Bible Synapse
Did Adam die on the day he ate the forbidden fruit, as God had warned?
Hard question · Creation, the flood and the patriarchs · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
God warns: “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”.
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Adam lived 930 years in all, “and he died”.
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
The objection
God told Adam that “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, yet he did not die that day. Genesis 5:5 says he lived to the age of 930. Critics ask how the warning came true.
The answer
The Hebrew phrase in Genesis 2:17 marks the day when the death sentence takes hold, not the day it must be carried out. The words are beyom … mot tamut, ‘in the day … dying you shall die’, a doubled verb that stresses certainty: “thou shalt surely die”. The same words are used in 1 Kings 2:37, where Solomon warns Shimei: “on the day thou goest out, and passest over the brook Kidron, thou shalt know for certain that thou shalt surely die”. Three years later Shimei left Jerusalem for Gath, found his runaway servants and came home again; only then did the king send for him and have him put to death (2:39–46). The sentence was not carried out on the day he left, yet Solomon’s words came true: from that day Shimei’s life was forfeit.
So it was with Adam. On the day he ate, the sentence fell: “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Then he was shut out of the garden, so that he could not “take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (3:22–24); from then on he was a dying man. And death in its deepest sense, being cut off from God, began at once: he hid from God’s presence (3:8) and was driven out. The New Testament speaks of sinners as “dead in trespasses and sins” while still alive (Ephesians 2:1), and traces death to that one act: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Romans 5:12). Genesis 5:5 records the end of the death that began in 2:17.
Other answers Christians give
Spiritual death
Many Christians, as in the answer to Shabir Ally on bible.ca, take the death of 2:17 to be chiefly spiritual death, separation from God, which came that very day, while 5:5 records the physical death that followed.
‘Dying you shall die’
The KJV’s margin renders the Hebrew ‘dying thou shalt die’, and some, like Gill, take it to mean that the process of dying began that day: Adam became mortal, and death began to work in him.
A thousand-year day
Some early Christians, as Irenaeus reports, noted that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years” (2 Peter 3:8) and that Adam died within his thousandth year. Irenaeus offered this beside other answers, and few rely on it today.
Still open
Hebrew scholars agree that the doubled verb mot tamut stresses certainty; whether it also suggests a process (‘dying you shall die’) is debated. Christians differ on how far the death threatened was physical, spiritual or both, but most hold that both are in view.
From the classic commentators
he was immediately arraigned, tried, and condemned to death, was found guilty of it, and became obnoxious to it, and death at once began to work in himJohn Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Genesis 2:17 (1746–1763)
Whether, therefore, with respect to disobedience, which is death; whether [we consider] that, on account of that, they were delivered over to death, and made debtors to it … it follows that, in regard to all these significations, God is indeed true.Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, chapter 23 (about 180)
Sources
- John Gill, Exposition of the Bible: Genesis 2 (1746–1763), at Bible Hub
- Eric Lyons, ‘Why Didn’t Adam Die Immediately?’ (Apologetics Press)
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, chapter 23, at New Advent