Hamori adopts a similar position in her recent God’s Monsters. (Both Daniel McClellan and Esther Hamori here are scholars with solid credentials, vulgarising for popular audiences. See Hamori’s profile here and McClellan’s there.)
- https://utsnyc.edu/blog/faculty/esther-j-hamori/
- https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/tr/mcclellan-daniel
David Carr in The Formation of Genesis 1-11 has a great section where he discusses the cultural backgrounds of the Eden narrative, potential intertextual “connections”, and how the story resonates with the narratives focusing on human mortality in Ancient West Asia myths and lore, where mortality distinguishes human beings from divine entities:
etiological roughly means “explaining the origin of a feature of the world”, as an example (for the Eden narrative) human mortality, or why snakes don’t have legs and slither on the ground.
Meanwhile, the narrative does not appear interested in addressing a number of other theoretical questions about what might have been that do not relate to its etiological purpose. For example: Why did the humans not already eat of the tree of immortality? Why didn’t God forbid eating from that tree also? What would have happened if the humans had eaten of the tree of immortality? What would have happened had the humans not eaten of either the tree of immortality or the tree of knowledge? The narrative awkwardness of 3:24 vis- à- vis 3:23 indicates the etiological importance of depicting the human’s permanent exclusion from a chance at immortality, while the narrative’s silence on these other questions demonstrates their relative unimportance for the author of the story.
These considerations can be important as we look back on the story and attempt to determine the reason for God’s forbidding of the tree of knowledge in 2:17a and assess the accuracy of God’s statement in 2:17b that the human would “surely die” if he ate of the forbidden fruit. The human’s eating of the fruit did not lead to immediate death, to be sure, and in that sense the snake’s statement in 3:4– 5 (“you will not surely die”) was correct. But we see in 3:22– 24 that the human’s gaining of godlike knowledge from eating the fruit did lead YHWH to permanently exclude him from the garden and a chance to gain immortality through eating of the tree of life. In that sense, he will now “surely die” in a way that was not (necessarily) the case before eating the fruit.41 Unknowingly given the chance of immortality, the human loses that chance— and indeed loses it in a similarly random way as in Adapa’s unknowing refusal of the food of immortality or Gilgamesh’s loss of the plant of rejuvenation while taking a swim.
Seen in this light, God’s prohibition of eating from the tree of knowledge in 2:17 can be read as a divine provision for keeping the human in the garden, aimed at preserving the human (and soon his wife) in the special, elevated position of tending God’s sacred garden that he gained in 2:15. In this sense, the prohibition of 2:17 is consistent with God’s prior generous provision of other garden fruit (2:16) and God’s subsequent care in providing the human with a corresponding “helper” in the garden work (2:18– 22). All of these acts reflect God’s initial gracious intent for humanity to live with God in the abundant Eden garden. And all of this was lost when humans chose to eat of the forbidden fruit, thereby growing up in gaining a modicum of godlike “knowledge of good and evil,” but losing their privileged position as God’s garden attendants and their chance at godlike immortality.
