It is often argued to the effect that a literal meaning should be presumed in a Biblical text unless there are good reasons to do otherwise. So, we often hear the standard objection from Genesis: Adam and Eve did not physically die from eating of the tree, as God's comment, taken with wooden literalism, would indicate:

> Gen. 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.'

Commentators as far back as early antiquity have read this as indicating spiritual, not physical, death. But an objection from a strictly literalist perspective might be: 'That's not what the text says. It says they will die. Nothing is said about a spiritual death.'

It has been noted that the literal Hebrew says, 'Dying you shall die,' which does indicate a 'progressive' death. However, even if it did not -- as is the case with many cites where 'death' and 'die' is used in isolation -- nothing needs to be said because the context says all that is needed. Common sense alone therefore supports the 'spiritual death' interpretation within Christianity, but there is more, and this is where we come back to the overall pervasiveness of figurative language in Hebrew, combined with an understanding of the Semitic theological mindset.

The account in Genesis goes on to depict Adam and Eve as losing fellowship with God. To the Hebrew mind, loss of fellowship with God is a fate worse than death, for it was the loss of fellowship with the prime source of peace and life. Thus the word 'death' --- representing the most fearsome and irreversible fate in this life --- was chosen to figuratively describe this loss of fellowship with God.

From the perspective of a Western mind reading an English translation, this figurative reading might not be immediately obvious. But to a Semitic mind reading in a language with a much higher level of poetic sophistication the text says that very thing. This is no expediency, but a fact of the culture that wrote the book.

The texts cited support a literal interpretation where physical death occurs or is imminent, but there is the genre of the texts where the cites appear, which are cast as pure narrative history, as opposed to the account of the Fall, which carries an 'otherworldliness' about it of a sort found in other ANE literature of the time, which indicates a substance of far deeper meaning behind the narrative.

The objection that a strictly literal meaning must be forced here overlooks the language, literature, and culture of the Ancient Near East.