Having established the methodological error of “Reformed Fringe”—their rejection of confessional authority in favor of a speculative, “Naked Bible” approach—we now turn to a concrete example of this method in action. Their episode “Genesis 3: A Dragon in the Trees” serves as a perfect case study, revealing how their flawed hermeneutic inevitably leads to a mishandling of the biblical text. This episode is a masterclass in exegetical malpractice, characterized by the persistent use of the etymological fallacy and the imposition of a preconceived mythological framework onto the sacred narrative. Ultimately, their etymological revisionism is an unstable hermeneutic that, if applied consistently, will lead to doctrinal corruption across the entire scope of biblical and systematic theology. By prioritizing remote word associations and allegorical speculation over the plain, contextual meaning of the text, Van Dorn and Moffitt abandon sound exesis and transform the historical account of the Fall into a gnostic drama of their own creation.
The Serpent, the Fallacy, and the Formal Charge of Plagiarism
The cornerstone of their reinterpretation of Genesis 3 is the etymological fallacy. They argue that the Hebrew word for serpent, nachash, should not be understood as a literal snake, but as a “shining one,” based on its phonetic similarity to words for “divination” and “bronze” (Van Dorn and Moffitt, “Genesis 3,” 12:21). This is a profound error. The specific noun used in the text is nāḥāš, and its primary and overwhelming sense in its 31 Old Testament occurrences is “snake” (Hoogendyk, “נָחāשׁ 1,” LALHB). The meaning of a word is determined by its context, not by phonetic coincidences.
As if this exegetical malpractice were not egregious enough, there is a shocking and deeply troubling layer of intellectual dishonesty at play. The entire theory of the nachash as a “shining one”—the lynchpin of their revisionist account of the Fall—is not the fruit of Van Dorn’s own research or insight. A formal analysis reveals a comprehensive, systematic, and uncredited dependence on the unique intellectual framework of his late friend and mentor, Dr. Michael S. Heiser.
This is not a matter of shared ideas, but of what is formally known as “idea plagiarism”: the uncredited appropriation of a unique, integrated system of thought presented as one’s own. Dr. Heiser’s work on the “Divine Council Worldview” is precisely such a system—a novel, interlocking framework that reconfigures known data in a new way. His interpretation of Genesis 3 is not a collection of isolated points, but a complete, coherent theological edifice. To present this entire intellectual architecture without attribution is an abhorrent act of plagiarism that calls the integrity of this entire project into serious question.
The evidence for this charge is clear when we break down the unique, interdependent pillars of Heiser’s signature framework and compare them to the arguments presented by Van Dorn.
- Heiser’s Nachash Thesis: Dr. Heiser’s most foundational departure from traditional exegesis is his re-identification of the tempter. This is built on a specific, multi-faceted argument:
- The Linguistic Argument: Heiser posits that ha-nachash is a substantivized adjective meaning “the shining one,” linking it to the luminous descriptions of divine beings elsewhere in Scripture.
- The Grammatical Argument: A linchpin of his case is that the word “other” in Genesis 3:1 (“any other beast of the field”) is a translator’s insertion, and its absence in the Hebrew detaches the nachash from the animal kingdom.
- The Metaphorical Curse: Consequently, the curse to “eat dust” is not a biological change but a metaphor for cosmic demotion and eschatological defeat.
- Heiser’s Divine Council Hermeneutic: The second pillar is Heiser’s use of Psalm 82 to establish the existence of a heavenly “Divine Council” as the primary hermeneutical key for understanding plural language for God.
- Genesis 3:5 (“you will be like gods”): Heiser argues the temptation is an offer of elevation to the status of the beings in this council.
- Genesis 3:22 (“the man has become like one of us”): Heiser interprets this as God speaking to His council, acknowledging humanity has seized a divine prerogative.
- Heiser’s Cosmic-Mythological Landscape: The third pillar re-conceptualizes Eden as a “cosmic mountain,” the mythological center of the world and the headquarters of the Divine Council, drawing on texts like Ezekiel 28.
These three pillars form a causally and logically interlocking system that is unmistakably Heiser’s. Van Dorn, in the “Reformed Fringe” episode, does not merely touch on these ideas; he reproduces the entire system in its precise structure and interdependence. He presents the nachash as a “shining one,” makes the specific grammatical point about the absence of the word “other,” reinterprets the curse metaphorically, and uses the Divine Council to explain the plural “gods” in the text. This is not influence; it is a wholesale replication of a signature intellectual framework, presented without a single word of credit to its originator. This profound ethical failure, this act of taking the intellectual property of a deceased mentor and passing it off as original analysis, is indefensible.
