“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” is a quote from the William Butler Yeats poem “The second coming.”
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
From our earliest days we were told the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation by the serpent in the garden. In children’s books there is often the quick explanation that the serpent is the devil/satan tempting the first humans. To be clear this earliest of accounts in Genesis 3 does not refer explicitly to Satan (which by the way is never used as a proper name in Scripture). The tempter is simply called a nāḥāš, which is a common Hebrew word for a serpent, used a total of 31 times in the OT. There is perhaps a sinister nuance possible as seen in the Hebrew word for serpent (nāḥāš) if it is to be connected with the verb nāḥaš, “to practice divination, observe signs,” a verb that appears eleven times in the OT. In the ancient Near East such divination formulae frequently involved a serpent. Continue reading
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