After Adam and Eve had sinned Jehovah passed judgment on them. Then God said: “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 from the tree of life and eat and live to time indefinite,—”​—Gen. 3:22.

The first human pair were not devoid of knowledge of good and bad. God had told them that it would be wrong or bad to eat of the fruit of one designated tree; conversely, to obey God was good. (Gen. 2:16, 17) So the particular “knowledge” indicated by the “tree of the knowledge of good and bad” involved a self-determining of what is good and bad. On this, Professor T. J. Conant wrote: “By disregarding the divine will, and deciding and acting on his own, man chose to know for himself what is good and evil.” Yes, Adam and Eve rejected God’s determination and chose to set up their own standard of what was good and what was bad.

With Adam and Eve, their coming to know good and bad involved breaking Jehovah’s command and rejecting his standards. For this they deserved to die and were so sentenced.

In the New World Translation and some other versions, Genesis 3:22 ends with a dash. This indicates that God did not put in the record a statement of what should be done. Instead, his words stop and the next Ge 3 verse 23 describes the action itself; he drove Adam and Eve out of the garden. So their independent standard of good and bad was not like that of Jehovah and his Son. Rather, it was one that led them to misery.​—Jer. 10:23.