Genesis 2:16
"The command of himself is eternal zoe-life"
And He is mighty ones is commanding concerning the Man, to speak: "From every tree of the Protected-Garden, he ate, she is eating,And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, You may freely eat of every tree in the garden;
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
And the Lord God gave a charge to Adam, saying, Of every tree which is in the garden thou mayest freely eat,
Footnotes
| 85b | The phrase וצוה על (ve-tzivah al) in Hebrew translates to "and he commanded concerning" or "and he commanded on". The preposition על "on" as used with the verb "to command" is rare because it gives the sense of "on account of" or "concerning". Scholars applied the expression "laying charge upon" to these phrases and thus left out the preposition altogether in many translations. "Laying charge upon" not only changes a simple verb into a verb-noun-preposition phrase where there is no noun, but is also an expression that has zero merit in ancient use. The verb "he is commanding" which is used about 71 times in the Hebrew scriptures almost never includes the preposition. That means the preposition is there for a reason and that reason was not to be erased. |
| 86 | This Hebrew akal tokel "idiom" has been traditionally called the “intensifying infinitive absolute”. Because it has been misunderstood, many translations put in “surely” or "freely". The LITV and YLT rendered it a little bit more accurately, “eating you do eat” or “dying you do die”. There is no preposition "to" so it cannot be "to eat". The same Hebraism is used in the following verse for “dying, you are dying” and in 3:16 “multiplying I am multiplying”. The dualistic sense of this can be compared with Zechariah 11:9, “the dying, let die; and the cut off, let be cut off”. Gesenius also thought the repetition of words was for some "emphatic" sense. This “idiom” must be translated fully so that we can see a connection to the words in the NT where Christ speaks the command which is commanded to him to speak, and it is only one command: "For myself from out of myself has not spoken, but the father himself, having sent myself, commanded what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that the command of himself is eternal zoe-life which myself therefore is speaking, just as the father has said to myself; thus I speak." (John 12:49-50 RBT) אכל Eat Strong's To eat is in the complete form. Without the lamed preposition, we don't take it for an infinitive. The difference between okel and akal is a matter of pronunciation. The vowel points (and pronunciation) were imposed by the Masoretes. Which one is it here? Context determines. אכל okel I ate אכל akal He ate אכלה akalah She ate תאכל tokel you are eating/she is eating (3rd person feminine and 2nd masculine singular are identical) The Masoretes, a group of Jewish scribes and scholars, began adding vowel points to the Hebrew Bible in the early centuries of the Common Era. The process of adding vowel points, known as vocalization, was undertaken to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew text. The Masoretes are believed to have started their work in the 7th to 9th centuries CE, with the activity reaching its peak during the 8th and 9th centuries. Script is much easier to preserve than pronunciation, and thus the Masoretic work is prone to all sorts of "mispronunciations". |