We've listened in as the serpent whispered his power of confusion into the woman's ear. We've gazed at the fruit in all its delectable allure. We've tasted with the woman, and the man, the sweetness of sin and its rot. We've endured the spiral of shame, the growth of guilt, the frantic force of fear. We've panicked and bellowed blame every which way. We've toiled under the catastrophic weight of the curse. We've said a tearful goodbye to our paradise lost, and ventured out to the land of thorns and thistles where our tombs will be. But in the course of wringing all these tragic meanings out of Genesis chapter 3, there's one little note we've passed by, one glimmer in the dark. For this all began with a serpent, and before our penalties are even mentioned, he's got to get his.
“The LORD God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this'” – because you deceived the woman who did you no wrong, because you twisted and mocked and spread doubt, because you cast the holy name of God into disrepute, “cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14). Now, the surface meaning is that God has a problem with the animal we call a snake.1 Formerly, the snake was the most cunning of wild beasts; now, it's the most cursed of wild and domestic alike, an exile from the animals.2 The snake gets around not by flying, swimming, walking, but slithering, wriggling its body over the earth. Their tongues flicker in and out to augment smell; it looks like they lick up dust as food. As far as “enmity” goes, even infants instinctively are wary of snakes,3 and “many species of primates are deeply afraid of snakes.”4 By some estimates, over 150,000 people die each year from snakebites, making them the most deadly animal to us besides mosquitoes and each other.5
But if we're content to leave things at that level of understanding here, we're missing out. As we've mentioned, the serpent here isn't just an ordinary snake, as if snakes were cunning conversationalists. We're dealing with a spiritual power behind the surface of the snake. Many of Israel's neighbors told stories about cosmic serpents who set themselves up against the gods. In Egypt, the sun god was under threat each night from a giant serpent of chaos, and a great deal of Egyptian religion revolved around keeping this serpent at bay. Among the Hittites, the storm god had once been defeated by the serpent, and only with human help was he able to kill this serpent and its offspring.6 Among the Canaanites, their god Baal was said to have faced “Litan the Fleeing Serpent..., the Twisty Serpent, the Potentate with Seven Heads.”7 The Bible uses that same language: “Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent..., the Dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1), “king over all the sons of pride” (Job 41:34). “No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up” (Job 41:10).
So this isn't simply a common, everyday snake in the first place. This is that serpent, a spiritual power opposed to divinity, just as the Egyptians and Hittites and Canaanites and others all could've recognized. Here, “the nature of the serpent was a symbol of the devil.”8 This is 'the Serpent' with a capital S. The snake seen on the surface is hiding a fallen angel, an adversarial Satan, a force of disorder and disruption and danger, the sinuous wellspring of pride, a Leviathan full of venom that corrodes the soul. And that's whom God is judging.
“Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the beasts of the field!” (Genesis 3:14). More than any other creature, God curses the devil. The Serpent is tolerated only for a time. A cosmic war has begun: the Serpent picked a fight with God, dragging his name through the mud; in turn, God skewers the Serpent with the words of his curse (Isaiah 27:1).9 In the end, this Serpent will be destroyed, which will mean creation's salvation.10
In the meantime, “on your belly you shall go,” the LORD announces to the Serpent (Genesis 3:14). The devil – once a lofty light in heaven, momentarily absorbed in the contemplation of the perfect good which is God – is now condemned to earthly obsessions, the muck and the mud of baseness.11 For the devil to be cast onto his belly is to be a pathetic figure slithering through the world, since he “forfeited the dignity accorded him in the beginning and was cast down to earth.”12 The devil is here being restrained, bound from being the menace he'd otherwise be; cowardice strikes his heart, forced into submission by God before the war really begins.13
“Dust you shall eat all the days of your life,” God announces (Genesis 3:14). Just like crawling on the ground, licking or eating dust was a posture of extreme humiliation in the ancient world.14 To 'eat dust' was a Near Eastern way of describing what it was like to be dead: people in the underworld were pictured as “those who long for light, who eat dust and live on clay.”15 No matter how much of our dust he eats, no matter how much destruction he causes, it doesn't nourish or satisfy the devil: he's starving on this dusty diet, frustrated, pained.16
God goes on: “I will put enmity between you and the woman” (Genesis 3:15), that is, the devil “with the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14) will be made an enemy to “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). “I will make the woman your implacable enemy,” God's saying.17 For a moment in the story, it seemed like the Serpent had won the woman for his partner, his ally, virtually his vessel in leading humanity astray. But now that budding alliance is blessedly ripped asunder, divorced, turned into burning hatred, as the scales fall off her eyes and she at last can recognize all the Serpent's abuse for what it is – and she will be his furious foe.18 This is no merely mild mutual dislike; it's a state of war, a hatred on which life and death hang.19 And this hostile condition, this bold antipathy, this open enmity between the Serpent and the Woman, is enforced by the word of God.20
“I will put enmity,” the LORD elaborates, “between your seed and her seed.” Not only are the Serpent and the Woman personally opposed, but from each will descend dueling lineages locked in a mortal combat throughout time: “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). There is, there must be, an instinctive opposition between everything truly human in us, everything that comes from the mother of life, and the darkness that roams the world. There's common grace hereby placed in us that, despite our sinfulness, will burst through and resist the dark. “Reconciliation with the Evil One is harmful... Accordingly,” St. Basil said, “the devil has remained our opponent because of the fall that came upon us due to his abuse long ago. So the Lord has planned for us wrestling with him so that we would wrestle through obedience and triumph over the Adversary.”21 This long war is part of God's curse against the Serpent, who expected no resistance from us.
