 So let's first read this passage together. Genesis chapter 3, Bereshi chapter 3. This is after the entire incident where God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We know that the serpent managed to trick Eve into eating from that tree and then she offered some of the fruit to her husband. And so here in verse 14, God now addresses the serpent. God speaks to the serpent and says, because you did this, cursed are you more than all of the livestock and all of the wild beasts. On your belly you shall crawl and dusk you shall eat all the days of your life. I will plant hatred between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike you in the head and you will strike him in the heel. Now it seems like a fairly innocuous passage at first blush, but what gets many Christians very excited is that the Hebrew here, I don't have it in front of you, but the Hebrew here speaks of the Zera, the seed of the woman. And it's translated in this verse 15 here as her offspring. It refers to Eve's descendants as her offspring, but again the Hebrew is her Zera, her seed. And so this English translation prefers to render the word her seed as her descendants, which actually is the real meaning of the word. In the Christian Bible in the book of Galatians they make the strange assertion that the word seed, S-E-E-D, really refers to only one human being. Somehow whenever the Bible uses the word Zera seed, it makes the strange assertion that it refers to one person. Now the problem with that is quite serious for anyone that knows any Hebrew because in Hebrew the word Zera seed always means descendants in the plural. God promises Abraham, if you just look up for example in the 17th chapter of Genesis, so God is always promising to Abraham, he will have many descendants and it says that it refers to them as his seed. So even though the word an English seed is in the singular and Zera also, Zera seed in Hebrew is in the singular, but in context it always refers to a person's progeny, their descendants in the plural. For some reason the writers of the Christian scriptures want to insist that it really refers to not a group of people, not progeny, descendants, but one. And so what happens is in general Christian apologists will claim that in the Hebrew Bible, we call it the Tanakh, Christians insist that in the Tanakh in the Hebrew scriptures, they insist that there are actually hundreds of prophecies that prove Jesus was the Messiah. This is an assertion that Christians make. They assert that the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh contains, they say hundreds of prophecies proving that Jesus was the Messiah. And they refer to this passage in Genesis chapter 3 as the proto-Evangelium. It's a fancy big word. They refer to this as the proto-Evangelium. Don't try putting it on your bread. Which means that it's the first glimmer. It's the first glimmer of the Christian gospel found in the Hebrew scriptures. So they will say that this is the first place in the entire Jewish Bible where you have a glimmer of the Christian message, of the gospel message. And what is their claim here? Their claim based upon this passage is that the Messiah would be born through the seed of a woman. Because again, the Hebrew in this passage, God says to the snake in verse 15, I will plant hatred between you, Mr. Snake, and the woman, and between your offspring and her seed. And so the Christian assertion is that we see in this passage that the Messiah would be born through the seed of a woman without a human father. Now if this seems a little bit hard for you to digest, that's good because it is a very strange assertion. But that's their claim that they say you see from this passage that the Messiah would be born through the seed of a woman without the agency, the participation of a human father. And this of course is the alleged miraculous virgin birth of Jesus that is written about in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In addition, Christian apologists will use this passage to establish again their claim that as the Messiah, Jesus came to crush the head of the snake who is seen as Satan. We'll get back to that second claim in a little while. Now the first thing that I will say about these assertions by both the New Testament and Christian apologists is that if you just read this passage and we just read it, there is absolutely nothing here, nothing, not one word that says anything about a Messiah. This is again something that they are asserting, they're claiming, but there's nothing in the text itself to substantiate such an assertion. It's just a claim that they make. And that the plain sense of this passage, the plain sense is very simple. It's speaking about the ongoing hostility between humanity and that's what the snake is being told here. The snake is being told that God is telling the snake it's going to be an ongoing hostility between you and your descendants, Mr. Snake and Eve and her descendants. And we all know that all over the world, no matter where you go throughout history, human beings have had not the best of relationships with snakes. People are afraid of snakes, people don't like snakes. We use the term snake as an insult for human beings. You're a snake in the grass, but we don't love, I mean some people they have pet snakes, but