Genesis - Chapter 03 - Line 00070

Contemplative Summary

Then YHWH God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all the living creatures of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”

The divine voice turns now to the source of distortion. No question is asked, no defense invited — only the statement of consequence. The Hebrew ki asita zot — “because you have done this” — fixes cause and condition in one breath. The word arur — “cursed” — emerges as reversal of blessing, a binding of energy into limitation. The serpent, once subtle and unbound, is now pressed to the ground: al-gehonkha telekh, “on your belly you shall go.” Its movement becomes horizontal, tethered to dust, the very matter from which life began.

Here, descent becomes symbol — consciousness fallen from vertical awareness into continual contact with the base of existence. Dust, afar, is not mere soil but the residue of mortality, the echo of unintegrated creation. The serpent will consume what it stirred — feeding on the vibration of its own separation. Yet even in curse, law remains — the order that all distortion must find form, all deviation must settle into balance.

To contemplate this line is to sense how consequence is not vengeance but physics — how every act shapes the plane it inhabits. The serpent’s path is ours whenever awareness narrows to survival, when vision turns only earthward. Still, within the dust itself glimmers the same substance of beginning — a reminder that even what crawls low remains part of the sacred whole, awaiting its next rising.