Study Serpent for free

Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube ad for MasterClass on “The Genesis Story.” It begins with Justin Jackson, professor of English at Hillsdale College, saying, “So, the fun thing with the serpent is how does a serpent talk?” upon which you can hear laughter from the class.

He proceeds, “But not only that, why is the serpent’s punishment to crawl on its belly when that’s what it does? If you don’t know how to read biblical poetry, if you don’t know the formal qualities of parallelism and expansion, you are missing out on one third of the Hebrew bible. Whatever theological background you have, you’re going to have your own hypothesis, that is to say, your own plot and narrative. What the literary reading allows you to do is to find new details that work within that overall plot or narrative.”  

Here’s Richard Jordan in a free study online at Shorewood’s website under media archives: “Satan is the serpent; that’s a description of his character, the essence of his being. We use the illustration, ‘Behold the lamb of God.’ Well, Jesus is the lamb of God, but He’s not a four-legged ‘Baa, baa’ wool-bearing lamb. He has the character; He functions in the role of a lamb of God.

“Well, Satan has a character. He is that seven-headed dragon, that old serpent the devil, so on and so on. When he stood in front of Eve he didn’t stand there as a big old slithering fork-tongued snake. He transformed himself into an angel of light. He stood there as a beautiful, handsome Errol Flynn kind of guy, or whoever it is you think’s good-looking."

(new post tomorrow)