Another tree was specifically mentioned & they were not told they couldn't eat of its fruits until after the fall, the tree of life.
They do it at the serpent's temptation (the Genesis text doesn't say that the serpent is Satan, but we identify the serpent with Satan).
It is why I called it Satan's fruit. Satan's fruit is death, as he has been the only one who has been condemned to die.
God then comes and condemns them to death, and to exile from Eden, to pain and suffering and labor.
Do you think Adam, Eve & all of their children die? Tell me why people pray for intercessions again? The fruit didn't bring death in the sense of death on earth, but the death of the lake of fire.
God goes further and condemns not just them, but their offspring forever. It seems to me as though God is the one who metes out the death, not the fruit.
The fruit did it, through corruption of men's minds. If we die, it is because we've brought it upon ourselves.
Yes. I think that the curse of Adam is physical death, not spiritual death. "You are dirt, and to dirt you shall return" - God's words to Adam, refers to physical dissolution. In a similar vein, when God worries about Adam reaching out to the tree of life and living forever, he expels them from Eden and puts the Cherubim with the flaming sword there. (Presumably the Tree of Life drowned in the flood, so there isn't some valley somewhere with a Cherubim and a flaming sword in it, waiting for some hapless Dr. Livingstone to blunder into it.)
When I read this, it seems very much to be talking about physical death.
Likewise the whole list of the ancients, each of their lives is described. Then it says "And then he died."
I don't take "died" to be in a spiritual sense but in a literal physical sense, just as the description of Enoch walking with God and not being here I take literally, and I take Elijah being taken up literally.
Or rather, I should say that I take them literally for the purposes of reading the text.
Pulling back, I know that there isn't any evidence of a world-wide, planet drowning flood. High seas everywhere, yes. Mount Everest under water? No.
Similarly, I know that man probably descended from primates, and that the genetic markers strongly indicate that hominids walked out of Africa a million years ago, and dispersed and differentiated. To the extent there was a Garden of Eden where man originated, it may not have been by the Tigris and Euphrates at all, but somewhere near Lake Victoria and Mt. Kilamanjaro.
I know that creatures have been dying on this planet for a billion years and more, and that man didn't cause that.
So, what am I to actually make of Genesis?
It's too late to go into it tonight. Perhaps tomorrow. I think it is the story of Everyman and Everywoman, and describes each and every one of ours naked birth rise in innocence to adolescence, and Fall, when that knowledge of good and evil blossoms in us with that temptation to sin, that overwhelming temptation, which none resists.
I don't think physical death is a punishment for anything, but a change of state from the circles of this world to the unadumbrated soul which goes back to God.
And I don't expect anybody to share this view, so I don't think I need to elaborate on it even tomorrow.
Good night.