fantôme profane;1823372 said:
So you have assumed, or perhaps you belong to some kind of tradition that tells you this. But there is not one word in the text itself that indicates that they ever ate of the tree of life.
"YHWH, God, commanded concerning the human, saying: From every (other) tree of the garden you may eat, yes eat, but from the Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil - you are not to eat from it, for on the day that you eat from it, you must die, yes, die." (Gen 2:16-17 Everett Fox translation) This is an indication that ALL the rest of the fruits, which doesn't explicitly exclude the fruit of the tree of life and therefore including said fruit, may be eaten.
Of course there's nothing to indicate whether or not they actually ate from the fruit; we're not given any sort of time transition between the creation and the fall. Could have been several centuries, may have been a few minutes; we don't know, and it doesn't matter to the story.
And, by the way, no I didn't grow up in a tradition that says so; I grew up in a household that didn't talk AT ALL about the Bible or religion, save for what Christmas was all about, since we celebrated it, and even then I didn't know exactly who Jesus was until I was a teenager.
Here's where I got it from:
2:17. in the day you eat from it: you'll die! On first reading, most readers take this to mean that one's death will occur in the very day that one eats from the tree. In the absence of punctuation in the Hebrew text, however, one cannot be certain. Before eating from the tree of knowledge, humans have access to the tree of life and therefore can live forever. This verse may mean that in the day that humans eat from the tree of knowledge they become mortal, in the sense of: "If you stay away from it, you'll life; in the day you eat from it, you'll die." This general meaning of the expression "in the day you do you'll die" occurs elsewhere (1 Kings 2:37, 42); and this is what in fact occurs in the story here.
Alternatively, if it does in fact mean that their death will occur in the very day that they eat from the tree, then we must understand what subsequently occurs to be a divine act of mercy or relenting: they do not die immediately but are rendered mortal.
-Richard Elliot Friedman Commentary on the Torah
In these ancient myths, you must MUST look beyond the words in order to figure out what's going on.