And that means, for one, a long spiritual warfare. One old commentator observes that “the seed of the devil are apostate angels, who were corrupted by the example of his pride and rebellion.”22 For all human history, we've been under siege by subtle powers of corruption, seed of the serpent which slither behind the scenes. These are spirits oppressive and possessive, unclean spirits that stink up all they waft through like a sewer breeze (Mark 1:23), harmful spirits that wear down our living (1 Samuel 16:14), lying spirits that aim to propagate that old mission of deception (1 Kings 22:22). And they were quite successful: through the ages, as the line of promise narrowed and narrowed, “demonic deceit was thus overshadowing every place and hiding the knowledge of the true God.”23 Yet we could always resist them through obedient openness to being taught by God's Spirit.
But it isn't only spirits who are the Serpent's seed. Down through the ages, the devil has been able to draw away many of those descended physically from the woman. The Serpent's seed includes all “those captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26), into whom he implants his sly craft, onto whom he imprints his low-down ways, through whom he reproduces his faithlessness and wickedness.24 In the grand field of this world, humans can be either “sons of the kingdom” or “sons of the Evil One” (Matthew 13:38). Just as the woman's seed will live in the direction of humanity's mission to spread life and order and flourishing, so the Serpent's seed will go the other direction, to disrupt and disorganize and dismantle that which God wanted to see in the world.25 For “whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil” (1 John 3:8). But just as the Serpent can corrupt the seed of the woman into his own, anyone who's lived as the Serpent's seed can be renewed as the Woman's seed, can “turn... from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive the forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith” (Acts 26:18). The question is, whose side will you take? Whose seed will you prove to be?
Skipping past how this plays out in the rest of Genesis (we'll get there), at Sinai the LORD chooses to take Israel under his wing as a young bride (Ezekiel 16:8). She became “a Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1). And so the Children of Israel are, from that perspective, the promised collective seed of this Woman, Mother Zion.
