“He will crush your head”
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. (Genesis 3:15 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A curse on the snake, or a cryptic first promise of a coming deliverer.
The cultural key
On the surface this is an origin story for the reflexive dread between people and snakes: they strike our heels, we crush their heads. But the language reaches further. 'Seed' (zera) is a collective that can mean a whole line of descendants or narrow to a single one, and the switch to 'He' has led many, from ancient Jewish readers to the New Testament, to hear a promise that one offspring of the woman will one day deal the serpent a fatal blow while himself being wounded. Honesty requires holding both: the plain sense of ongoing enmity, and the messianic reading the later canon builds on it.
Recovered meaning
Christians have long called this the protoevangelium, the gospel in seed form: a head-wound for the serpent, a heel-wound for the deliverer. Whether one hears a single victor or the long human feud with evil, the verse plants the hope that the serpent does not get the last word.