Dying to Know

“but the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” Genesis 3:3  NASB

Die – We need to ask some questions.  They’re not easy questions to ask – and they are even harder to answer.  But without the questions, nothing makes much sense in this story.  So, let’s start with this one.  If Adam and Havvah live in perfect paradise, what does the word mut mean to them?  That’s right.  If they have never experienced death, then what can the prescription of the command possibly mean?  How do they know that death is something bad?  In fact, how do they even know what death is?

Everything in the Garden is living delight.  God put it all there to express Himself and God is the God of life.  Hebrew, of course, isn’t like the director’s cut of a movie.  It is a terse language often expressing deep concepts in a minimum of words and quite often leaving out what doesn’t really matter to the point of the story.  So you won’t find a footnote here explaining the concept of death.  The original audience of the Genesis account had plenty of personal experience with this fact.  But Adam and Havvah didn’t.  All the first human beings knew was this:  God prohibited one act and that one act had consequences.  Even without understanding the full sense of mot, the implications are obvious.  This is not something anyone would want.

We know that Adam must understand the difference between true and false.  He must understand that what God says is right, reliable and true (emunah) and that anything else is false, wrong and unreliable.  If he doesn’t know this much, even the command is nonsense.  Rambam makes this point when he says that prior to eating of the fruit Adam knew what was true and what was false, but only after eating did he know what was good and what was evil because only after eating did good and evil become part of the personal assessment of obligation.  In other words, before he ate, Adam knew God told the truth.  After he ate, Adam knew that he was capable of living a lie.

But death?  What could that mean?  If it is simply a matter of physical existence, then the serpent told the truth.  Neither Adam nor Havvah died – immediately.  But something died in that very instant.  What died was the pure and undefiled relationship with God. What died was transparency.  A fall from grace.  Not entirely, of course, since God reinstitutes relationship through sacrifice.  But the yetzer ha’ra gained a foothold and has been struggling for supremacy ever since.

Adam communicates the commandment to Havvah.  At the end is our word, mut.  What Adam knows, and what Havvah must assume, is that mut is a condition separated from God’s goodness.  It is important to consider that Hebrew often connects mut with departing and not returning.  Adam and Havvah discover this when they are exiled.

In the end, we are left with conjecture.  But this much we are allowed to know.  Mut removes.  It removes life, order and relationship.  Adam can know that being in the presence of the Creator is life, order and relationship.  Being without Him is death.  God’s presence, even if invisible, is essential for life in any of its forms.  That is the point of the Genesis account.  We do not exist on our own.

Havvah didn’t die when she ate the fruit.  Her existence was not snuffed out in an instant.  But she and her man began a journey toward extinction, toward disorder and chaos.  They were pushed on to the path of removal.  It might be important to note that Havvah builds a fence around the command and, at the same time, opens the gate in the fence.  God said, “You will mot tamoot” (“die die” – surely die).  Havvah says, “You will temootoon.”  Not “die, die.”  Just “die” (although the final Nun may have some effect on the meaning).  We could say that God absolutely closes the door with the doubled word, but Havvah leaves it slightly ajar.  Through that small crack comes the serpent suggesting that whatever it was that God said, it isn’t quite what is true.

I wonder if we don’t leave the door just a little bit open too.

Topical Index:  death, mut, Genesis 3:3, die