Going back to the beginning

Recently I posted a post (post a post) about Genesis and animals and Cain and plants and Abel and curses and transformers. Cain was a transformer.

Anyways, Ryan Topper had brought up the verse from Genesis chapter 4 that has the woman, Eve, saying she has made/acquired/conceived a man by the help/from/like the Lord. How your interpretation has it is up to you and it matter not in what I am talking about. Here we will quote what the NET bible has:

4:1 Now the man had marital relations with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. Then she said, “I have created a man just as the Lord did!”

And just previously in Genesis, in an earlier episode, during the curse God says to the serpent:

3:15 And I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; her offspring will attack your head, and you will attack her offspring’s heel.”

Now a cool thing that the NET says in it’s commentary (which can be read by clicking on the verse link) is that the woman believes she has given birth to the one who will crush the serpent’s head, the promised Messiah. This turns out not to be true as Cain instead just goes buck-wild and kills his brother, then becomes a vampire. You know, like common vampire mythology.

So we know it isn’t true that Cain is that Messiah and the Jews have been looking forward to this Messiah for years, looking for the one whom God will send to crush the serpent’s head. So I was thinking about that and since I have also been reading Luke at the same time I began to ponder this Messiah who will crush the serpent’s head. And I began to think about the controversy surrounding Jesus birth and how we often see it as bad because in society that day it would have been terrible for the woman to have a baby before Joseph had even married her, much less by someone other than Joseph. But I began to think about the controversy as well of what the authors’ created by writting the story down. In the story of Jesus conception Mary gives birth to a child by the help of the LORD. Let that sink in. Okay, so Jews are reading this story about this guy who the author claims is the Messiah and the first thing the Jew reads about is the child being conceived by the help of the LORD. Already at the beginning the author is claiming not that the child is just unique because he fulfills the virgin birth prophecy but the author is also showing that this child fulfills the original prophecy that a child is born by the help of the Lord that will strike the head of the serpent. This woman and child are like Eve and Cain, but where one had failed, this one succeeds. It all harkens back to the beginning.

If I were a Jew at the time, knowing the Torah as they did, I’d already be tuned into what the author is saying. Maybe the authors of the gospels were not just showing how Jesus was born but also tuning us into the idea that this is the one who will fulfill the prophecy of old.

Which then is interesting in that John doesn’t have the account of the virgin birth in his gospel. And Sailhamer would say that omission is a literary device to show us something.