When they enter the promised land, the city of Gibeon decides to be “cunning” – now there's a serpent word (Joshua 9:3-4). They manufacture false evidence that they've traveled from a distant land that isn't in Canaan, and so when they speak flattering words and seem harmless, Joshua and the Israelites make a hasty covenant with these Gibeonites (Joshua 9:4-15). After realizing the truth, Joshua asks them why they “deceived” Israel (Joshua 9:22). He uses God's words to the serpent against them, announcing “Cursed are you” (Joshua 9:23), and he relegates them to servants under Israel's foot, debased like a serpent slithering in the dust (Joshua 9:24).26
In the days of the judges, when a Canaanite general named Sisera menaced Israel, a woman named Jael lured him into a false sense of security in her tent and, as he slept, hammered a tent peg through his skull (Judges 4:21). “Most blessed of women,” they sang of her who “crushed his head” like a serpent's head (Judges 5:24-26).27 Later, the Children of Israel demanded a king, so they got a promising young man named Saul (1 Samuel 10:17-27). His first real test of leadership came by a confrontation with the Ammonite king Nahash – 'Serpent' (1 Samuel 11:1-4). So Saul mustered an army, marched to the rescue, and struck at King Serpent's army until salvation was won (1 Samuel 11:8-11). Only once he'd shown himself a true seed of the woman (for now), able to lead Israel in crushing the serpent's head, did they accept him fully as king (1 Samuel 11:15).28
Eventually, as Saul began to take a more serpentine path in life, Samuel anointed a boy named David to one day take his place. And it's no coincidence that, when the Philistines sent their champion to intimidate the Israelites, Goliath was wearing a helmet made of bronze – (the Hebrew word for 'bronze' sounds a lot like 'serpent') – and, literally, a “coat of scales” (1 Samuel 17:5). Goliath was costumed as the seed of the Serpent, so what was David to do as the seed of the woman? Smash a stone square in the giant's head, that's what (1 Samuel 17:49)!29
The prophets promised his descendants that “the nations... shall lick the dust like a serpent, like the crawling things of the earth..., and they shall be in fear of you” (Micah 7:17). But even within Israel, “whoever does not practice righteousness” could find themselves numbered among “the children of the devil” (1 John 3:10). Be they Jew or be they Gentile, “the wicked... go astray from birth, speaking lies; they have venom like the venom of a serpent” (Psalm 58:3-4), “plan evil things in their heart and stir up wars continually; they make their tongue sharp as a serpent's, and under their lips is the venom of asps” (Psalm 140:2-3). No wonder, then, that as Israel grew more and more venomous to each other, more and more serpent-like, Jeremiah heard the verdict: “Behold, I am sending you among serpents..., and they shall bite you, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 8:17).
The rabbis looked back and said that whenever Israel forsook the commandments, the serpent “will aim and bite on his heel and make him ill. For [Israel's] sons, however, there will be a remedy; but for you, O Serpent, there will not be a remedy, since they are to make appeasement in the end, in the days of King Messiah.”30 To bring a climax to this conflict, a woman would bear the Messiah, the One destined for the promise. Until then, Israel – Mother Zion – endured the agony of her combat like labor pangs, “and the Dragon stood before the Woman who was about to give birth, so that, when she bore her child, he might devour it” (Revelation 12:4).
“Eve, an undefiled virgin,” they used to say, “conceived the word of the serpent and brought forth disobedience and death.”31 But in answer to that, there's a New Eve in town, a Woman who hears an angelic voice announce to her good tidings that she's conceiving the hope of the world.32 And so “the knot of Eve's disobedience was untied by Mary's obedience.”33 We probably don't give Mary nearly enough credit or honor; the Bible she every generation must celebrate the matchless blessing God gave her (Luke 1:48). It was with unstained faith that she carried God in her womb, was tethered by an umbilical cord to the Infinite, the Immortal, the Consuming Fire. It was through her that Mother Zion's birth pangs came to their blessed fruition. If Eve the Disobedient was the “mother of all the living” in a natural sense (Genesis 3:20), Mary who gives birth to the Body of Christ is the new “Mother of All the Living” spiritually. As the New Woman carrying the Promised Seed, she's the woman whom the Serpent most completely hates, and who most abhors him as her enemy, wanting nothing to do with him but to see him destroyed by her Son (Genesis 3:15).34 Her childbearing is curse-breaking, world-saving, all because it brings our Savior to us. It's as the Seed of this woman that Jesus is here to save.
Legend had it that, from the moment the Virgin Mary gave birth, the darkness shuddered in terror and confusion – for, in a moment, “all magic was vanquished, all bondage of evil came to naught, ignorance was destroyed, and the ancient realm was brought to ruin.”35 Looking back on everything that came before, Christians could say that the Serpent had “bit and killed and hindered the steps of humanity until the Seed came who was Mary's Child, who was destined beforehand to trample on [the Serpent's] head.”36 This Child, this Jesus, was born with a mission: “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), whether demonic or human.
