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Gen.3:1. The serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field that the Lord God created. The nature of this serpent is quite mysterious: according to some of its signs, for example, by its very name, by belonging to an animal species, by its distinguishing cunning (Matthew 10:16) and by the punishment imposed on it - crawling on the ground (Gen. 3:14) - it undoubtedly appears in the Bible as an ordinary, natural serpent, but a number of other signs, such as: the gift of speech, awareness in the existence of the commandment, extraordinary cunning and deceit, as well as the affirmation of the extraordinary duration of its existence for a natural serpent - all this tells us about some higher consciously intelligent being. Therefore, the correct understanding of this serpent will be the one that unites all these above-mentioned features, as, for example, St. John Chrysostom does, saying: “following Scripture, one must reason in such a way that the words belonged to the devil, who was excited by envy for this deception (Wis. 2:24), and used this animal (i.e., an ordinary serpent) as a convenient tool.” (John Chrysostom). The presence of the devil-tempter in this serpent is also confirmed by many other places of Holy Scripture, in which the devil is called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44), the primary author of evil on earth (1 John 3:8; Wis. 2:24) and even directly “the ancient serpent” (Rev. 12:9–10). And the serpent said to the woman: Has God truly said: The insidious serpent turns to his wife as the weakest vessel (1 Tim. 2:14; 1 Pet. 3:7), in a fair calculation it is easier to achieve his goal through her; Moreover, the wife probably did not personally hear the commandment from God, but received it from her husband and therefore knew it less steadily and firmly. do not eat from any tree in paradise? The seducer deliberately exaggerates the severity of the commandment in order to thereby confuse his wife and instill in her dislike both for the commandment itself and for its Founder. Gen.3:2–3. And the woman said to the serpent: We can eat fruit from the trees, Only from the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, do not eat it or touch it, In Eve’s answer, attention is drawn to her insufficiently precise formulation of the divine commandment (cf. Gen. 2:17), namely, the addition to it of the words: “and do not touch them.” Many commentators see this as a reproach to God from Eve for the excessive severity and difficulty of His commandments and dull dissatisfaction with this. Eve puts the random and external motive for keeping the commandment (Gen. 2:17) here as the main and even the only one. “From this we can guess,” Filaret rightly notes, “that the thought of the severity of the commandment and the fear of death was already beginning to overshadow in her the pure feeling of love and reverence for God the Lawgiver.” Gen.3:4. And the serpent said to the woman: No, you will not die, Rightly discerning from Eve’s answer that in obedience to God she is restrained not so much by internal and moral motives as by a purely external feeling of fear of death, the devil now tells a pure lie: “no, you will not die,” i.e. your fears of losing your life, based on the divine threat, are completely unfounded and in vain. Gen.3:5. but God knows that on the day that you eat of them, Seeing that Eve does not object to his new, obvious lie (denial of death), the devil uses gross slander against God, painting Him as an envious and cunning tyrant of the first people, grossly exploiting their naive gullibility, which serves as the basis of His dominion over them. The opening of the eyes is a common biblical image that signifies the opening of the faculty of mental understanding and moral sensitivity (Gen. 21:19; 2 Kings 6:17–20; Acts 26:18). In the Hebrew text the last word is expressed by the term Elohim, which is one of the common names for God. But since, according to its philological composition, this is a plural form and actually means “forces”, “powers”, “authorities”, then LXX translated it literally, i.e. in the plural “gods”. However, it would be more correct to retain the usual biblical usage, that is, to translate the word “God”; for, firstly, the first people did not yet know other gods other than the one true God, and secondly, only with such a translation is the opposition between God and people that is given in the text maintained (“God” knew that you would be like gods). A hint of this daring desire to equal God in knowledge is given to us by some other places of Holy Scripture (Is. 14:13–14). - here, just as before (Gen. 2:9), are taken in the sense of universal knowledge, as if its extreme pole. The Fall of the Forefathers. Gen.3:6. And the wife saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes and desirable because it gave knowledge; When the devil managed not only to destroy the fear of death in Eve, but also to awaken in her ambitious thoughts of broad knowledge and high power (like the gods), then in her soul, strictly speaking, the process of mental fall had already taken