offspring: the descendants a person leaves behind, held together as one ongoing line rather than counted as separate children.
The word travels one connected road. It starts with the grain a farmer scatters, reaches the sowing itself, then the male seed of conception, and arrives at the children who come from it. Calling descendants "seed" was not a Hebrew invention: the neighbouring languages of the ancient world did the same, because the shared picture of reproduction was of a man planting seed in a field the woman supplied. That picture is why the word clings so tightly to a father's line, and why in only three places does the Bible speak of a woman's own offspring as her seed.
The grammar carries a lot of weight here. The word stays singular even when it means a whole nation, because it names the line and not the number of people in it. Hebrew already had an ordinary word for a son or a child (בֵּן) and a word for a generation as a stretch of time (דּוֹר); this word does what neither of those does, gathering a whole descending line into one thing. So "your seed" can mean a single heir or millions of people, and the text usually does not stop to say which.
This is the load-bearing word of God's promises. Land, blessing, and throne are pledged not only to a man but to his offspring after him, so the covenant travels down the generations on this one noun. When the New Testament quotes those promises it uses the Greek word for seed (σπέρμα), which is singular in the same way, and Paul builds a famous argument on that singular in Galatians 3:16.
The word also narrows over time. In Genesis it is expansive and outward-looking, promising a line as countless as the stars. By the time of Ezra it has hardened into a boundary marker: the "holy seed" that must not mix with the surrounding peoples, deliberately echoing the farming rule against sowing a field with two kinds of seed. Reading the late, guarded use back into the early, open promises is the most common way this word gets misread.
Nuances
What kind of category the "holy seed" of Ezra 9:2 is, and therefore why marriage with outsiders counts as defiling it.
- majorityA holiness transmitted by descent, on the pattern of priestly holiness extended to all Israel, so that marriage outside it is a sacrilege rather than a matter of ritual impurity.; Christine E. Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford, 2002)
- minorityPurity vocabulary used as an instrument for redrawing the boundaries of the post-exilic community rather than as a claim about inherited holiness.; Saul M. Olyan, "Purity Ideology in Ezra-Nehemiah as a Tool to Reconstitute the Community," Journal for the Study of Judaism 35 (2004)
- minorityAn ethnic category, with Ezra patterning the removal of the foreign women on the conquest traditions.; Sara Japhet, "The Expulsion of the Foreign Women (Ezra 9-10): The Legal Basis, Precedents, and Consequences for the Definition of Jewish Identity"
Whether the offspring of the woman in Genesis 3:15 is a group (the human line, or godly humanity, set against the line of the serpent) or a single individual deliverer. The noun is grammatically singular but regularly collective, so the reading turns on the agreement of the pronouns and verbs, on the shape of Genesis as a whole, and on the weight given to later interpretation.
- majorityA collective: the woman's offspring as a class in ongoing hostility with the serpent's, with no individual deliverer in view in the plain sense of the passage.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (Continental Commentary; Augsburg, 1984), 259-261; James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Fortress, 1992), 140 n.28
- minorityAn individual: the singular agreement matches the pattern the word shows when it denotes one descendant, and read against Genesis as a whole it points to a single royal deliverer.; C. John Collins, "A Syntactical Note (Genesis 3:15): Is the Woman's Seed Singular or Plural?" Tyndale Bulletin 48.1 (1997): 139-148; T. Desmond Alexander, "Genealogies, Seed and the Compositional Unity of Genesis," Tyndale Bulletin 44.2 (1993)