When would Adam die if he ate the forbidden fruit?
Posted on Jan.18, 2009. Filed in Genesis. Average rating: 4.6 / 10 (Rate It).
According to Genesis 2, God placed man in the Garden of Eden with one instruction: ‘Don’t eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil!’ God appears to have made a mistake, however, concerning what the consequences of disobedience would be.
The consequence of eating the fruit, God told Adam, would be death within that day:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree in the garden; 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 die.’ [Genesis 2:16-17 (NRSV)]
Adam, of course, did eat the forbidden fruit, but he didn’t die within the day. On the contrary, having eaten the fruit, Adam was driven out of Eden by God to till the ground from which he came, had children, and lived to the age of 930.
Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died. [Genesis 5:5 (NRSV)]
So was God wrong when he said that Adam would die on the day that he ate the fruit?
N.B. All posts are written in a style sympathetic to the claim of Biblical error, even in cases where the author ("Errancy") disagrees with the claim. See the About page for the site's philosophy.
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Inerrantist Responses
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January 18th, 2009 on 10:38 am
The key word in 2 Peter 3:8 is “like”; this verse doesn’t tell us that a thousand years to humanity is a day to the Lord, but that a thousand years to humanity is like a day to the Lord. It’s all about perspective, saying not that time actually passes differently for us and for God, but that it seems to pass differently, that we and God see time differently.
This doesn’t support the idea that to God Adam died on the same day that he ate the forbidden fruit. At most, it supports the idea that to God it was like Adam died that day. That isn’t enough for us to say that God’s warning was true.
January 19th, 2009 on 7:22 pm
I think this is a poor argument. The interpretation I favor is that Adam died spiritually.
But the primary reason I think this argument isn’t due to the strength of any reconciliation, but because the possibility of a mistake doesn’t make any sense. Matthew contradicting Luke makes sense. J contradicting P makes sense. J contradicting J doesn’t. Even if Genesis is a work of man, this isn’t the kind of human error to be expected.
The observation of how wrong a literal interpretation can be is a relevant observation, but this alone does not counter inerrancy.
January 20th, 2009 on 1:13 am
The concern that I have with the metaphorical (i.e. spiritual) interpretation of “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” is that I don’t see any indication in the text that this is intended metaphorically. It looks like a pretty straightforward statement of fact.
Your point that we should be less ready to say that a single author contradicts himself than we are to say that two different authors contradict each other is a fair one, though. That does make me more ready to apply the principle of charity to the text.
March 1st, 2009 on 10:46 pm
Reading the Old Testament through New Testament eyes, the idea that Adam suffered spiritual death the day that he ate the forbidden fruit seems to be the best interpretation of the passage.
But it is also worth noting that the word “die” here is in a continuous, rather than a perfect tense. One way to interpret this is that the death being predicted is a process, not a completed event. As such, one might view the passage as predicting that the process of Adam’s death will begin when he eats the fruit, not that that process will come to completion when he eats the fruit. This ties in with the second inerrantist response above.
September 7th, 2010 on 8:32 pm
It really doesn’t matter when Adam was supposed to die, since an important point is being missed. According to Genesis, Adam was NOT expelled from the garden as punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge. He was expelled to be prevented from eating from the tree of life and living forever (3:22-23), making the time of his death of no consequence since it wasn’t his “sin” which condemned him to death after all; if he could have eaten from the tree of life, he wouldn’t have died.
October 12th, 2010 on 11:06 am
“Adam was NOT expelled from the garden as punishment…He was expelled to be prevented from eating from the tree of life…it wasn’t his “sin” which condemned him to death after all; if he could have eaten from the tree of life, he wouldn’t have died”
If A causes B, B causes C, and C causes D, then A causes D right?
Adam’s sin caused his expulsion. His expulsion caused him to stop eating from the tree of life (because he lost access). His not eating from the tree of life anymore caused him to die.
December 31st, 2011 on 6:35 am
An alternative is that biologically death took a while to kick in, in the way that God’s setting the max age at 120 (Gen.6:3) took a while to kick in as demonstrated in the genealogy of Gen.11:10-24. However the ages in Genesis 5 do look stable.I’m still going with the traditional view of death in the spiritual sense as in Ephesians 2:1 (compare Revelation 20 which distinguishes first versus second death).