place; All that remained was for this sinful mood to be revealed outside, to be expressed in a criminal act. Here the immediate impression from the forbidden tree itself came to the aid of the tempter, which had an irritating effect on all her senses. In this last act of Eve’s fall, so picturesquely and deeply psychologically depicted in the Bible, all those three main types of sin are thoroughly found, which the Apostle John (1 John 2:16) distinguishes as the lust of the flesh (good for food), the lust of hair (pleasant to the eyes) and the pride of life (lustful because it gives knowledge). and she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave it to her husband, Seduced by the seductive speech of the devil and completely clouded by sensual irritation from the tree, Eve picks the forbidden fruit and eats from it (2 Cor. 11:3). Having fallen herself, she hastens to involve her husband in her act, doing this, according to most interpreters, without any particular malicious intent, since the poison of sin has not yet had time to penetrate her soul and poison the peace of conscience. If Eve in the fall was, to some extent, excused by her comparative natural weakness, an exaggerated formal and purely external idea of the commandment, and finally, a direct sensory impression from the tree, then Adam, who received a formidable commandment from God himself and experienced so many manifestations of divine love in himself, did not have any circumstances mitigating his guilt, so that his sin is a purely spiritual crime and is heavier than the sin of Eve (Rom. 5:12, 14; 1 Cor. 15:21–22; 1 Tim. 6:14). Gen.3:7. And the eyes of both of them were opened, Thus, the tempter’s prediction came true, but instead of a feeling of contentment and joy, the fall produced only tangible sorrow and anxiety. Since previously nakedness served as a synonym for childish innocence and purity of the first people (Gen. 2:25), now the painful sensation of it has become a victorious sign of gross sensuality and sin (Rom. 6:12–14, 7:4, 8; Col. 3:5). “The external eye,” in the thoughtful expression of Origen, “opened after the spiritual one closed.” and they sewed together fig leaves and made aprons for themselves. This, according to the Bible, was the first clothing of mankind; and this is in complete agreement both with the universal tradition of antiquity and with the history of human culture. Gen.3:8. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in paradise: Obviously, here we are talking about one of those epiphanies that characterize the primitive era - a time of special closeness and direct relations between God and man. As for the very nature of this theophany, then, judging by the description, it had an accessible to external senses, therefore, a concrete character, which is also confirmed by the entire subsequent context. Finally, other expressions of the Bible similar to this confirm us in this (Lev. 26:12; Deut. 23:14–15; 2 Sam. 5:24; Exod. 9:23; Job 37:4–5; Ps. 29:3, etc.). or, according to a translation closer to the Hebrew text, “in the wind, in the evening of the day.” Some see here an indication of the time of theophany - namely, the evening cool of the day, others - of its image (Job 38:1), that is, of the Lord’s loving readiness to forgive the fallen ancestors in the event of their sincere repentance. and Adam and his wife hid from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of paradise. The fear of the sick conscience of fallen people, who had lost their innocence and purity, so darkened their mental faculties that they thought of hiding from the All-Seeing and Omnipresent (Jer. 21:14; Am. 9:3), seeking in their naive blindness refuge from Him under the leaves of the trees of paradise. Gen.3:9. And the Lord God called to Adam and said to him: [Adam,] where are you? In this matter, ignorance is by no means revealed, but only a call of divine love is heard, addressed to the sinner for his repentance. According to the interpretation of Saint Ambrose, God asks Adam not so much about what place, but about what state they are in. Gen.3:10. He said: I heard Your voice in paradise, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Instead of sincere and sincere repentance, Adam resorts to false apologies - self-justification, which, of course, only increases the severity of this guilt. Gen.3:11. And [God] said: Who told you that you were naked? have you not eaten from the tree from which I forbade you to eat? Divine mercy is inexpressible: as if going towards the false modesty and sinful inertia of man, God himself supposedly calls out his guilt; the latter could only, like the prodigal son of the Gospel parable, exclaim from the depths of a contrite heart: “I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:21). But man, due to the action of sin, turned out to be unable to rise from his fall by this immediate repentance. Gen.3:12. Adam said: The wife whom You gave me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. Instead of proper repentance, Adam allows himself crude self-justification, in which he even dares to reproach God himself for giving him what he previously considered