Who Will Crush the Serpent’s Head?
Most modern English translations of
Genesis 3:15 read, “He shall crush
your head”, referring to the “seed of the Woman”, understood to be Jesus
Christ. However, the Douay-Rheims and Vulgate read, “She shall crush your head”, which has always been understood as a
reference to the Blessed Virgin. This has often been
depicted in iconography. The difficulty probably lies
in the fact that the Hebrew male and female pronouns are written similarly and
easily confused: St. Jerome’s Hebrew text evidently had a feminine pronoun in
this place. The stronger linguistic case, however, can be made for an original
masculine pronoun. Theologically, there is no difficulty, since it is true that
both the seed (Jesus Christ) and the woman (the Virgin Mary) crush the head
of the serpent: the woman crushes the
head by means of her seed.
(John Bergsma and Brant
Pitre, A Catholic Introduction to the Bible, 2 vols. [San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2018], 1:107, emphasis in bold added)
