This positive character shifts in vv. 16–17, where God addresses the man directly: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” It may be that the “knowledge of good and evil” means assumption of political power not properly man’s (see Clark, “Legal Background”; Coats, “God of Death”). But in the context of the story this tree bodes its own contrast to the tree of life: “In the