a desirable good for himself (Gen. 2:18, 20). Gen.3:13. The woman said: The serpent deceived me, and I ate. The wife’s answer, although it does not deny the very fact of breaking the commandment, also places responsibility for it and transfers it to someone else. This self-justification of fallen ancestors is a very characteristic feature of all stubborn sinners, indicating their moral coarsening. The very fact of the seduction of a wife by the serpent is verified very easily in the Holy Scriptures (2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:14). Gen.3:14. And the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the cattle and above all the beasts of the field; Since in the person of the serpent-tempter two separate beings were united, as we saw, the evil spirit and the natural serpent, all this simultaneously applies to both of them: to the serpent, as a visible instrument, directly, and to the devil, as his invisible agent, indirectly and by analogy. In particular, the curse of the natural serpent, preferential in comparison with the rest of creation, which also underwent the work of corruption (Rom. 7:20), is, as it were, just retribution for its former superiority over it (Gen. 3:1). on your belly you will go, and you will eat dust all the days of your life; According to the majority of authoritative interpreters, the crawling of the serpent on its belly was not some new miracle, but was a natural property; but before this property did not have any special meaning, now it becomes a symbol of humiliation and contempt (Deut. 32:24; Mic. 7:17) due to a feeling of disgust towards its bearer. The subsequent words of the text - about eating the dust of the earth - contain essentially the same idea: they give a figurative expression of the same idea about the reptile of the serpent, since it inevitably leads to the inhalation of earthly dust and contact with its various impurities. When applied to the devil, this last metaphor indicates the humiliation of Satan, who has already been cast down from heaven and thereby, as it were, doomed to grovel on the earth, feeding here on human vices and atrocities, direct consequences of his own insidious suggestions. Gen.3:15. and I will put enmity between you and your wife, This section is of the greatest importance. It contains a prophecy that runs through the entire history of the world, right up to the very end of the world, and is fulfilled together on every page of the above-mentioned history. The deep enmity mentioned here is that internal opposition that exists between good and evil, light and darkness (John 3:19–20, 7:7; 1 John 2:15), - this enmity is reflected even in the sphere of higher spirits (Rev. 12:7–9). “The first wife in the world was the first to fall into the devil’s snare, but she is also the first to shake his power over herself with her repentance (meaning repentance for the entire subsequent extra-paradise life)” (Vissarion). Many Church Fathers (Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, John Chrysostom, Jerome, etc.), based on various places of Holy Scripture, attribute this instruction not so much to Eve, but to that great wife who, more than all other wives, personified in herself “enmity” towards the kingdom of Satan, serving the mystery of the incarnation (Rev. 12:13, 17; Gal. 4:4; Isa. 7:14; Luke 2:7; In place of the disastrous friendship between the wife and the serpent, there is a saving enmity between them. Since the wife of the first Adam was the cause of the fall, the mother of the second Adam was the instrument of salvation. and between your seed and her seed; By the seed of the serpent, in the immediate, literal sense, we mean the offspring of the natural serpent, i.e., all future individuals of this kind, with which the offspring of the woman, i.e., all of humanity in general, wages a primordial and fierce war; but in a further, certain sense, by means of this analogy, the offspring of the serpent-tempter is symbolized, i.e., the children of the devil in spirit, which in the language of the Holy Scriptures are called either “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7, 12:34, 23:33), then “tares in God’s field” (Matthew 13:38–40), then directly “sons destruction, disobedience, the devil" (John 8:44; Acts 13:10). From among these children of the devil, the Holy Scripture especially singles out one “great adversary,” “the man of lawlessness and the son of destruction,” i.e., the Antichrist (2 Thess. 