Genesis 2:16-17 states:
"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
What is the correct interpretation of the word "die" (or the reference to death) in that passage? My parenthetical examples in the original question are just some of the interpretations that have been proffered over time.
And this was the second question in my original post. The first one was -- what is the correct interpretation of the correlation between man's acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil and the consequence of death (whatever that "death" may be).
Genesis 2:16-17 states:
"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
What is the correct interpretation of the word "die" (or the reference to death) in that passage? My parenthetical examples in the original question are just some of the interpretations that have been proffered over time.
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Okay, now I get it...
This one puzzled me for a while, and then it dawned on me what the scriptures were saying.
[**My Personal Opinion here] Let me re-phrase this way, the day you eat of it you will be subject to physical death... Read the passage carefully, it does not say that the day you eat of the fruit, you will die that day. Previously in Genesis it appeared that Adam an Eve would live forever in fellowship with God in the Garden. Upon sinning creation itself changed its physical form as we see by the snake have bodily changed so that it would now crawl on its belly and eat of the dust of the earth. We see that humans changed too, women would now be subject to pain in childbirth and the man would have to toil to feed himself. And emotionally people changed, the woman and her seed would have "enmity" with the serpent.
It's likely a weakness in the differences between English and Hebrew. Not necessarily a translation problem. For example, there are some languages that don't have words that are even related to other languages. Some languages have subtle variations and nuances of the same word. So in some languages it takes several words to describe a single word in the other language.
There are also cultural issues that may be unwritten, i.e. "understood" by the writer and never actually written because it would be silly to them to do so.
And yes, I have verified at least the language related issues with my wife who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in cross-cultural communications.