The historic Reformed understanding, in contrast, holds both the spiritual agent and the physical instrument in view. The Bible presents the tempter as a serpent (Gen 3:1), and the confessions clarify that this temptation was the work of Satan. The Westminster Confession of Faith states that our first parents were “seduced by the subtilty and temptation of Satan” (WCF 6.1; Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 4:241). The “Fringe” interpretation flattens this biblical complexity, dismissing the literal serpent as a “cartoon” and thereby rejecting the church’s settled understanding of the text.
Ultimately, the most powerful refutation of a novel Old Testament interpretation comes from the New Testament’s own inspired use of that text. The Apostle Paul, addressing the Corinthian church, provides a definitive commentary on the identity of the tempter: “But I am afraid that as the serpent (ho ophis) deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Cor 11:3 ESV). Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, uses the common Greek word for “snake.” He feels no need to correct a supposed ancient misunderstanding or reveal a hidden meaning about a “shining one.” He simply affirms the plain, historical reading of the Genesis account. This apostolic testimony serves as a final, authoritative word, confirming the orthodox understanding of the tempter as Satan acting through a literal serpent and exposing the “shining one” theory as a speculative departure from the witness of Scripture itself. Are we to believe that the Apostle Paul was confused about the meaning of the original Hebrew? Or are we to conclude, following the logic of “Reformed Fringe,” that the inspired apostle himself held to a simplistic, “cartoon” understanding of Genesis 3? Indeed, are we to suggest that the Holy Spirit, who inspired Paul to write these words, lacked a sufficiently supernatural worldview to grasp what truly happened in the Garden?
A Cloud of Witnesses: The Historic Interpretation of Genesis 3:5
This historical-exegetical sleight of hand is further exposed when we consider the testimony of the Reformers themselves. In their episode, Van Dorn and Moffitt make much of the fact that older translations rendered Genesis 3:5 as “ye shall be as gods” (plural), claiming this supports their divine council worldview (Van Dorn and Moffitt, “Genesis 3,” 37:02). Yet, this is a profound misrepresentation of the Reformed exegetical tradition. The great teachers of the church, working with these very texts, did not interpret this phrase as a temptation to join a pantheon of lesser deities. Augustine, long before the Reformation, identified the core of the temptation as pride and a desire for illicit autonomy:
We see from these words that they were persuaded to sin through pride, for this is the meaning of the statement “You will be like gods.”… Thus they refused to obey his Law as if, by his prohibition, he jealously begrudged them an autonomy that had no need of his interior light… This is what they were persuaded to do: to love to excess their own power. And, since they wanted to be equal to God, they used wrongly, that is, against the Law of God, that middle rank by which they were subject to God… Thus they lost what they had received in wanting to seize what they had not received (Augustine, On Genesis, 117–18).
John Calvin, acknowledging the textual options, cuts to the same theological heart of the matter. He writes:
Some translate it, ‘Ye shall be like angels.’ It might even be rendered in the singular number, ‘Ye shall be as God.’ I have no doubt that Satan promises them divinity; as if he had said, For no other reason does God defraud you of the tree of knowledge, than because he fears to have you as companions (Calvin, Commentary on… Genesis, 150–51).
The great Puritan commentator Matthew Henry concurs: “‘You shall be as gods, as Elohim, mighty gods; not only omniscient, but omnipotent too;’ or, ‘You shall be as God himself, equal to him, rivals with him; you shall be sovereigns and no longer subjects, self-sufficient and no longer dependent’” (Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 11). For the orthodox—from the Fathers to the Puritans—regardless of the specific rendering, the fundamental temptation offered by Satan was divinity itself: equality with the one true God. This nuanced understanding is lost in the “Fringe” focus on mythological beings. This unbroken chain of interpretation, from the Patristic era through the Reformation to the Puritans, demonstrates that the Church has never needed a ‘divine council’ mythology to make sense of Genesis 3. The orthodox reading has always located the text’s profound theological drama not in a war among gods, but in the prideful grasp of a creature for equality with the one true Creator.
