Genesis 3:22

And the Lord God said,.... The Word of the Lord God, as the Jerusalem Targum; not to the ministering angels, as the Targum of Jonathan but within himself, or to the other two divine Persons: behold,

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Behold, the man is become as one of us.

The Lord God said, either within himself, or to the other persons of the Godhead, Adam and Eve both are become such according to the devil’ s promise, and their own expectation. This is a holy irony, or sarcasm, like those, : q.d. Behold! O all ye angels, and all the future generations of men, how the first man hath overreached and conquered us, and got the Divinity which he affected; and how happy he hath made himself by his rebellion! But this bitter scorn God uttereth not to insult over man’ s misery, but to convince him of his sin, folly, danger, and calamity, and to oblige him both to a diligent seeking after, and a greedy embracing the remedy of the promised Seed which God offered him, and to a greater watchfulness over himself, and respect to all God’ s commands for the time to come. As one of us, i.e. as one of the Divine persons, of infinite wisdom and capacity. Here is an evident proof of a plurality of persons in the Godhead; compare , and . If it be said, God speaks this of himself and the angels; besides that as yet not one word hath been spoken concerning the angels, it is an absurd and unreasonable conceit that the great God should level himself with the angels, and give them a kind of equality with himself, as this expression intimates. To know all things, both good and evil. Lest he put forth his hand: the speech is defective, and to be supplied thus, or some such way. But now care must be taken, or man must be banished hence, lest he take also of the tree of life, as he did take of the tree of knowledge, and thereby profane that sacrament of eternal life, and fondly persuade himself that he shall live for ever. This is another scoff or irony, whereby God upbraideth man’ s presumption, and those vain hopes wherewith he did still feed himself.

Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:Ver. 22. The man is become as one of us.] A holy irrision of man’ s vain affectation of the Deity. Quod Deus loquitur cum risu, tu legas cum fletu. Howbeit St Augustine is of opinion that God speaks thus, not by way of insulting over Adam, but deterring others from such proud attempts. Discite iustitiam moniti, &c. And take also of the tree of life.] And so think to elude the sentence of death pronounced upon him by God; which yet he could not have done, had he eaten up tree and all. He should but have added to his sin and judgment by abuse of this sacrament; which would have sealed up life unto him, had he held his integrity. Multi etiam hodie propter arborem scientiae amittunt arborem vitae: In terris manducant quod apud inferos digerunt. Aug. De Gen. ad Literam, lib. xi., cap. 39. Aug.

(22) As one of us.—See Note on Genesis 1:26. By the fall man had sunk morally, but grown mentally. He had asserted his independence, had exercised the right of choosing for himself, and had attained to a knowledge without which his endowment of free-will would have remained in abeyance. There is something painful and humiliating in the idea of Chrysostom and other Fathers that the Deity was speaking ironically, or even with insult (Augustine). All those qualities which constitute man’s likeness to God—free-will, self-dependence, the exercise of reason and of choice—had been developed by the fall, and Adam was now a very different being from what he had been in the days of his simple innocency. Lest he put forth his hand.—Adam had exercised the power of marring God’s work, and if an unending physical life were added to the gift of freewill now in revolt against God, his condition and that of mankind would become most miserable. Man is still to attain to immortality, but it must now be through struggle, sorrow, penitence, faith, and death. Hence a paradise is no fit home for him. The Divine mercy, therefore, commands Adam to quit it, in order that he may live under conditions better suited for his moral and spiritual good.

Verse 22. Behold, the man is become as one of us] On all hands this text is allowed to be difficult, and the difficulty is increased by our translation, which is opposed to the original Hebrew and the most authentic versions. The Hebrew has היה hayah, which is the third person preterite tense, and signifies was, not is. The Samaritan text, the Samaritan version, the Syriac, and the Septuagint, have the same tense. These lead us to a very different sense, and indicate that there is an ellipsis of some words which must be supplied in order to make the sense complete. A very learned man has ventured the following paraphrase, which should not be lightly regarded: "And the Lord God said, The man who WAS like one of us in purity and wisdom, is now fallen and robbed of his excellence; he has added לדעת ladaath, to the knowledge of the good, by his transgression the knowledge of the evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever in this miserable state, I will remove him, and guard the place lest he should re-enter. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden," c. This seems to be the most natural sense of the place. Some suppose that his removal from the tree of life was in mercy, to prevent a second temptation. He before imagined that he could gain an increase of wisdom by eating of the tree of knowledge, and Satan would be disposed to tempt him to endeavour to elude the sentence of death, by eating of the tree of life. Others imagine that the words are spoken ironically, and that the Most High intended by a cutting taunt, to upbraid the poor culprit for his offence, because he broke the Divine command in the expectation of being like God to know good from evil and now that he had lost all the good that God had designed for him, and got nothing but evil in its place, therefore God taunts him for the total miscarriage of his project. But God is ever consistent with himself; and surely his infinite pity prohibited the use of either sarcasm or irony, in speaking of so dreadful a catastrophe, that was in the end to occasion the agony and bloody sweat, the cross and passion, the death and burial, of Him in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, Colossians 2:9. In Genesis 1:26-27, we have seen man in the perfection of his nature, the dignity of his office, and the plenitude of his happiness. Here we find the same creature, but stripped of his glories and happiness, so that the word man no longer conveys the same ideas it did before. Man and intellectual excellence were before so intimately connected as to appear inseparable; man and misery are now equally so.

22–24. The Expulsion from the Garden 22. as one of us] It is not stated to whom Jehovah addresses these words. Two explanations are possible. Either (1) He speaks to the Heavenly Beings by whom the throne of God was believed to be surrounded. See notes on Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 3:5, Genesis 6:1, Genesis 11:7. “As one of us” will then mean, not “like unto Jehovah personally,” but “like to the dwellers in Heaven,” who are in the possession of “the knowledge of the distinction between good and evil.” Or (2) the words are used in the language of deliberation, and represent the Lord moved, as it were, by apprehension or displeasure, because the eating of the Tree of Knowledge had conferred upon man an attribute to which he was not entitled. According to either line of explanation, the sentence is one which is most easily understood as one of the few survivals of the earlier myth form of narrative. The Targum of Onkelos, to avoid the phrase “as one of us,” renders “is become one from himself.” and now, lest, &c.] Man must be prevented from eating of the Tree of Life, and so obtaining another prerogative of Divinity, that of immortality. Man is created mortal. Immortality, obtained by disobedience and lived in sin, is not according to Jehovah’s will. The verse contains a survival of the naïve trait in the primitive story, which represented Jehovah as jealous of the possible encroachment by man upon the prerogatives of Divinity. The serpent had referred to this (Genesis 3:5); and it appears again in Genesis 11:5.

- XVII. The Execution 24. כרוּב kerûb ברך in Aramaic: “carve, plow”; Persian: “grip, grasp.” This word occurs about eighty-seven times in the Hebrew scriptures; in sixty of which it refers to carved

22. As one of us, to know good and evil — The plural form of expression is the so-called plural of majesty, as in Genesis 1:26. Some, however, imagine that the angels are here addressed.