What If They Live Forever? (Gen 3:22)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²³ … and take some fruit from the Tree of Life too … וְלָקַח֙ גַּ֚ם מֵעֵ֣ץ הַֽחַיִּ֔ים

When the woman decided (in Gen 3:6) to eat some of the fruit from the Tree of Sorting, she just “took” it (וַתִּקַּ֥ח va-tiqqaḥ, the same verb as in our verse). We noticed last time that what YHWH is afraid of now is not merely that the humans will take some more fruit, but that they will “reach out” to do so. The Hebrew idiom of “sending the hand,” if it means anything at all, refers to independent action. We also saw the word פן־ pen- ‘lest’, indicating that YHWH is afraid of the independent action the humans might take next.

Long-time readers know, and new readers may have realized from the previous post, that I think there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from the littlest words in the Bible. So before we go on with the exciting plot of our story, we are going to spend some quality time with today’s little word, גם gam.

I’ve translated it here as too, and in Modern Hebrew it almost always means too or also. (Repeating it — gam X gam Y — is the way, modern as well as biblical, to say both X and Y.) Too is not a good automatic translation of גם in the Bible, so I had to give some thought here to using another meaning of it, which my instinct tells me is even more common: even: “and even take some of its fruit.”

You see from the emphasis I had to put on its in that translation that what YHWH is afraid of is that the humans will be (from his perspective) piling on: eating not from just one tree he didn’t want them to sample, but from two. So the “also-ness” of גם seems to be what matters here. It’s not that eating from the Tree of Life is worse than eating from the Tree of Sorting.

In fact, God did not even bother to tell the humans not to eat from the Tree of Life. So it may be time for a quick dendrological refresher. The trees in our story are deployed in a way that’s quite confusing. As I’ve mentioned previously, Jack Sasson thinks even the human characters are confused:

The primordial man and woman may believe they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, but they actually ate from the Life-Giving Tree.

Rather than sinning (as in many traditional interpretations) they did not even do what they had been told not to do.