by Michael Siemon

In late June 1989, Michael Siemon — a writer and theologian posting from Big Electric Cat Public UNIX — contributed this essay to soc.religion.christian. The immediate occasion was a debate about Genesis 3:15 and whether Mary or the Messiah, or both, are typologically foreshadowed in the verse. The deeper occasion was a question Siemon had been circling for years: what exactly are we doing when we find a meaning in a sacred text?

Siemon's method is rigorous and his tone is precise without being cold. He draws on Westermann's form-critical commentary, on Justin Martyr, on T. S. Eliot's theory of the objective correlative, and on the New Testament itself. His argument is not that typological reading is wrong, but that it is a human act — a creative, poetic response to the living Word — and that pretending it was planted in the text by God, waiting to be discovered, is both intellectually dishonest and spiritually dangerous.

The essay is one of the finest pieces of scriptural hermeneutics to appear in the early years of online religious discourse. It was written for a network audience, not for publication; the freshness and directness of the thinking reflects the medium.

This note grew out of discussion in talk.religion.misc about Genesis 3:15, and in particular about that verse as background for some statues where Mary is shown treading on a snake. Beyond its original intent, the essay became both long and very particularly Christian in its assumptions, so I felt it to be inappropriate in that forum and have sent it here.

Lurking behind the issue of interpreting Genesis 3:15 is the question of typology. That is one of the main instances of what I had in mind when I noted that it is worthwhile knowing what Christian biases are in reading scripture and possibly stepping outside the tradition as an exercise in making allowances for our biases. Joe Applegate wants to read this passage as typological for the Messiah; Joe Buehler wants it to be typological of Mary. There is no particularly good reason it can't be both, since typology is always an overlay of an "additional" meaning on top of the text. Any good deconstructionist would allow either reading or both; but the problem I face — not being fond of deconstructionism — is whether there is justification for this outside the desire of the reader. I see here the basic issue of interpretation: when you "find" something in a text, what can you do to decide whether the meaning you find is really "there"?

There is a great deal of typological interpretation of the Old Testament, much of it developed in the earliest days of the church. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (circa 150) is full of it. Some goes back to NT writings; there is at least an implicit typology of Jesus as paschal lamb in the Passion in John's gospel. The problem is whether this is anything more than a poetic association of ideas, or perhaps more pointedly, whether poetic inspiration in making such an association is attributable to the Holy Spirit and has the status of "revealed truth." I will argue that there is truth there, but NOT dogmatic, propositional truth; that attempts to cast poetic structures as doctrinal statements are a "category mistake" and need to be resisted, even as I (personally) accept the force of the poetic statement.

The Text of Genesis 3:15

Joe Buehler's remarks form a reasonable entry into the question:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. He shall crush thy head, and thou shalt crush his heel.

As for doctrinal points, whatever the passage might say theologically about our Lady is contained in the first half of the verse; if anyone wants to press it, the second half isn't necessary. This verse may indeed be a good example of a place where the Vulgate is flawed critically speaking, but theologically sound. Which, of course, is what is primarily claimed for the Vulgate. It would be interesting to check the other early Latin versions and see if St. Jerome was just retaining a traditional mistranslation. In his day, he caught flak for changing the Latin translations then in use; people were used to the translations already used in the liturgy.

Jerome was constrained by earlier translations mostly in the NT; as I said earlier, I don't object to his translation as such. The passage takes the situation — enmity between this woman and this serpent — and projects that indefinitely into the future via their respective "seed." The literalistic translations I have, as well as Jerome and the Septuagint, all give a second-person pronoun in the latter part of this verse ("and you will snap at its heel"), so that parallelism suggests that the "it" which refers to Eve's seed might better be replaced by a pronoun referring to Eve. That replacement has a valid poetic "point" — it tightens the form of the passage. The difficulty arises when readers take Jerome's "she" as evidence supporting a typology in this passage (a reading that takes the passage to be "mentioning" a specific female who will crush "the" serpent in a future apocalypse.) The same difficulty arises when Messianic typology reads "it" as referring to some future male "he." Because the actual text refers to the collective and neuter seed, and not to any individual. And the verbs are in a form that indicate not one future action but ongoing, iterated action (I say this not of my own knowledge of Hebrew, but following Westermann's commentary, published by Augsburg). Among other things, Westermann says:

"From the time of Irenaeus, Christian tradition has understood the passage as a prophecy about Christ (and Mary)... This explanation runs from Irenaeus right through the history of exegesis in both Catholic and evangelical tradition... There are two main reasons that do not allow such an interpretation: First, it is beyond doubt that the word 'seed' is to be understood collectively. The text is speaking of the line of descendants of the woman as well as of the serpent. The second reason is form-critical. The word occurs in the context of a pronouncement of punishment (or of a curse). It is not possible that such a form has either promise or prophecy as its primary or even as its secondary meaning."

Note: Westermann is saying that the author cannot have had any such meaning. The problem when people start finding secret meanings slipped in by God without the author's knowledge is that there is no way at all to confirm the presence of any such meanings. What those who propose Messianic or Marian readings need to consider is why anyone should believe them that a text has the meaning they give it, when the text itself leads in a totally different direction. Joe Buehler has an "answer" to this question that only begs the question — interpretive authority is in the hands of the Magisterium, so somehow magically Jerome's "critical flaws" turn into theological soundness. In either case, readers outside the inner circle are told that they cannot in principle read it correctly — which to me implies that it wasn't written correctly. If public reading informed by the best available critical scholarship must fail, then all reading must fail. I suppose what I am saying is a restatement of the Protestant notion of the "perspicuity of scripture," and I will go along with the weakest formulation of that — well-informed and well-intentioned readers will not go seriously astray from the Truth embedded in scripture.

