[Springfield Reformer]

But the grammatical gender of "heel" is of no relevance here

Actually, you're partly right.  I didn't identify correctly where the masculine pronoun was coming from. "Heel" is masculine independently, as you suggest, just because of the history of the word.  My bad.  However, the root for "bruise" is appended with both the inflection for the "you shall" part and the "him/his" part.  It's built into the complex package of endings (which as a student I found to be one of the most challenging aspects of Hebrew - we of the English persuasion don't pack all that pronoun info into individual words).

תְּשׁוּפֶ֥נּוּ

The morphology (derived from Logos) is

1.  The verb root: [verb, qal, imperfect,]
2.  The person performing the action: [second person, masculine, singular,]
3.  The person receiving the action: [third person, masculine, singular, energic nun] 

What this would look like then in English (oversimplified somewhat) is "bruise [you will] [his]" followed by "heel."  This explains why the LXX supplied autou, which is the masculine genitive.  They wanted to draw that out to show who owned the heel in question.

This, BTW, points us back to the Seed as both the crusher of the serpent's head and the owner of the bruised heel.  This symmetrical inverse relationship between Seed and Serpent is the most natural way to understand the mutual exchange of damage.  The woman is too remote from the pronoun in any event.  One cannot make arbitrary attachments to remote nouns if a closer one is available that fills the bill, as Seed does.  Proximity matters.

Peace,

SR

[annalex]

You are right, the ending nun indicates masculine object of action. But it is still heel, not the owner of the heel, — who can be either physiological gender. There is an anatomical joke in here somewhere...

However, I never claimed that the Vulgate translation is rooted in the Hebrew text. I still think it is corrupted simply because it is easier to think of the passage in terms of the woman and her heel because of the leading statement of enmity between the woman and the serpent.

[BlueDragon]

Very good presentation and info, spot-on to the finer points.

Thank you, again.

At this juncture I should provide some disclaimer though;

for you are most often quite polite, and I am not always so much (if at all).

I point this out here, in hopes that none will assume that you be entirely supportive of myself, and my own 'style' as it were.

Yet we do much agree on a wide range of things.

That said, I will now return to my own stubborn & headstrong, ongoing cross-examination of the recalcitrant witness(s). ;^')