NOTE: This article is the starting place for a larger investigation I hope to complete in time. It simply frames the question—which, in light of all the confusion on this topic, seemed worthy of posting, even before the various hypotheses are fleshed out and examined. You will see that I have laid the groundwork for those hypotheses simply by listing the various ways in which Genesis 2:17 might be questioned, challenged, or reconsidered.
When a prediction is made in the Bible and the outcome doesn’t seem to match the prediction, it can send us scurrying to make sense of it all. And so it goes with Genesis 2:16-17, where the record tells us:
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Genesis 1:16-17. NKJV
In short, what happens afterward is that Adam and Eve eat from that tree, and are put out of the Garden and cut off from access to the Tree of Life, and that they eventually die, apparently from old age, as many of us do today:
3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. 4 After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. 5 Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.
Genesis 5:3-5. NIV
And what seems to be the problem here? Well, they didn’t drop dead the day they ate of the forbidden fruit. The impression that such dropping dead was what was predicted is a popular one—as is the impression that this did not come to pass as expected. So some explanation is in order.
The Big Picture Analysis
In the big picture, therefore, it makes sense to question the following:
- As he is depicted in this story, is God reliable?
- Does the Bible tell it right?
- Are our impressions/expectations/interpretations right?
Or in other words: Did it happen right, was it recorded right, and are we reading it right?
Interestingly, many people seem much more apt to ask the first two questions more often than the last one! And this is one of my main motives—other than my personal interest in this subject—for writing this article. That is, I’m very interested in the quality of the mental work we do regarding the Bible.
The Smaller Questions
As I’ve hinted, there are many hypothesis that are held by various people and camps—many ways to explain the apparent disconnect between what was predicted and what happened. And it’s very likely that they can’t all be right.
Rather than to list the actual hypotheses—which I still need to research in order to compile a good list for you—what I have done here is to list the fundamental questions that might lead to those hypotheses. That is, if you’re troubleshooting the prediction/outcome disparity, these are the most natural questions to ask. At present, there are eleven questions on my list—examining the possibilities a little closer than did the list of three big-picture questions above:
- Did this not really happen?
- Is the genre of the account important? For example, is this story meant to be an allegory, or an actual event?
- Is the story meant to surprise the reader?
- Is the meaning of the prediction something we can figure out from reading the outcome?
- Are the tree and the fruit literal, or were they representing something else?
- Is this not translated well?
- Was God mistaken?
- Did God lie?
- Was God just saying it to manipulate Adam and Eve into good behavior?
- Did God change his mind after the fact, and not enforce it as promised?
- Did “day” not mean what we think it does?
- Did “die” not mean what we think it does?
- Did “eat” not mean what we think it does?
That’s it for now.
I may continue simply by attaching below the various hypotheses I find—or better yet, by writing short abstracts of the hypotheses below and linking to various posts where I discuss the individual ideas.
In the mean time, if you just can’t stand waiting and want to write me about it—or if you want to send me links to various hypotheses to put on the list— you can always contact me here.
“Spiritual death”
The following interpretations from various Bible interpreters seem to operate on question #12 above: Did “die” not mean what we think it does? (I have lightened some terms here and there in the exerpts below.)
Thou shalt surely die — The death here threatened is evidently to be considered as opposed to the life (or lives rather, Genesis 2:7) which God had bestowed on him. This was not only the natural life of his body, in its union with his soul, but the spiritual life of his soul, in its union with God, and the eternal life of both. The threatening then implies: Thou shalt not only lose all the happiness thou hast, either in possession or prospect, and become liable to the death of thy body, and all the miseries which precede and accompany it; but thou shalt lose thy spiritual life, and become dead to God and things divine, and shalt even forfeit thy title to immortality, and be liable to death eternal. And all this in the day thou eatest thereof.
Benson Commentary