And so Jesus “commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27). Famously “he cast out many demons” wherever he went (Mark 1:34). And he enlisted his apostles as officers in that same campaign: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven! Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:18-19). The demons, seed of the Serpent, were trod down by Jesus. But Jesus was also opposed by those to whom he thundered back: “You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil?” (Matthew 12:34). “You are of your father the devil” (John 8:44). “Serpents, brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?” (Matthew 23:33). The scribes, the Pharisees – they'd become seed of the Serpent, full of devilish venom against the Woman's Seed.37
Ultimately, though, the Seed of the Woman wasn't sent just to live out his enmity with the seed of the Serpent. His fight, in the end, was to be against the Ancient Serpent himself. And it all came down to the moment when he allowed the devil to bite his heel, to lash out with all his venom and fury, to hurl him down to the dust of death from the cross. Little did the Serpent realize that it was in biting Christ this way that his own head would be smashed. At the cross, Christ “disarmed the principalities and powers and put them to open shame by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). It was a costly victory, since the Son of God, wearing the fragility of our flesh, had to be bitten by everything the devil could muster; but it was the only way for God to make this a truly human victory.38 “On Good Friday,” it's been said, “a holy heel took aim with all the power of heaven.”39 Now are fulfilled the words of Job: “His hand pierced the fleeing serpent” (Job 26:13)! Now are fulfilled the words of Asaph: “You crushed the heads of Leviathan” (Psalm 74:14)! Now is the Serpent trodden down!
But though the Promised Seed has triumphed decisively, the fight isn't over. The Woman has been reborn in him, and her name is Church. Meanwhile, the devil limps along, crippled and enraged: “The Dragon became furious with the Woman and went off to make war on the rest of her seed, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). Someone being baptized into the Church would declare: “I renounce you, Satan, and all your works, and all your pomp, and all your worship!”40 In saying that, every person baptized into Christ, abandoning the Serpent to become the seed of the Church, pledged enmity against the Serpent and all his seed. One Christian said this about the Church as the Mother of Christians: “Do you not see these weapons, unconquerable and unbreakable, with which she shatters and removes the head of the serpent? I am speaking of the cross, the body, the blood of Jesus, and the vows, prayers, vigils, and other weapons that fight against the serpent.... Here is evidence of the God-given hatred this pious woman has gained against the serpent: she removes the idols..., she raises the churches, and the nations acknowledge God.”41
Still we have demons to resist by our resolute faithfulness to God; still we have demons to cast out in our Lord Jesus' name. Still we have false teachers to beware, for until the end, “some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1), “who do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive” even now (Romans 16:18). “Satan, through his works of wickedness, has driven some from the Church and formed heresies and schisms.”42 “May a hatred of the serpent be granted you that, as they lie in wait for your heel, you may crush their head.”43
Still, too, we have persecutors and critics. Given that the seed of the Serpent on earth oppose the cause of Christ, we should expect to feel a sharp nipping at our heels if we're truly the brothers and sisters of our Master. Be sure you're not the one cozying up to the devil, of course! “Let none of you suffer as... an evildoer” (1 Peter 4:15). But “rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings” (1 Peter 4:13). Rejoice when they hiss derogatory things, when they coil around and squeeze your life tight, when they spit venom, when they bite, “for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:12). “Do not repay evil for evil..., but, on the contrary, bless” (1 Peter 3:9). Pray for those who imitate the Serpent, that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:25). It's through prayer and blessing and good news and the outpouring of love – only through these – that we can crush what the Serpent has done in them.
Ultimately, in having chosen to tempt us, chosen to pick a fight with God through us, the Serpent did so much more harm to himself than he's done to us. We have a promise: “The God of Peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20). Even now, “when you gather frequently as a congregation, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and his destructive force is vanquished by the harmony of your faith.”44 And so “if you turn to the Lord with your whole heart and do righteousness..., you will be empowered to rule over the works of the devil. Do not fear the devil's threat at all, for he is as weak as a tendon on a corpse.”45
Already we bear witness that “the Dragon, that Ancient Serpent who is Devil and the Satan,” is “thrown into the pit... so that he might not deceive the nations any longer” (Revelation 20:2). “Just as it was decreed against the serpent that he and all his seed were to be trod upon, so it was also decreed against him who was in the serpent that he go to the fire together with all his hosts,”46 into “the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). And so at last “the devil who had deceived them [will be] thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur,” to “be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10).
And thus, by Jesus the Woman's Conquering Seed, “God destroys both the Serpent and those angels and humans who have come to resemble the Serpent; but frees from death those who repent of their sins and believe in Christ.”47 That's what God, in a veiled way, announces in advance here in the Bible's third chapter, amidst all these curses – indeed, before we hear a word of our punishment, we hear the protevangelium, the first gospel! The war may be long and hard and costly, but evil will run out! Evil will be beaten! Evil will get its head caved in and be done away with, and the death-blow to the Serpent's head has already been dealt by Christ crucified and risen! And because of him, humanity – all those who, in the end, prove to be the Woman's seed – will live to trample down the ruins of evil, thanks to Jesus Christ the Serpent-Smasher! Thanks be to God! Amen.
