Wednesday, June 11, 2025

James Chukwuma Okoye on Genesis 3:22

  

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)

 

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