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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.

Thank-you for your thoughtful reply. I have seen one suggested translation, by the way, that replaces "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" with "if you eat of its fruit, you will be doomed to die" (emphasis added). I tend to think that this translation, while a valiant effort to reconcile the conflict between the threat of death and the subsequent long life of Adam, is impermissibly loose.

It is a difficult passage, but it seems to me consistent with the otherwise curious and anomalous juxtapositions found in Genesis 1-3. For example:

-- the patent metaphoric phenomena (e.g., "trees" that stand in for the conceptual rudiments of life and the knowledge of good and evil, temptation anthropomorphized as a serpent) are contrasted for apparently deliberate effect against mundane natural phenomena (herbs, rivers, deltas, birds, etc.);

-- woman is described as being created from a rib, a piece of the structural cage surrounding the heart of man, and this description is followed immediately by a description of marriage as the leaving of father and mother and the cleaving to wife (what father and mother?);

-- the lack of death prior to the threat in 2:17, and the consequent inexplicability of God threatening death to someone who would otherwise have no concept of it;

-- the very civilized references to gold, bdellium, onyx, and lapis lazuli in the garden, elemental basics of currency and ornamentation for which Adam would have no use or knowledge.

The passage is also of a piece with the notion that "Adam" is a representative whole in Genesis 1-3, and not a discrete individual. Although I have seen efforts to parse and distinguish the generic use of adam as the Hebrew common noun for man from a more specific use of Adam as a singular individual in these early chapters, they are, for me, rather unpersuasive.

I therefore view the passage as of a piece with the metaphoric whole of the Genesis creation account. In simplistic terms, the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor for the development of sentience in man, for the appearance of the capacity to exercise free will. And Elsie, I do not view it as merely an act of generic disobedience, since this capacity to choose wrong is substantively broader than ordinary sins of omission and commission -- it is an earmark of human capacity, an ability to, by deliberation, distinguish between right and wrong and choose to perceive wrong as right.

The ultimate metaphoric suggestion seems to be that, when we choose evil, fellowship with God is broken resulting in spiritual death. And this metaphoric interpretation certainly appears consistent with the recitation of the long and productive life of the discrete individual, Adam, which commences as a distinct demarcation in Genesis 4.

The death referenced in 2:17, then, suggests an estrangement from God borne of the capcity to perceive good and evil, not a physical or biological death (immediate or delayed).

This is also entirely consistent with the later appearance of Christ as the sacrificial path back to fellowship with God. In short, as Paul stated in Ephesians: "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; . . . Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ (by grace ye are saved).”