1 Donald E. Gowan, Genesis 1-11: From Eden to Babel (Eerdmans, 1988), 57.
2 Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 134-135.
3 Nobuyuki Kawai, The Fear of Snakes: Evolutionary and Psychobiological Perspectives on Our Innate Fear (Springer, 2019), 59.
4 Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (Harvard University Press, 2009), 109.
5 Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (Harvard University Press, 2009), 111.
6 Illuyanka Tale 1.3, 10-12, in Writings from the Ancient World 2:11-12.
7 KTU 1.5 i 1-3, in Writings from the Ancient World 9:141.
8 Augustine of Hippo, Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian 6.28.A1, in Works of Saint Augustine I/25:686.
9 Richard E. Averbeck, “Ancient Near Eastern Mythography as It Relates to Historiography in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 3 and the Cosmic Battle,” in James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard, eds., The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions (Eerdmans, 2004), 352.
10 James M. Hamilton Jr., God's Glory in Salvation Through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2010), 76.
11 Anastasius of Sinai, Hexaemeron 11.4.6, in Orientalia Christiana Analecta 278:415.
12 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 34, in Library of Early Christianity 1:75.
13 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 52.
14 Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 134.
15 Epic of Gilgamesh VII:187-188, in Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), 67. Compare also Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld lines 7-8 (“the house whose dwellers thirst for light, where dust is their food, clay their bread”) in State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 6:29.
16 R. R. Reno, Genesis, Brazos Theological Commentary (Brazos Press, 2010), 93.
17 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 17.28, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 74:237.
18 Anastasius of Sinai, Hexaemeron 11.4.3, in Orientalia Christiana Analecta 278:411.
19 Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11, Christian Standard Commentary (Holman Reference, 2023), 197.
20 Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 135.
21 Basil of Caesarea, Homily Explaining That God is Not the Cause of Evil 9, in Popular Patristics Series 30:77-78.
22 Bede, On Genesis 3:15, in Translated Texts for Historians 48:133.
23 Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 13, in Popular Patristics Series 44A:77.
24 Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 94.
25 Bryan C. Hodge, Revisiting the Days of Genesis: A Study of the Use of Time in Genesis 1-11 in Light of Its Ancient Near Eastern and Literary Context (Wipf & Stock, 2011), 132.
26 Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to Torah and Tanakh (Pickwick Publications, 2011), 107.
27 Andrew David Naselli, The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer (Crossway, 2020), 85.
28 Andrew David Naselli, The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer (Crossway, 2020), 87.
29 Andrew David Naselli, The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer (Crossway, 2020), 87-88.
30 Targum Neofiti Genesis 3:15, in Aramaic Bible 1A:61.
31 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 100.5, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 6:305.
32 Mitchell L. Chase, Short of Glory: A Biblical and Theological Exploration of the Fall (Crossway, 2023), 160.
33 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.22.4, in Ancient Christian Writers 64:105.
34 Paul O'Callaghan, God's Gift of the Universe: An Introduction to Creation Theology (Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 288.
35 Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 19.3, in Loeb Classical Library 24:239.
36 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.23.7, in Ancient Christian Writers 64:108.
37 Andrew David Naselli, The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer (Crossway, 2020), 97.
38 Matthew S. Harmon, Rebels and Exiles: A Biblical Theology of Sin and Restoration (Crossway, 2020), 15-16.
39 Mitchell L. Chase, Short of Glory: A Biblical and Theological Exploration of the Fall (Crossway, 2023), 123.
40 Hippolytus of Rome, On the Apostolic Tradition 21.9, in Popular Patristics Series 22:111; Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogic Catechesis 1.4-8, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 64:155-157; Ambrose of Milan, On the Sacraments 1.2 §5, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 44:271; and so many other sources testify to this act of renouncing the devil.
41 Anastasius of Sinai, Hexaemeron 11.4.8-9, in Orientalia Christiana Analecta 278:417-419.
42 Didascalia Apostolorum 6.6, in Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum: An English Version with Introduction and Annotation (Brepols, 2009), 229.
43 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 6.35, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 61:168.
44 Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 13.1, in Loeb Classical Library 24:223.
45 Hermas, Shepherd of Hermas, Commandments 12.6.2, in Loeb Classical Library 25:303.
46 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 2.32.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:121.
47 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 100.6, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 6:305.
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