Step Two: What Are You Assuming?

Before we solve the problem, we need to name it precisely. And naming it precisely requires you to identify what you were assuming before you came to this chapter.

Most of us read Genesis 2:17 with an assumption already in place. We brought it to the text. We did not find it in the text. The assumption is this: "die" means biological death. It means the heart stops. The body ceases to function. The person is physically gone.

That assumption is so embedded in how we read that most of us did not notice we were making it. It felt like reading the text. It was not. It was reading the text through a definition we imported before we started.

And once you import that definition, the text breaks. Adam was supposed to die the day he ate. He did not die the day he ate. Either the text is wrong, or God was bluffing, or something else is going on. Most of the theological machinery built to "explain" Genesis 2:17 is actually machinery built to defend the imported assumption against the friction it creates. The assumption stays. The text gets bent to accommodate it.

This is the question: where did that assumption come from?

Not from your personal reflection. Almost certainly not from your own close reading of the text. From the tradition you inherited. From the preacher who taught you. From the Sunday school lesson that said Adam and Eve brought death into the world, and the picture in your head was a funeral. From a theological culture that has been reading "die" in Genesis 2:17 as biological cessation for so long that the reading has become invisible.

The assumption is not yours. You inherited it. You can set it down and examine it. That is what this step is asking you to do.