Genesis - Chapter 03 - Line 00078

Contemplative Summary

And YHWH God said, “Behold, the human has become like one from us, knowing good and evil. And now—lest he reach out his hand, and also take from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever…”

The divine voice pauses within realization — a moment of knowing that bridges creation and consequence. The Hebrew hen ha’adam hayah ke’achad mimennu — “the human has become like one from us” — carries both wonder and sorrow. Knowledge, once the divine domain, now pulses within humanity, the awareness of opposites awakened. Yet this likeness is incomplete: perception expanded, but coherence undone. The phrase pen yishlah yado — “lest he reach out his hand” — expresses not fear but mercy, a boundary born from compassion. To grasp the Tree of Life now would freeze the fracture, immortalizing division.

Here, God’s speech turns reflective, almost protective — consciousness safeguarding itself from eternal imbalance. The divine perceives that immortality without integration is exile of another kind: living forever without wholeness. Thus the pause, the ellipsis — creation holding its breath before intervention.

To contemplate this line is to feel the tenderness of divine restraint — the wisdom that limits what love cannot yet sustain. Every boundary, rightly seen, is not a wall but a womb, shaping what must ripen before returning to the Tree once more. For even this “lest” conceals promise: that eternal life will come again, not through reaching, but through remembering unity beyond the knowledge of good and evil.