2:3–4). In complete parallel with this, the interpretation of the wife’s seed is established: by it, in the same way, first of all, we mean all her offspring - the entire human race; in the further sense determined by the context of speech, it means pious representatives of humanity who energetically fought the evil that reigned on earth; finally, from among this latter, the Holy Scripture gives reason to single out one Great Descendant, born of a woman (Gal. 4:4; Gen. 17:7, 19), as the victorious opponent of the Antichrist, the main culprit of the victory over the serpent. it will bruise your head, and you will bruise its heel. The very process and nature of the above enmity is clearly depicted in the artistic picture of the great struggle between the two warring parties, with a fatal outcome for one of them (a blow to the head) and relatively insignificant damage to the other (a sting in the heel). Quite close analogies to this image are found in other places of Holy Scripture (Rom. 16:20, etc.). The mention here of a wife, a serpent and their offspring, a blow to the head and a sting to the heel - all these are nothing more than artistic images, but images full of deep meaning: they contain the idea of ​​​​the struggle between the kingdom of light, truth and goodness and the region of darkness, lies and all evil; this highly dramatic struggle, beginning from the moment of the fall of our first parents, goes through the entire world history and will end only in the kingdom of glory with the complete triumph of good, when, according to the word of Scripture, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28; cf. John 12:32). The conclusion of this struggle will be the spiritual duel that is spoken of here, when “He” (αὺτὸς – masculine pronoun), i.e. The Great Descendant will enter into battle with the serpent himself or his main fiend, the Antichrist, and will strike the latter on his head (2 Thess. 2:8–9; Rev. 20:10). It is curious that the tradition of paganism has preserved a fairly strong memory of this important fact and has even captured the very picture of this struggle on various artistic monuments. If this divine promise of victory over the devil serves as a living source of consolation and joy for us, then what ray of life-giving hope was it for the fallen ancestors, who first heard this most joyful news from the lips of God himself? Therefore, this promise is quite deservedly called the “first gospel,” that is, the first good news about the coming Deliverer from slavery to the devil. Gen.3:16. He said to his wife: I will multiply your sorrow in your pregnancy; in illness you will give birth to children; These words pronounce the punishment for the wife, which consists in the fact that childbearing, the greatest act of a person’s earthly life, which was the subject of a special divine blessing (Gen. 1:28), now turns into a source of sorrow and suffering. However, these birth pangs are not something deliberately sent by God now as punishment to the wife, but constitute only a natural, legitimate consequence of the general flabbiness of the physical nature of fallen man, which, as a result of the fall, lost the normal balance of spiritual and physical forces and fell into illness and death. and your desire for your husband, These words express even more clearly the whole tragedy of the wife’s position: despite the fact that the wife at birth will experience the greatest torment, coupled with danger to her very life, she will not only not turn away from marital communication with her husband - this involuntary source of her suffering, but will seek him even more and more strongly than before. and he will rule over you. A new feature of marital relations between husband and wife, which established the fact of complete dominance of the former over the latter. If previously the wife, as only her husband’s assistant, was placed in some dependence on him, now, after the first wife has proven her inability to use freedom, God, by a certain law, places her action under the supreme control of her husband. The best illustration of this is the entire history of the pre-Christian world, especially the ancient East with its humiliatingly slavish position of women. And only in Christianity - the religion of redemption - are the rights lost to the wife again returned to her (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 5:25, etc.). Gen.3:17. And he said unto Adam, Because thou hast listened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; The verdict on the last culprit of the Fall - Adam - is preceded by an explanation of his deep guilt, precisely by an indication of how, instead of having a sobering effect on his wife, he himself fell under her seductive influence. cursed is the earth for your sake; you will eat from it in sorrow all the days of your life; We find the best explanation of this fact in the Holy Scripture itself, namely in the prophet Isaiah, where we read: “the earth is desecrated under those who live on it, for they transgressed the laws, changed the charter, and violated the eternal covenant. Because of this, a curse consumes the land, and those who live on it suffer punishment” (Isa. 24:5–6). Consequently, these words give only a particular expression of the general biblical thought about the close connection between the fate of man and the life of all nature (Job 5:7; Eccl. 1:2, 3, 2:23; Rom. 8:20). In relation to the earth, this divine curse was expressed in the impoverishment of its productive power, which in turn most strongly affects man, since it condemns him to hard, persistent work for daily food. Gen.3:18–19. She will bring forth thorns and thistles for you; and you will eat the grass of the field; by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, These two verses provide a more detailed explanation of the