GENESIS 2:17

Q: I’ve heard several interpretations of the death “declared” by God following their disobedience. What is the correct understanding? Some maintain that it was spiritual death – spiritual death. The actual translation (I think) is: “The day you eat of it, in dying you shall surely die."

An alternative understanding says that "muwth," the Hebrew term meaning physical death, appears twice in the sentence. In other words, his death would be permanent. This excludes the possibility that God was speaking of "spiritual death," which is the understanding of most because he did not physically die the day he ate of the tree.

First, to clear up a few points:

1. The word for death does not appear twice in this passage, but instead a particular form of the verb “to die” is employed. The grammatical construction is technically called “the absolute infinitive followed by the imperfect form of the finite verb form.” This does have the same implication of certainty that you mention above: “you shall surely die,” but apparently (according to my sources) says nothing about the permanence of death one way or the other.

2. The word yom for day has three possible meanings depending on the context: daylight vs. night, an unspecified time period, or a 24-hour day.

3. The word for death can mean either physical death of the body or spiritual death (separation from God).

Let's deal with each of these three points in more detail:

1. The exact same Hebrew expression “in the day...you shall die” appears two other times in the OT. The first is when Pharaoh warns Moses never to appear in his presence again (Exodus 10:28), and the second is when Shimei is warned not to cross the river if he wants to keep living (I Kings 2:37,42). In the contexts of these two passages, the phrase above makes more sense in referring to the inevitability of the deaths, not their actual time frame. In other words, it is a Hebrew idiom expressing the certainty of death if certain conditions are not met.

2. Looking at the near context of the word yom reveals that the identical phrase “in the day” appears in both Genesis 2:4 and 5:1-2. The first passage mentions the “day” in which God created everything (at least 7 days long even for a fundamentalist), and the second one talks about the “day” when God created mankind, both male and female. But according to Gen. 2, quite a few events transpired between the time that Adam was created and the time when Eve was made. So the most likely usage of yom in 2:17 is as an unspecified time period.

The most telling factor, of course, is that Adam and Eve did not physically die in that same 24-hour day. There have been several attempts to stick to a 24-hour understanding and still translate “die” in the physical sense without making God into a liar. One proposal offered by a number of mainly Calvinist scholars is that God in his mercy relented and delayed their physical death until a later time. A rabbinical explanation was also offered early on: Adam lived to almost 1,000 years old, but with God a thousand years are as a single day.

The following phrases demonstrate how a variety of Bible scholars interpret the inevitability of physical death expressed in this passage: “you are doomed to die eventually,” “you will become mortal rather than immortal,” “a death sentence is announced by divine decree whether it is ultimately carried out or not,” and “man entered into a state in which bodily death was now inevitable.”

3. Regarding the full definition of death in this passage, every source I have looked at considers that both physical and spiritual death are in mind. The clearest demonstration of this fact is seen in the aftermath of Adam and Eve's sin: they are excluded from Eden and the very presence of God (spiritual death), and from the tree of life so that they will return to the dust they came from (physical death).

This does bring up the somewhat controversial subject: Did Adam and Eve possess immortality in the first place? There was no prohibition in Genesis 2:16-17 against them eating from the Tree of Life in the garden. Genesis 3:22-24 seems to imply that they had not yet eaten of it, but the Hebrew in those verses can also be translated to say, “he might reach out his hand and continue to eat from the tree of life and live forever.”

 According to this understanding, mankind only possessed immortality as long as it had access to the tree, as we will eventually, according to Revelation 20-21. I Timothy 6:16 states that only God has immortality, but that statement reflects the current situation only, not any possible immortality that mankind had at one time in the Garden. “The Scriptures do not teach the continued existence of the soul by virtue of its inherent indestructibility...Since, according to the Scriptures, man has been created by God and continues to be dependent on God for his existence, we cannot point to any inherent quality in man or to any aspect of man which makes him indestructible.” (Hoekema, The Bible and the Future)

In short, the jury is still out on that subject.