God’s intervention, people’s (and possibly spiritual beings’) pervasive, destructively rebellious actions leave no further opportunity for God’s pursuit of relationship in a fruitful land. God temporarily un-separates the day-two and -three waters of Genesis 1 as the floodgates of the heavens and fountains of the deep open to yield a flood.
At this point, we may begin to recognize another emerging pattern: de-creation as judgment.
| De-Creation as Judgment in Genesis | |||
| Creation | Reference | De-Creation | Reference |
| “The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. The Lord God planted an orchard in the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man he had formed.” | 2:7–8 | “So the Lord God expelled him from the orchard in Eden to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken.” “The entire lifetime of Adam was 930 years, and then he died.” | 3:23; 5:5 |
| “God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.’ So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so . . . . God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.’ It was so.” | 1:6–9 | “all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” “The waters completely overwhelmed the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the waters. The waters completely inundated the earth so that even all the high mountains under the entire sky were covered.” | 7:11, 18–19 |
God instructs the righteous man Noah in building a wooden boat as a refuge for his family, animals, and plants, and by his obedience Noah fulfills humans’ Genesis 1 responsibilities. When the floodwaters recede, the dry land appears again as on day three of Genesis 1. Noah emerges from a watery waste, plants a vineyard, consumes fruit in the form of wine, and becomes naked, each step a variation on Genesis 2 and 3’s wilderness-garden-fall progression. God’s guidance to him following the flood echoes God’s Genesis 1 purpose for people. Following a judgment in response to pervasive violence, God gives Noah additional instructions prohibiting eating blood in meat and requiring accountability for murder.
The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, and Noah help us see the beginnings of an ongoing cycle of similar events in God’s relationship with people.
| Relationship Cycle 1. God forms his people in the wilderness. 2. God brings them into a fruitful land for ongoing relationship with him. 3. God gives instruction for living in the land.9 4. People do what is right in their own eyes, yielding increasing corruption and violence. 5. The oppressed cry out.10 6. God sees/hears and comes down. 7. When corruption of people and/or land nears completion, God assesses judgment is necessary. 8. God brings judgment in the form of de-creation. 9. God restores a remnant into a fruitful land for continued relationship. 10. God makes a covenant with/gives guidance to the remnant concerning issues that led to the judgment.11 (Steps 8, 9, and 10 become steps 1, 2, and 3 of the next iteration of the cycle.) |
The storyteller identifies the seed of the serpent and seed of the woman among Noah’s sons by their response to Noah’s compromised state. Like the serpent, Ham’s actions expose his father’s nakedness. Like God, Shem and Japheth cover it.
Just as rebellious Cain’s genealogy precedes righteous Noah’s, in Genesis 10 we first find the ancestors of Nimrod, whose name may mean “rebellion.” He embodies characteristics of the seed of the serpent: a warrior-ruler of men with a great name who founds cities including the precursors to Babylon and Assyria, which will later rebel against God, raid Israel, and force Israelites into exile.12 The seed-of-the-woman Shem-to-Abram genealogy appears after the story of Babel/Babylon, where Nimrod’s followers consolidate in a city, build to heaven, and make a name for themselves, all opposite God’s Genesis 1 intent for people to be God’s image and fill the land.
| Genesis 1-11—Seed of the Woman Paradigm and Seed of the Serpent Response | |||
| Seed of the Woman | Reference | Seed of the Serpent | Reference |
| “Let us make man in our image” | 1:26–27 | Making a name for oneself | 4:17, 19–24; 6:4; 10:8–11; 11:1–9 |
| To rule over the fish, birds, cattle, creeping things | 1:26 | Ruling over people | 4:7; 10:8–11 |
| “Be fruitful and multiply”; clothing/covering nakedness | 1:28; 3:22 | Violence, abusive sexuality, uncovering nakedness | 3:7; 4:8, 19–24; 6:1–2; 9:20–24; 10:8–11 |
| Fill the land and subdue it | 1:28 | Consolidation in cities, building to heaven | 4:17; 10:8–11; 11:1–9 |
| “Then the Lord . . . put him into the garden . . . to cultivate it and keep[/protect] it.” | 2:15 | Destruction of the land; Nimrod “was a mighty hunter” (possibly related to ancient kings’ monumental, wastefully destructive hunts)13 | 6:11–13; 10:9 |
| “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” | 2:16–17 | Deception, seeing what is good/attractive/desirable and taking | 3:4–7; 6:2; 9:20–24 |
| “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” | 2:24 | Multiple wives, sexual immorality | 4:19; 6:2–4; 9:20–27 |
| “They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” | 3:8 | “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God”; in later passages, God comes down as a prelude to judgment of seed-of-the-serpent activity | 3:8; 11:5 |
Interpreting Stories
As we read through Genesis and the books that follow, the paradigms of good and bad in the seed-of-the-serpent vs. seed-of-the-woman conflict prime us to perceive key narrative elements and aid in interpreting difficult passages.14 Recognizing elements of the relationship cycle helps us to see each generation’s experience as part of a larger progression along God’s planned purpose for his people.
In Genesis 12, when God calls Abram out from among the exiled people of Babel into the land of Canaan, we may see another iteration of the cycle we first saw in the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, and Noah. Canaan is the new fruitful land. God tells Abram to walk through it and makes a covenant with him that it will enduringly remain a place where God will be in relationship with Abram’s descendants.15
In Genesis 34, we may recognize serpent-like characteristics in Shechem, the son of a ruler who has the same name as his city and sees, takes, is deeply attracted to Jacob’s daughter Dinah—an apparent self-centered act of kidnapping and sexual abuse. Surely this will be a conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, yet Jacob does nothing,16 and his sons, Dinah’s brothers—whom we want to pursue godly, seed-of-the-woman actions—instead also embrace the violent, enslaving destruction of the seed of the serpent’s way.
