3:2-5 — 2The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say,'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"
4"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5"For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
[T - OL ]
The serpent set a trap and the First Woman fell straight in. Of her response we observe the following.
1) She was so eager to get engaged she forgot to get her "quoting of Scriptures" right; enough of the original words to give it the force of authenticity but mixed with added words ("and you must not touch it") that exposed herself to mis-direction in the ensuing discourse.
2) She also forget who she was. Falling into the serpent's cunning, she followed It in calling God simply 'elohim instead of acknowledging Him as 'the Lord God,' Yahweh 'elohim. As we have said, the serpent would not use the personal name of God because doing so would require it to acknowledge the covenant sovereignty of Yahweh over It. The Woman was an agent under sovereign authority.
3) She failed to follow on from the question asked. The serpent had asked, "Did God . . .?" Her response should have kept to what God did and demanded. Instead she veered off to 'we' and focused on the one tree and forgetting the 'all' of the many from which she and her husband were already feasting upon. The First Woman just got sucked in and allowed the serpent to set the rules for how "the game" was played.
Unlike the woman, the serpent got its quotation right: mot tamut "surely die," but It added a negation and pluralizes the verb to apply to both the Man and the Woman. It contradicted patently and openly Yahweh's command. And to boot, It lied by adding a reason why its assertion was to be believed: "For God knows." We can be certain that what it said about God was a lie for two reasons.
1. As a creature created by God, it would have no way to intuit into the heart and mind of God unless It was acting in obedience; here It was not.
2. If, indeed, Yahweh could ever possibly entertained such an unworthy thought, surely He would not have communicated it to the serpent or anyone else.
But crafty as it was, the serpent intuited some truths that would soon become evident.
You may wish to read the following commentaries-expositions:
John Calvin (Calvin skips on vv2-3)
Matthew Henry
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2016