previous thought about the impoverishment of earthly fertility and the burden and unproductivity of human labor. With this divine verdict, a person’s entire earthly existence, as it were, turns into a continuous feat of labor and is doomed to sorrow and suffering, as the Slavic text expresses much more clearly: “endure this in sorrow all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17) (cf. Job 5:7, 14:1; Isa. 55:2; Eccl. 1:13, etc.). until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you will return. The series of divine punishments ends with the determination of the fulfillment of the threat that was announced in case of violation of the commandment, i.e., with the proclamation of death. This law of destruction and death, as can be seen from this text, as well as from a number of biblical parallels (Ps. 103:29, 145:4; Job 34:14–15; Eccl. 12:7), concerned only the physical side of human nature, formed from the earth and returning to its primitive state; but it did not extend to the human soul, which has its highest source in God (Eccl. 12:7; Proverbs 14:32; Isa. 57:2, etc.). In relation to the physical nature of man, death, if it can be considered a punishment for the Fall, is not so much in the positive as in the negative sense of the word, that is, not as the introduction of something completely new and inconsistent with human nature, but only as a deprivation, the taking away of that which was the gift of the supernatural grace of God, the conductor and symbol of which was the tree of life, which destroyed the effect of physical destruction in the human body. In this sense, we should also understand the well-known biblical expressions that “God did not create death” (Wis. 1:13), that “God created (more precisely, destined) man for incorruptibility” (Wis. 2:23) and that death was brought into the world by man’s sin (Rom. 5:12). Gen.3:20. And Adam called his wife's name Eve, for she became the mother of all living. Until now, as can be seen from Scripture, she did not have her own name, and she was designated only in terms of her relationship to her husband by the word “wife.” The name given to her now, Hebrew: Havva, means “life”, or, in fact, “producer of life” (ζωογόνος - Symmachus). In the fact that even at the very moment of the divine sentence of death, Adam did not doubt the immutability of the divine promise of the wife (and her Seed) as the restorer of life (“Eve”), the Church Fathers rightly see evidence of the conscious, living and ardent faith of the fallen ancestors in the promised Redeemer (Messiah). Gen.3:21. And the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife and clothed them. In this brief biblical note, in the opinion of the best exegetes, a tacit indication is given of the divine establishment of the institution of sacrifice, which perfectly explains the connection of the context, through the assumption of which the very connection of the text is restored: just as in the previous verse, giving the first wife her own name was closely related to the messianic idea, so the slaughter of sacrificial animals symbolized the same idea; The Lord instructed man to use the skins of these sacrificial animals as clothing. This, according to the Bible, as well as the cultural history of mankind, is the second stage of development in the gradation of human clothing. Expulsion of the fallen ancestors from paradise Gen.3:22. And the Lord God said: Behold, Adam has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand, and also take from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever. It would be too rude and unworthy of God to see in these His words only one simple irony over the unfortunate fallen ancestors. Therefore, those who see in them a strong antithesis to one of the earlier verses of this narrative, which spoke of the tempter’s flattering promise to give people equality with God (Gen. 3:5), are more right. “Since,” notes Blessed Theodoret, “the devil says: “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil,” but to those who transgress the commandment a mortal decree is pronounced, the God of all spoke this in reproach, showing the falsity of the devil’s promise.” Thus, if there is any irony here, it is in the facts themselves, not in the words. Gen.3:23–24. And the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he had been taken. The conclusion of the entire history of paradise is the fact of the expulsion of the fallen ancestors from paradise, with the main goal of depriving them of the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the tree of life. And he drove out Adam, and placed Cherubim and a flaming sword that turned around in the east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life. In order to completely block people's access to paradise, God places one of the celestials - the "cherubim" - as a guard at the entrance to paradise, and in addition, sends a special heavenly fire that came out of the bowels of the earth and sparkled like a shiny blade on a rotating sword. According to another reading: and between her Seed; He will bruise your head, and you will bruise His heel. You might be interested in: