What Does Genesis 3:4 Mean?
And the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:THE KEY
The serpent sets “not” before the warning’s doubled death-root, so death remains audible inside the denial.
THE MEANING
A voice makes the stated consequence sound unreal with a blunt contradiction. Yet the Hebrew repeats the root for dying beneath the negation, keeping the denied outcome at the center of the sentence. The verse holds the reader where assurance and consequence collide.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A consequence stops being real once someone confidently says it will not happen.
THE ROOT
לֹא־מוֹת תְּמֻתוּן
lo-mot temutun
GROWS FROM
מות
to die; be dead
“surely” in this verse is lo-mot temutun. The Hebrew stacks מוֹת (mot, “dying”) before תְּמֻתוּן (temutun, “you will die”), an infinitive absolute followed by a finite verb that intensifies the claim. The serpent puts לֹא (lo, “not”) over that same repeated root, so the word for dying remains audible inside its denial.
ALSO GROWS
mot: to die; dying (infinitive absolute)
מוֹת
It is the first half of the doubled construction here, voicing death before the negation lands on it.
māvet: death
מָוֶת
This noun names the outcome carried by the same root, making the connection between “die” and “death” visible.
THE PATTERN
The text keeps death at the end of a path visible even when the path looks right or its outcome is denied.
There is a way straight before a man, but its latter end is the ways of death.Then craving, when it has conceived, gives birth to falling short; and falling short, when it is full-grown, bears death.For the pay of falling short is death, but the gift of God is the life of the ages in Jesus, the Anointed One, our Lord.THE THREAD
But from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.Genesis 2:17 says מוֹת תָּמוּת (mot tamut, “you shall surely die”), using מות (mût, “to die”) in an emphatic construction. Genesis 3:4 repeats that construction and sets לֹא (lo, “not”) before it, making the serpent’s sentence a direct reversal of the warning’s wording.
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