The Trees and the Gnostic Impulse
If the handling of the serpent was an exercise in exegetical malpractice, the treatment of the trees in the garden descends into the realm of the truly ludicrous. With an audacity that is frankly astonishing, Van Dorn proposes that the “trees” among which Adam and Eve hid were not, in fact, trees at all. Rather, he claims they were the lesser elohim of his divine council, a conclusion reached based on a tenuous phonetic similarity between the Hebrew words for gods (elim) and certain types of trees (elim) (Van Dorn and Moffitt, “Genesis 3,” 49:25). One must pause to consider the sheer arrogance of such a proposal. We are asked to believe that for millennia, the people of God—from the ancient Israelites to the Apostles, the Fathers, the Reformers, and the Puritans—have fundamentally misunderstood the landscape of Eden, mistaking a pantheon of divine beings for simple botany. This is not exegesis; this is Gnosticism, plain and simple. It is an interpretive method that posits a secret, hidden knowledge available only to the initiated, a “deeper” meaning that lies beneath the “cartoon” version of the text the rest of the church has been content to read. The Church has a name for this interpretive impulse: heresy. Augustine, with prophetic clarity, identified this very move as the archetypal temptation of the serpent himself:
For that serpent taken prophetically signifies the poisons of the heretics… For no men promise more loquaciously and boastfully the knowledge of good and evil… Moreover, who more than they utter the words, “You will be as gods”? In their proud vanity, trying to win others to that same pride, they assert that the soul is by nature that which God is… In general, all heretics deceive by the promise of knowledge and and find fault with those whom they find believing in all simplicity (Augustine, On Genesis, 134–35).
Augustine’s insight is devastatingly relevant. The promise of a secret, hidden meaning behind the plain words of Scripture—the notion that “trees” does not mean trees—is not a sign of deeper spirituality, but the classic mark of the serpent’s own deceptive method.
This gnostic hermeneutic is a direct assault on the Reformed doctrine of the clarity and sufficiency of Scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.6, insists that the whole counsel of God “is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 4:235). The “trees as gods” theory is neither. It is not “expressly set down,” and to call it a “good and necessary consequence” of a phonetic pun would be to mock the very concept of sound reason. It is a flight of fancy, an interpretive atom bomb that obliterates the perspicuity of the text, rendering every noun in Scripture unstable and subject to the esoteric whims of the interpreter.
The Fruit of a Flawed Method
This episode provides a clear and disturbing window into the pastoral dangers of the “Reformed Fringe” project. Their exegesis isn’t happening in a vacuum; it is necessary to support their larger system. This transformation of the Fall narrative is not an end in itself; it is a necessary step in constructing their alternative cosmology. By populating the garden with a pantheon of lesser elohim (the “trees”) and making the tempter one of their number (the “shining one”), they create from the very beginning a world that looks more like the pagan pantheons of the ancient Near East than the world of the biblical authors. This faulty exegesis of Genesis 3 is the narrative foundation upon which their corrupted doctrines of God and Christ are built. When the authority of the church’s confessions is set aside, the interpreter is left with no guardrails. In the end, this entire interpretive project, with all its claims to a deeper, more supernatural insight, is nothing more than a modern echo of the serpent’s original question in the garden. “Did God really say ‘serpent’?” they ask, replacing the clear testimony of Scripture with a speculative “shining one.” “Did God really say ‘trees’?” they wonder, dissolving the created world into a gnostic pantheon. This is the oldest temptation of all: to doubt the clarity of God’s Word, to seek a hidden knowledge beyond what is plainly revealed, and to answer the serpent’s question not with faithful submission, but with a fatal “No.”
Bibliography
Augustine of Hippo. Saint Augustine: On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees; and, on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book. Edited by Thomas Halton. Translated by Roland Teske. Vol. 84. Washintgon, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991.
Calvin, John. Commentary on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis. Translated by John King. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010.
Dennison, James T., Jr., ed. Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation. Vol. 4. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008.
Heiser, Michael S. “The Nachash and His Seed: Some Explanatory Notes on Why the ‘Serpent’ in Genesis 3 Wasn’t a Serpent.” N.p., n.d. https://www.scribd.com/doc/75040213/68024391-3972311-Serpent-Seed-Dr-Michael-S-Heiser.
Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy. Vol. 1. London: Fleming H. Revell.
Hoogendyk, Isaiah. “אֵילִם.” In The Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023.
———. “נחשׁ 1.” In The Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023.
———. “נְחָשׁ.” In The Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023.
———. “נָחָשׁ 1.” In The Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2023.
Van Dorn, Doug, and Jon Moffitt. “Genesis 3: A Dragon in the Trees.” Reformed Fringe, September 8, 2025. Podcast audio. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reformed-fringe/id1673785890?i=1000725501724.