Genesis 3:15 and the Promised He

The evidence in Chapters 11 and 12 was a matter of form and of where words occur: which letter ends which word, which verses set two words side by side, and which verses the standard analysis set aside. Genesis 3:15 says outright who the promised one is, and it says it twice.

The verse is the first promise of salvation in the Bible. It was spoken in the garden, after the first man and woman had disobeyed, and it was spoken not to them but to the serpent.

The Words Spoken to the Serpent

Genesis 3:14-15 And the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the cattle and above every living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) of the field; upon your belly you shall go, and dust (aphar עָפָר aw-fawr') you shall eat all the days of your life (chai). And I will put enmity between you and the woman (ishah אִשָּׁה ish-shaw'), and between your seed and Seed-H(Seed of the LORD) (zarah זַרְעָהּ zeh'-rah); He (masculine 3rd singular) shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

Read the second verse slowly. God will put enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between the serpent’s seed and another seed. Up to this point the verse speaks of two lines, two seeds set against each other. Then the sentence turns from the two seeds to one person: “He (masculine 3rd singular) shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

The YLV renders the second seed “Seed-H(Seed of the LORD) (zarah).” Most English Bibles render the same Hebrew word “her seed.” To see why the two differ, and why the difference does not change what the verse finally says, we need to look at three words.

Three Words in One Line

The word zarah (זַרְעָהּ) is the noun zera, “seed,” with a heh at the end. Of everything said about the seed, that final heh is the one element analyzed as feminine. Standard grammars read it as the possessive ending “her,” pointing back to the woman named just before, and so they translate “her seed.” That is the common reading, and you should know it is the reading of nearly every English Bible.

This study, as we saw in Chapters 10 to 12, reads the heh at the end of certain words differently: not as a mark of the feminine, but as the letter that ends God’s own name, Yah. That is why the YLV renders zarah as “Seed-H(Seed of the LORD).” The seed promised here is the seed that belongs to the LORD.

But notice what follows, whichever way you take the heh. The noun zera is masculine. The pronoun that takes it up is hu, “he,” masculine and singular. The verb, yeshuphekha, “shall bruise,” is masculine and singular as well. The YLV marks the point in the verse itself: “He (masculine 3rd singular).”

Noun, pronoun, and verb are all masculine. That one letter at the end of zarah is the only feminine element in all that is said about the seed.

Even the last words of the line keep to the same pattern. The YLV reads “you shall bruise his heel,” and the Hebrew ending on that verb, which points to the one whose heel is bruised, is masculine too. From the moment the sentence turns to the promised one, it never speaks of that one in any other way.

The Text Names the Gender

This is why Genesis 3:15 carries a weight the earlier verses could not. With yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw, we had to weigh verb agreement against pronoun reference and ask what each one shows. Here there is nothing to weigh. The text itself specifies the gender of the One it promises, and it specifies it twice: once through the pronoun and once through the verb.

On the common reading, that heh says whose seed it is, the woman’s, and says nothing against the seed being a “He”; on this study’s reading, it marks the seed as the LORD’s. Either way, no reading of one ending can override what the text states twice, and the study draws exactly this line. However the heh at the end of zarah is read, the One promised in this verse is a “He.”

This also matters for the question Chapter 12 raised. We saw there that a verb may follow the form of a word, but a pronoun shows how the speaker understands the one he is speaking of. We also saw that in all 76 verses where yeshuah occurs, no feminine pronoun ever refers back to it. Here, in the first promise of salvation, a word ending in the same letter is taken up at once by a masculine pronoun. The speaker is God, and He chose to say “He.” The pattern holds from the first promise onward.

A Head and a Heel

There is one more word in the line that you should keep in mind, because it will come back two chapters from now. The serpent is told, “you shall bruise his heel.” The Hebrew word for heel is aqev עָקֵב ay'-keb. The word for serpent, which runs through the chapter from its first verse, is nachash נָחָשׁ naw-khawsh'.

So the promise speaks of two wounds. The serpent’s head will be bruised by the One who is coming, and the serpent will bruise His heel. The head and the heel are both in the promise, and they belong together. A heel that is bitten is not the end of the story, because the same sentence says that the head will be crushed.

Keep these two words, nachash and aqev, in mind. Long after the garden, a dying man would speak them together again in one sentence, and his own name would be one of them.

What the First Hearers Heard

The words were spoken to the serpent, but the man and the woman heard them. They left the garden with this promise: a seed would come who was a “He,” who would bruise the serpent’s head, and whose heel the serpent would bruise. The text does not tell us at this point how much of that promise they understood.

It does tell us, in the very next chapter, what the woman said on the day her first son was born. Her words have been translated in more than one way, and most translations add something to make them read smoothly. When you read them as the Hebrew has them, they sound like the words of someone who had heard Genesis 3:15 and was waiting for it. That is where we go next.