Endnote 4 – Of Time and Immortality

The Revised Standard Version’s (RSV’s) translation of our passage, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil …,” implies that Lord God is reacting to a new set of circumstances in which humans have come to know good and bad. But the verbal form in this phrase is past, not present as in the RSV, and Lord God’s apprehension does not come until the second portion of his statement, “what if he should now stretch out his hand?” The syntax of Genesis 3:22, therefore, locates Lord God’s alarm not in the pair having attained knowledge (they displayed it before they ate from the fruit), but in their potential continuing access to the Tree of Life.