when they're out in the wild, snakes can be dangerous sometimes. And so generally speaking, we have this adversarial, hostile relationship between humans and snakes. And that's what God is telling the snake here. God in this passage is speaking to the snake and is saying to the snake, look, I'm going to put enmity, hostility between you and your descendants and the woman and her descendants. And what's going to happen, God says, you will, I'm sorry, he, meaning the descendants of humanity, the human beings in the future, they will strike you in the head. Because again, snakes are crawling on the ground and a human being that wants to hurt the snake, you're not normally going to step on its tail, you're going to go for the head. So the human being is able just to crush and smash the head of the snake, but you will strike the human being in the heel, meaning you can't bite the human being in its neck. The human being stands up high, you're crawling on the ground. So God is very simply here painting a picture of what is going to be the relationship between humanity in the future, who will be the descendants of Eve and the snakes that will come in the future. And this passage requires a tremendous leap to assume that it is a messianic prophecy. And it would only happen if you approach the Bible wearing Jesus' glasses. Meaning that if you have red glasses on, if you're wearing red glasses, everything looks red. So if you're wearing Jesus' glasses and you believe in Jesus and you believe that Jesus is the Messiah and you believe that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil and to smash Satan and crush the snake, so you will see Jesus here. Like Mark Twain used to say, to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So to a Christian who is trying to find Jesus on every page of the Bible, they will see Jesus in this story, even though that's clearly not what it's talking about. Now when it says she will put enmity or hatred between you and her seed, so it is a strange expression. We don't normally speak about the seed of women. Usually the Bible, when it speaks about Zerah, it's speaking about the man's issue. But this reference here in chapter three of Genesis is not the only place in Scripture where this occurs. This is not the only place in the Bible that speaks about the seed of a woman. The passage here again is addressing the serpent in the presence of the woman. That's what's going on here. God is addressing the serpent in the presence of Eve. And so when God addresses the serpent in the presence of Eve, it refers to mankind who will come in the future as her seed, as her descendants. It would not have made any sense in this passage to say I will put enmity or hatred between you and the woman and between you and his seed, Adam's seed. Adam is not being addressed here. So because God is speaking to the serpent in the presence of Eve, he refers to humanity that will come as her seed. We see this same construction a few chapters later in Genesis chapter 16, verse 10. When God speaks to Hagar, Hagar is the handmaiden of Abraham. And God says to Hagar, I will greatly multiply your seed. So again, Genesis 3 is not the only place in the Bible that speaks about the seed of a woman. When God speaks to Hagar, he says, I will greatly multiply your seed, meaning her descendants. And God doesn't say to her that I'll greatly multiply his seed, meaning Abraham's seed. That would be ridiculous. He's speaking to Hagar. He's not going to refer to Abraham's seed. So we see that this construction of a woman's seed or issue is not that unusual. And the truth is, there are many, many places in the Bible where it speaks about a woman's seed. For example, in the 24th chapter of Genesis, of Braysheet, verse 60, when it speaks about LaVan and Bessuel, who are blessing Rebecca, their daughter and their sister respectively. So the verse says, a very famous verse, that they blessed Rebecca and they said to her, you become the mother of thousands and 10,000s and may your seed possess the gates of their foes. So again, God speaks here through LaVan and Bessuel to Rebecca who speaks about her progeny, her descendants as her seed. Now one more point about this passage in Genesis 3. The Christian assertion is that it's predicting that the seed of the woman is actually speaking about only one person, that's Jesus, and what will this descendant of the woman do? He will crush the head of the snake. And so the Christian interpretation is that Jesus would crush the head of the snake which refers to destroying the works of the devil. Now is that true? That Jesus destroy the works of the devil. We know that in Christian theology, Satan is the cause of all sin. Did Jesus with his death destroy all sin? Has sin stopped in the world? Is Satan now powerless? Is Satan out of business now? Is the devil no longer running around and doing anything in this world? So everybody on the planet would agree that Satan, Satan is still alive and well, causing many people to sin, both non-Christians and Christians. And Paul himself refers to himself as one of the greatest sinners. So everybody sins, including Jews, including Muslims, including Buddhists and including Christians. And so there's no evidence whatsoever that Jesus through his death was able to destroy the works of the devil.