Behold the man has become like
one of us [lā-da’at
ṭōb wa-ra’], knowing
good and bad. The LORD God is speaking to the divine council, originally the
pantheon, but in Israel beings in YHWH’s realm who serve him and carry out his
purposes. They resemble the LORD God in being; they share in the knowledge of
good and bad. Is the LORD God speaking in jest, seeing that when the couple’s
eyes were opened they saw they were naked? So, was the snake correct in
asserting that God knows the fruit will make them like gods, knowing good and
evil? Didymus rejects the notion that the LORD God spoke in jest, for mocking someone’s
mistake is improper for a virtuous person. Mimmenu is not to be read “like
one of us,” but “like one from us,” the one that fell away from the heavenly
beings (cf. Ps 82:6-7). R. Akiba renders mimmenu not as first-person
plural, but as third-person masculine singular, “one of himself,” that is, one who
knows good and evil by himself and thereby has himself chosen the path of
death. The step the LORD God took suggests that the man has grasped at a divine
quality, so must be prevented from eating of the tree of life and living
forever, another divine quality. But the tree of life was not forbidden; in the
garden the man could eat of it, but after his transgression he may not? YHWH is
“alarmed that humanity might attain immortality by eating from the tree of
life.” The LORD God expelled the man from the garden to work the ground from
which he was taken. The original placement in the garden was an act of
beneficence. Israel could have read this story as a parable of the settlement
in, and exile from, the promised land. (James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 1-11:
A Narrative-Theological Commentary [2d ed.; Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books,
2025], 81-82)