In Genesis 47, Joseph, who has been a remarkable figure to this point in the story—having reconciled with and rescued his family after they sold him into slavery—exploits the desperation of famine-starved Egyptians to buy all the fruitful land of Egypt and the Egyptian people themselves, and then requires the people to move into cities. If we recall the seed-of-the-serpent activity in Genesis 4–11 as paradigm, Joseph’s inspiring story of forgiveness and reconciliation makes a late turn to a dark foreshadowing of Exodus’ beginning where the serpent-like pharaoh enslaves the Israelites to build cities and orders their sons killed.
In Exodus 3, God declares his recognition of his people’s plight and his plan for them in a passage containing many elements of the relationship cycle:
I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land to a land that is both good and spacious, to a land flowing with milk and honey . . . .(Exodus 3:7–8a, NET, emphasis mine)
In Genesis 19 at Sodom, elements of the heavens descend to the land to bring destruction. In the plagues on Egypt (Exodus 7–11, 14), elements of the water emerge to destroy the land, elements of the land rise into the sky to torment, elements of the sky descend to the land to strip plants and kill, day becomes thick darkness, and God separates waters to form dry land for his people before allowing the separated water to flood back onto their enemies. Similar reversals of the creation order are apparent in judgment stories throughout the Bible if we are primed to recognize them.17
Just as God walked in the garden seeking relationship with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, and as Enoch walked with God in Genesis 5, later passages similarly describe the relationship between God and his people. In Leviticus 26, God tells the Israelites that if they walk in his statutes, he will walk among them, be their God, and they will be his people (v. 12). In Deuteronomy 23 Moses says, “For the Lord your God walks about in the middle of your camp to deliver you and defeat your enemies for you. Therefore your camp should be holy . . .” (v. 14). Walking with God in a fruitful land persists as a picture of right relationship through Revelation 21–22, when the faithful will walk by the light of the glory of God in his abundantly watered orchard-city and see his face.
Though it is not possible in a mere article to compile an exhaustive list of paradigmatic elements that repeatedly appear across the canon, I hope these few will prove adequate evidence that starting at the beginning to recognize features of God’s and the serpent’s work can invigorate our study of Scripture, clarify difficult passages, and help us recognize God’s character in his repeated actions.
Ben Thomas (B.A., Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music; M.S., Southern Methodist University) has written software, served as an infantry soldier in the US Army and a Special Agent in US Secret Service, worked in corporate security and investigations, and currently is an information security analyst. You can find his work on Twitter (@kalevcreative) and at kalevcreative.com.
Image: Benlin Alexander, The Serpent in the Garden
- Andrew Teeter, “The World Seen: Structure, Worldview, and the Poetics of Genesis 1”(Hebrew Bible Conference 2023, Multnomah University), available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWyYrKxW8tw. Accessed 31 March 2024.[↩]
- Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023), 40.[↩]
- André Sousan, The Woman in the Garden of Eden: A Rhetorical-Critical Study of Genesis 2:4b–3:24. (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2006), 176.[↩]
- Variations on the phrase “saw that it was good and took” appear in numerous temptation stories in the Hebrew Bible. In some, the keywords are out of order. Less obvious or compelling examples may substitute synonyms (including “attractive” or “desirable” in place of “good”) or intentionally leave out an element to be filled in later. For instance, in a failed temptation in Genesis 16, Sarai takes Hagar without seeing her, after which God’s seeing of Hagar becomes a key point of the passage. Interpreters may disagree about which stories meet the criteria for this pattern to be useful.[↩]
- Tim Mackie, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (BibleProject Classroom, October 2019), 88–89, available at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tbp-web/media/Intro to HB Images/CR_HB_Session-Notes_Final_2022.pdf.[↩]
- Thomas A. Keiser and Eugene Merrill, Genesis 1–11: Its Literary Coherence and Theological Message (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 66–67.[↩]
- Tim Mackie, Adam to Noah, Exploring Genesis 2–5 (BibleProject Classroom, June 2021), 111, available at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tbp-web/media/Adam to Noah/CR_AdamNoah_Session-Notes_2022.pdf.[↩]
- See this insightful thread from Peter J. Williams.[↩]
- Alan J. Hauser, Linguistic and Thematic Links Between Genesis 4:1–16 and Genesis 2–3, JETS 23, no. 4 (1980): 297–305.[↩]
- Mackie, Adam to Noah, 111-112.[↩]
- Thanks to Charlie Trimm for this idea, shared in a private conversation.[↩]
- Nimrod’s name can also be defined as “the valiant” and his description “mighty . . . before the Lord” interpreted as laudatory. He is therefore an ambiguous figure. His activities’ close alignment with those of the seed of the serpent and the corruption of his city Babel, though, argue for interpreting Nimrod as an oppressive figure with evil intent.[↩]
- E.g., Pharoah Amenhotep’s claim of a hunt in which he killed 96 bulls; Pharoah Thutmose III’s to have killed numerous lions, bulls, elephants, and a rhinoceros; or Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal’s inscription recording the killing of hundreds of lions, ostriches, elephants, and bulls. Other cultures viewed these acts as affirming the power of kings. The biblical account suggests they are corrupt inversions of the Genesis 1–2 paradigm.[↩]
- John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 37.[↩]
- Ibid., 99-100.[↩]
- Joanna Greenlee Kline, Intimations of Jacob, Judah, and Joseph in the Stories of King David: The Use of Narrative Analogy in 1 Samuel 16–1 Kings 2 (PhD diss., Harvard University, September 6, 2018), https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/41121240, 197.[↩]
- E.g., the trumpet judgments of Revelation 8–9.[↩]