[Springfield Reformer]

The point remains that the suggestion that "seed" will crush the head of a serpent which is near a woman's heel, ...

Except that עָקֵב (heel) is masculine, so "He will crush your head, and you (the serpent) will bruise [his] heel." Whereas the Hebrew infers the "[his]" based on the initial "He" plus the masculine "heel," the LXX supplies the "his" explicitly (αυτου).

Therefore, I can find nothing in the text about proximity to a woman's heel.  I know the D-R uses the feminine, but that's no doubt because they were borrowing the faulty initial pronoun from the Vulgate, and follow the gender error consistently with the second pronoun (Latin eius, being in the genitive, relies on external context to reveal gender). Kind of a cascade error.

Peace,

SR

[annalex]

But the grammatical gender of "heel" is of no relevance here. The verse begins by describing the enmity between the serpent and the woman, and so the natural reading would be that the bruising also will occur between the two antagonists' body parts: the serpent's head and the woman's heel. The fact that in fact there is a third actor introduced, the seed, and that grammatically it is the seed doing the bruising is of course a prophetic vision of the Holy Moses. I am though convinced that millions of Jewish eyes read that passage and mentally corrected the pronouns so that an epic battle between the Jewish Mother and Satan is depicted, not the battle between Jesus and Satan.

For Jerome, it was a dilemma. He probably consulted a rabbi, who said: Of course it is the Jewish nation battling Satan. Jerome, being Christian, recognized that not only by grammar but in truth it is Jesus crushing the serpent. However, he probably felt that to translate "He will crush" would be seen as reaching by non-Christians, who can also consult a rabbi.

Something similar is occurring with Isaiah's "virgin shall conceive", where Christians see a prophecy and Jews see nothing out of the ordinary, a young girl, העלמה, getting naturally pregnant. In that case Jerome threw caution to the wind and translated as the Holy Ghost lead him.

Why Jerome followed a judaized interpretation in the case of Genesis 3:15, but not in Isaiah 7:14 I don't know. It could be that to him Mary was a natural amalgamation of the Jewish nation and the Christian Church personified all at once, so he felt a marian reference would resolve the puzzle.

Of course, this is pure play of imagination on my part. It could be that quite simply the copy Jerome was working on had a feminine pronoun.