Genesis 2:16

A Command of a God to Himself

The command is two-fold. Or shall we say, a command to himself? Adam is commanded to speak the command to eat of the woods within the enclosure, the good food. The verb is in the infinitive with the preposition "to": to speak. The preposition has always been ignored and left out of translation. This means, God lays a command upon himself to speak.

This Hebrew akal tokel "idiom" has been traditionally called the “intensifying infinitive absolute”. Because it has been misunderstood, many translations put in “surely” or "freely". The LITV and YLT rendered it a little bit more accurately, “eating you do eat” or “dying you do die”. There is no preposition "to" so it cannot be "to eat". The same Hebraism is used in the following verse for “dying, you are dying” and in 3:16 “multiplying I am multiplying”. The dualistic sense of this can be compared with Zechariah 11:9, “the dying, let die; and the cut off, let be cut off”.

This “idiom” must be translated faithfully so that we can see a connection to the words of Jesus in the NT where he speaks the command which is commanded to him to speak, and it is only one command:

"For myself from out of myself has not spoken, but the father himself, having sent myself, gave a charge which I should say and which I should speak. And I know that the charge of himself is eternal zoe-life which myself therefore speaks, just as the father has said to myself; thus I speak." (John 12:49-50 RBT)

He seems to use the same “idiom” in his quoting from Isaiah,

“And is being fulfilled in them the prophecy of Isaiah the saying, ‘A hearing yourselves will hear, and never understand. And looking ones [participle] yourselves will look at and never perceive.” (Matthew 13:14 RBT)

Meaning those who are not born from above of the spirit, are one dimensional. They will see, but not see. They will hear, but not hear.

אכל Eat

Strong's To eat is in the complete form. Without the lamed preposition, we don't take it for an infinitive. The difference between okel and akal is a matter of pronunciation. The vowel points (and pronunciation) were imposed by the Masoretes. Which one is it here? Context determines.

אכל okel I ate

אכל akal He ate 

אכלה akalah She ate

The Masoretes, a group of Jewish scribes and scholars, began adding vowel points to the Hebrew Bible in the early centuries of the Common Era. The process of adding vowel points, known as vocalization, was undertaken to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew text. The Masoretes are believed to have started their work in the 7th to 9th centuries CE, with the activity reaching its peak during the 8th and 9th centuries. Script is much easier to preserve than pronunciation, and thus the Masoretic work is prone to all sorts of "mispronunciations".