This page was migrated in August 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
1 August 2022 Navigate 'up to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
And Yahweh God said to the serpent, Because you did this, you are cursed mikkol the livestock and mikkol the wild animals. On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life.
There are at least two ways to interpret mikkol. One is "more than": "you are cursed more than the livestock and wild animals." Another is "among all": "you, among all animals wild and domestic, are cursed."
Kittel suggests that there may originally have been no mention in the verse of livestock, and that the serpent was simply to be cursed mikkol all wild animals. Unfortunately, BHK gives only conclusions, not reasoning, so I'm not sure where that idea comes from. Perhaps it is because the opening of the story mentions only wild animals, and not livestock (3:1).
The snake is cursed to crawl on his belly, implying that before the curse he had some other way of getting around. One option is that the writer is simply not concerned about such things, and that dreaming up some kind of alternative pre-curse snake would be engaging in an exercise beyond the imagination of the author.
On the other hand, I have to wonder. Perhaps the association of the uraeus with the Hebrew seraphim points to a mythological background in which the primeval snake was imagined as flying.
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