Typology as Poetic Act

Form criticism is as much an obsession of our times as typology was in Irenaeus' time; so I think one is entitled to give little weight to the second of Westermann's objections as he states it. But the nub of the objection remains: all of the curses and punishments of 3:14–19 name an ever-recurring ill of humanity (or serpents), from one generation to the next. It is quite alien to this context to take one verse as cryptic reference to a unique future event. The overriding point in reading any text is that if the author is competent, the meaning cannot be something contrary to what he has written. If a secondary meaning is to be adduced, there must be support in the text for this meaning. Otherwise, the reader is projecting.

Some projections are unavoidable — some are even desirable. No Christian can read any passage of scripture cited by Jesus without seeing it in the light of Jesus' use, regardless of whether Jesus played fast and loose with the meaning. John's use of the paschal lamb image, or the use the author of the Letter to the Hebrews makes of Melchizedek, are much more subtle than saying "scripture says X but really means Y." They work by analogy, by looking at something God has done before and saying "now God has done something like the same thing but raised the stakes." In fact, the NT use of scripture is rather like T. S. Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative" in poetry — a particular term placed in a very particular new context carries a force that is partly association and also partly an overloading of new meaning onto the old. Such a way of reading is always legitimate, in the sense that one is constrained only by one's own associations, and poetic inspiration is the ability to convey these beyond the merely idiosyncratic, to communicate a meaning to others.

By canonizing some New Testament instances of "creative" use of scripture, we Christians have opened a Pandora's box of interpretation. Only sober restraint, and a certain measure of self-doubt, can keep our unruly imaginations under control. Because what is at issue is not our "cleverness" in "finding" types for Christian interpretation in Jewish scripture. The issue is recognizing the action of God in our own day, when the terms of discussion are set by an authoritative language forged in the past. When Jesus tells the synagogue "This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen," he uses scripture to assist in giving meaning to what was happening around him. But his intent is not to engage in learned exegesis, but to call people's attention to that present reality. Such connections between the past statements of God's acts and those we witness in the present are a gift to us from the Spirit. But they are our gift, not something to retroject into the past. In some odd sense of the term, these connections are "potentially present" in the text — but that is like saying my thoughts were potential aeons ago since the words I use go back for generations before me. You look in the wrong place if you want to find the Spirit speaking in the past; God is not the God of the dead but of the living.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

Returning to Genesis 3:15, Joe Buehler says:

As for doctrinal points, whatever the passage might say theologically about our Lady is contained in the first half of the verse.

And of course the point is that the first half of the verse says nothing about our Lady — it is about Eve and all her descendants. But neither is Joe Applegate justified in mounting his hobby horse on this verse. It says nothing about Christ either. A good Catholic might well find a resonance here in tradition handed down from the time of Irenaeus. And saying that it is Christ who tramples the serpent underfoot is to refer to Mary, since He is Mary's "seed" in an individualized parallel to the Genesis 3:15 reference to Eve's "seed." There is no real conflict of Messianic and Marian typologies here. The Catholic notion that Mary is foreshadowed in this verse is a tradition that can enrich one's devotional life; as such I have no quibble with it. But to insist on a reading like this makes me nervous, because it seems to encourage misreading of all of scripture. If scripture is a tissue of secret meanings not present in or maybe even contradicted by the text, then "revelation" is a mockery, and God is not revealed but hidden by what is claimed to be His word. What we project onto scripture must be understood as our response to the Word, just as our works are a response to grace. That's why I say typology is a "category mistake." We have taken creative action by the human mind — poetic reaction to the Word, the forging of associations between scriptural verses and the actions of God in salvation — and pretended that this is a work of God that we "discover" in scripture. But the locus of God's work is in us, not in the original texts of scripture.

I think the point is best illustrated by my own favorite case, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis 22 as a type of God's sacrifice of His only Son. The sacrifice is explicitly discussed in Hebrews 11:17ff and in James 2:21ff, yet they clearly focus on Abraham's "faith" as a model for Christians, not on Abraham and Isaac as types for Father and Son. Paul probably intends a reference to Abraham's sacrifice in Romans 8:32, "He did not spare his own Son, but surrendered him for us all." But the type remains at most implicit — Paul's intent is to lead up to the point that not even death can separate us from the love of God. So the earliest Christian treatment here is connected with themes of faith, resurrection and the righteousness that is God's gift to those with faith. There is an overtone of the testing of Abraham when we pray in the Lord's Prayer: "do not bring us to the test" (though that is obscured in the conventional rendering "lead us not into temptation"). The NT writers point to Abraham in order to clarify to their readers what faith is, and how it works.

But Genesis 22 was also placed among the texts of "salvation history" read in the great Easter Vigil; in this context Christian usage almost forces the typology as we await the great reversal so much more cosmic in significance than the last-minute substitution of a ram for the boy Isaac. God has put Himself to the test in His creation, a test He will help us to avoid ourselves, yet we must be perfect as He is perfect in order to deserve the Kingdom of Heaven. This interpretation should not drive out the apostolic interpretation focusing on Abraham's faith; nor should that reading deny the typology. Both are statements of truth, but the truth is not one of obscure hints in ancient scripture; the Truth is the Living God whom we recognize by the similarity to His actions in the past. It is precisely to preserve the potential for such recognition that we mustn't hide the original text with a myriad layers of recognition from earlier generations — that is commentary, vital perhaps to our spiritual growth, but in the final analysis the commentary is not the text and must not be confused with it.

Colophon

Written by Michael Siemon, Big Electric Cat Public UNIX. Posted to soc.religion.christian on June 26, 1989.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

🌲