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Genesis 2:15-17
● Gen 2:15-17 . .The Lord God took the man and placed him in the
garden of Eden, to till it and tend it. And the Lord God commanded
the man, saying: Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but
as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it;
for in the day you eat of it, you shall die.
That passage is a favorite of the Bible's critics because Adam didn't drop
dead the instant he tasted the forbidden fruit. In point of fact, he continued
to live outside the garden of Eden for another 800 years after the birth of his
son Seth. (Gen 5:4)
So; is there a reasonable explanation for this apparent discrepancy?
Well; first thing to point out is that in order for the threat to resonate in
Adam's thinking; it had to be related to death as Adam understood death in
his day, rather than death as modern Bible thumpers understand it in their
day. In other words: Adam didn't expect to die spiritually. No, he expected
to die normally; viz: physically; like as in pass away.
How can I be so sure that God meant normal death instead of spiritual
death? Because according to Gen 3:19 that's how it worked out; and to
make sure Adam stayed normally dead, God blocked his access to the tree
of life. (Gen 3:22-24)
Anyway; the trick is: Adam wasn't told he would die the instant he tasted
the fruit. God's exact words were "in the day"
According to Gen 2:4, the Hebrew word for "day" is a bit ambiguous. It can
easily indicate a period of time much, much longer than 24 hours; viz: the
day of everybody's death began the moment Adam ate the fruit.
"Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this
way death came to all men." (Rom 5:12)
Well; like Jack Palance's character Curly in the movie City Slickers said: The
day ain't over yet.
"It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of gaiety, for
death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this seriously." (Ecc
7:2)
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In Genesis 2:17 it tells us that God warned Adam that if he ate the fruit from the Tree of knowing God and evil that he would "die the second death." The transliterated is "mont taamunt" where mont and taamunt are both derived from the same Hebrew Root word H:4171. God was warning Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the Tree of knowledge that he would become a candidate for the consequences of the second death in the distant future.
Sadly "mont" which has the meaning of "die" in this instance but is wrongly translated in English as "surely" and "taamunt" which has the meaning of "the second death" is also wrongly translated as just "die."
In Revelation 20:14 both the bottomless pit, i.e. the deep from Genesis 1:2 and the second death is cast into the Lake of fire so that they will no longer existed in eternity.
A very different understanding to the one that you provided.