They were like us

It was suggested by Doug Green that a possible alternate translation to Genesis 3:22 was perhaps more correct than the traditional one. Traditionally, it reads something like:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever-- ESV

However, the Hebrew verb rendered there as 'has become' allows for a certain degree of ambiguity in terms of tense. It is simply Hebrew perfect tense of the verb 'to be'. Given the ambiguities of Hebrew, the verse could thus be read as:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man was like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever--

On this reading, the original state of humanity is 'knowing good and evil' and it is only upon the eating of the fruit that their minds were 'scrambled' and that they could no longer distinguish the good from evil.

So, is there any possible way that this could be a good translation? Well, from my admittedly limited Hebrew knowledge, I'd say these two examples make it possible.

Firstly, in the immediate context, you have the same word being used in what appears to be a past tense.

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field (Gen 3:1 ESV)"

And yet, this isn't so satisfying because you could argue that it's a past-tense of narration, where the language is describing something that was true at the time of the events being described. So what we really need is an example where it occurs in direct speech, as it does in Gen 3:22, and is still rendered as a past state of being. Interestingly, there's one even in Genesis:

They said, "We see plainly that the LORD has been with you." (Gen 26:28 ESV)

The same verb, translated as a state of being that was true prior to the actual speaking of the words.

If Doug's thoughts are right, then the irony of the situation is that the serpent who deceived Eve in telling her that she would become 'like God, knowing good and evil' has in a sense deceived a lot of translators over a lot of years. :P As Doug pointed out, pehaps Eve's response should have been,

"But I'm already like God. I'm in His image. And I know good and evil, God told us what that is."

More thoughts to come...