Nachash

NOTES:

Heiser, Michael S.. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.

The pivotal character of Genesis 3 is the serpent. The Hebrew word translated serpent is nachash. The word is both plain and elastic.

The divine being in the garden who rebelled against Yahweh’s desire to have humans rule an Edenic world is never cast in human form.1 Unlike the sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4 who are cast as assuming human flesh and capable of cohabitation, the divine rebel of Eden does not appear to Eve that way.2 Consequently, the idea of a “seed” or offspring extending from the nachash would not have been literal for the biblical writer. Instead, the notion is metaphorical or spiritual. And this is precisely what we see when the phrase occurs elsewhere in the Bible. The metaphor is perhaps most clear in the New Testament, when Jesus himself referred to the Pharisees as serpents (Matt 23:33) who were “of [their] father the devil” (John 8:44; cf. Rev 12:6).

earlier, the divine serpent (nachash, another word so translated) became lord of the dead after his rebellion in Eden. In effect, Bashan was considered the location of (to borrow a New Testament phrase) “the gates of hell.”