but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
⛓ Read Genesis 2 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
'Since death came by man... as in Adam all die' (vv.21-22) presupposes the Eden narrative where the LORD warns 'in the day you eat of it you shall surely die,' the origin of death through the first man. Coherence is very high: the Adam-Christ antithesis is the structural spine of the chapter and recurs at Rom 5:12-21.
High confidence'In the day you eat of it you shall surely die' establishes the death that befalls the disobedient, behind 'remains in death' and the passage from death into life. John frames moral failure as abiding in primeval death. The death/life antithesis traces to the Eden warning.
Medium confidenceEcho3
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
'Dead in transgressions and sins' draws on the Edenic verdict that disobedience brings death ('in the day you eat of it you shall surely die'). The metaphor of spiritual death as the consequence of sin coheres with Genesis' linkage of transgression and death, an availability Paul could presume.
Medium confidence'In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die' - sin's penalty is death. 'The wages of sin is death' (6:23) restates the Edenic verdict that disobedience earns death. A foundational thematic echo behind the whole sin-death nexus of 5-6.
Medium confidenceThe Edenic sentence 'in the day you eat of it you shall surely die' establishes the sin-death linkage that James assumes when full-grown sin produces death. Faint background to the genealogy of death.
Low confidence◇ Figural1
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
"Death through sin... death passed to all" (5:12): "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." The divine sentence binding death to the one prohibited act is the textual basis for Paul's claim that death entered through the one man's transgression.
High confidence