The Great Seduction

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field Genesis 3:1

Crafty – Adam and his wife thought they would be like God.  Instead, they just discovered they were naked.  It was the greatest seduction the world has ever known.  If we could just peer into the Hebrew in this verse, we would discover a subtle word-play that reveals just how “crafty” the serpent was.

The Hebrew word for “crafty” is ‘arum.  It has both positive and negative uses.  In Proverbs, the word means prudent (Proverbs 14:8) or humble (Proverbs 12:23).  Here it means shrewd or seductive reasoning.  What we don’t see in English is that this word is just one small vowel away from ‘arom, the word used to describe physical nakedness (Genesis 2:25).  In fact, there are a host of consonants (A-R-Y-M) that carry nuances about this event: ‘erwah (nakedness), ‘arwah (dishonor), ‘arom (naked) and ‘arum (crafty).  Do you notice something about the connections between them?  The Hebrew pictograph helps: “to see a person and behold chaos.”  In other words, nakedness is now a symbol of disordered existence.  There was a time, before the seduction of the one who saw that nakedness could be disordered, when being without the mask of clothing was perfect alignment with the Holy One.  There was a time when nakedness reflected ordered, honorable relationships.  Then the serpent turned nakedness against itself, using its vulnerability to bring about the destruction of the divine relationship.  Suddenly nakedness became the reminder of chaos.  Suddenly we could see what we lost and were not able to recover.  It was not innocence.  It was order.

Everything important in life happens in the first three chapters of Genesis (someday I’ll write a book with that title).  This wordplay is no exception.  What we discover is that we are tempted to put our order in place of God’s order.  We should learn that displacing God’s order destroys all order – it leaves us naked and ashamed, exactly the opposite of what we hoped to achieve.  We see that one time our vulnerability was the crown of humanity.  We thrived in dependence on our Creator.  But in sin we discover that disorder destroys our vulnerability, not by stripping away our fragile nature but by removing the trust that makes vulnerability possible.  Vulnerability without trust is chaos.  That’s what the serpent left us.

Finally, we discover that the biblical text notices our predicament even in the word pictures of human nakedness.  We are the ones who behold our own chaos.  We are afraid of who we are.  To be a sex object is to be nothing more than what the serpent left behind – chaos incarnated – a being without belonging.  God’s restoration appeals to our deepest loss – the loss of trust; a trust between God and us and between ourselves.  We can cover up but we cannot hide.  It takes God’s covering to restore our humanity.

Topical Index:  Nakedness