Hey, this is John at the Bible Project. Today we continue a conversation about the biblical

theme we're calling the Son of Man. Son of Man is praised in the Bible. It literally

means the human one. And it is the way that Jesus most often refers to himself. It's an

idea, a theme that begins in page 3 of the Bible, Genesis 3. So if you remember, Genesis

3, there's a snake, he's a beast, but also some sort of spiritual evil and he convinces humanity,

Adam and Eve, to rebel against God. And so God tells the snake that there's going to be two

lineages moving forward, the seat of the woman, the son of man, who, one day, crushed the snake,

and the seat of the snake. What does that mean to be the seat of the snake? It's giving ourselves

over to powers and thoughts and systems that take us not forward into life. It takes us backwards

into competitive, violent rivalry that results in all of us being destroyed. It takes us back into

chaos and nothing. In this episode, we're going to see how this theme that seeded the snake

develops through Genesis and then into Exodus. We'll look at Cain, Jacob, Joseph's brothers,

and we'll see how they all give into the snake. All that does is just reinforce to you that man,

we need some different humans. Every human I'm meeting in this story, there are some have positive

traits, but they're always balanced by really horrible traits. And those horrible traits are

almost always connected to animal things in the storyline. So you walk, yeah, you walk out of

Genesis going, dude, we need a new and different kind of human around here. Ben will get into the book

of Exodus and we'll look at Moses. And we'll look at something I've always overlooked. Moses is

told by God to turn a staff into a snake, to grab it, control it, and that's going to be the sign to

Pharaoh that he comes with God's authority and power. And when the prophets read the Exodus story,

like when Isaiah goes back and talks about it, he reads the Exodus narrative as a portrait of the

snake crusher. He reads the story of the past as giving us imagery and language to talk about our

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