As further proof of Peterson’s shallow scholarship in this area, I had a quick look at his claim that the line from Genesis 4:7 (“sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you”) refers to a “sexually alluring cat”. I first heard Peterson argue this on his second podcast with Sam Harris, and it appears in his online biblical lecture on Cain and Abel as well. It’s a pretty silly idea. His only explicit justification for it is that he consulted various translations. It seems to me that he loosely derives it from the reading of Genesis 4:7 which sees in it an allusion to the “crouching demons” of Mesopotamian myth (rabisu). But as Condren* points out in a summary of the academic debates over this line, such an interpretation is inconsistent with the style, imagery and grammar of the text. Condren’s broader point is that what is translated as a “desire” to compete with or dominate, in both Genesis 4:7 and earlier in 3:16 (“Your desire will be for your husband”) is a late interpretative development that seems to be influenced by the notion of a “battle between the sexes”; whereas previously the relevant wording had been interpreted as “return” (i.e. in 3:16, a return to male-female intimacy). So as with his interpretation of Enuma Elish, Peterson is here guided more by his adversarial understanding of the relationship between the masculine and feminine than by a serious grasp of the underlying scholarship.

* TOWARD A PURGE OF THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES AND “RETURN” FOR THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF GENESIS 3:16B Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society; Lynchburg Vol. 60, Iss. 2, (Jun 2017)