55-57. What are four basic elements of the Bible teaching about the death of the first human soul?

⁵⁵ In the original garden or paradise of Eden the perfect human souls Adam and Eve did not have to die. Those two perfect human souls could have lived on forever in their earthly paradise. How? By sustaining their human, material bodies with the natural food that Jehovah God there provided and by obediently nourishing their hearts and minds with the spiritual food that he provided when he talked to them out of the invisible. But God warned them that the human soul, despite its ability to live on earth forever by God’s provisions, was mortal, able to die. Genesis, chapter two, after describing God’s creation of the first human soul Adam, goes on to say: “And Jehovah God proceeded to take the man and settle him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to take care of it. And Jehovah God also laid this command upon the man: ‘From every tree of the garden you may eat to satisfaction. But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.’” (Gen. 2:15-17, NW) If Adam the soul disobeyed God, then Adam the soul would die. If Adam the soul obeyed God and ate of all the trees in Eden except this forbidden one, then Adam the soul would continue living as long as his obedience kept up. This offered the opportunity for the human soul to live eternally, not in a spirit world, but in human perfection in the earthly paradise of Eden.

⁵⁶ When God pronounced the sentence of death upon Adam after he disobediently accepted some of the forbidden fruit from the hand of his wife and ate it, God said: “In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Gen. 3:17-19, NW) Note that God did not say to Adam, ‘Your body will return to the dust but your spirit will be freed from the body and will live on consciously in the unseen world where I dwell, because your spirit is immortal and I cannot destroy it.’ No, but God said, ‘You [not your body, but you, the soul] were taken from the ground and to the ground you will return, for you [the soul] are dust and to the dust you [the soul under death sentence] will return.’

⁵⁷ As a living soul Adam was just some animated, quickened, enlivened or vivified dust molded together in a man’s form, just the same as the other land animals. To put the death sentence into force God drove the man out of the paradise of Eden. Why? “Jehovah God went on to say: ‘Here the man has become like one of us in knowing good and bad, and now in order that he may not put his hand out and actually take fruit also of the tree of life and eat and live forever,—’ With that Jehovah God put him out of the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken [and to which he must now return]. And so he drove the man out and posted at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubs and the flaming blade of a sword that was turning itself continually to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Gen. 3:22-24, NW) God did not keep him away from the tree of life that Adam might die only as to his body but pass alive in spirit to a spirit world, beginning an immortal journey there, knowing more and being freer there and thus really benefiting by his having disobeyed his Creator and dying. God drove him out of the paradise of Eden away from the tree of life that the human soul Adam might not live at all anywhere but cease to exist, “positively die,” just the same as a brute beast.

58. How is Adam’s reported death at the age of 930 explained?

⁵⁸ Because he fell from human perfection, the human soul Adam lived many centuries even on the cursed ground outside the paradise of Eden. “Meanwhile he became father to sons and daughters. So all the days of Adam that he lived amounted to nine hundred and thirty years and he died.” (Gen. 5:4, 5, NW) On the very day that Adam sinned and God condemned him and drove him outside Eden’s paradise, Adam was dead from God’s viewpoint and so was dead in sin. He became a father of disobedience and produced sons of disobedience. For this reason the apostle Paul told the Christians: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you at one time walked according to the system of things of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit that now operates in the sons of disobedience.” (Eph. 2:1, 2, 5, NW) From that standpoint, too, Eve as well as Adam was “dead though she [was] living.” (1 Tim. 5:6, NW) Now being dead in sin was not the full measure of death for Adam and Eve, but when they ceased to breathe and when the spirit or life-causing active force returned to God who gave it to them, then the first two human souls, Adam and Eve, died. Adam lived seventy years less than a thousand years. So, if we take the apostle Peter’s time measurement, “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8), then Adam as well as Eve positively died “in the day” that he ate from the forbidden tree. He died in the first thousand-year day of humankind’s existence.

(To be continued in our next issue)

The Nazis Bluffed, but Not the Witnesses

The Theory and Practice of Hell is a book giving an analytical report of Nazi concentration camps. It was a best seller for years in Germany, and in April, 1955, an English edition was published. Of particular interest to readers of The Watchtower is what it has to say in the chapter “The Categories of Prisoners” about Jehovah’s witnesses, among which is the following:

“On September 6, 1938, the SS [Nazi elite guards] offered the witnesses [at Buchenwald] the chance to abjure their principles in writing, especially their refusal to swear oaths and render military service, and thus purchase their liberty. Only a very few failed to withstand this temptation. The others were henceforth subjected to savage pressure in order to break their spirit. On Easter Sunday of 1939 the Roll Call Officer of Buchenwald made another effort to persuade the Witnesses to acknowledge ‘State and Fuehrer.’ The success was nil. On Whitsunday all the Jehovah’s Witnesses again had to fall in on the roll-call area. A speech was delivered to them, and a fearful period of fatigue drill followed. For an hour and a quarter the wretched men had to roll about, hop, crawl and run while the boots of the Block Leaders helped them along.

“When the war broke out the Witnesses at Sachsenhausen concentration camp were invited to volunteer for military service. Each refusal was followed by the shooting of ten men from their ranks. After forty victims had been killed, the SS desisted. In Buchenwald this appeal to the Witnesses was made on September 6, 1939. First Officer-in-Charge Rödl told them: ‘You know that war has broken out and that the German nation is in danger. New laws are coming into force. If anyone of you refuses to fight against France or England, all of you must die!’ Two SS companies with full equipment were drawn up by the gate house. Not a single Jehovah’s witness answered the officer’s appeal. There was a brief silence and then came the order: ‘Hands up! Empty your pockets!’ The SS men began to assault them, robbing them of their last penny—a reprisal that seemed rather grotesque in view of what might have been expected. True, the witnesses were assigned to the quarry and during this entire time were barred from hospital treatment.

“One cannot escape the impression that, psychologically speaking, the SS were never quite equal to the challenge offered them by Jehovah’s Witnesses.”