As I said, it’s not that simple. If translators are “experts” and it works as you seem to imply, then there should be broad agreement among all translations and we wouldn’t even need multiple Bible translations in the first place. So why the multitude of versions? Why the constant debates?
The issues with translation are obvious with anybody who has fluency in two very different languages. (I’d be curious to know whether you are multilingual yourself.) As someone who is fluent in Indonesian and English, I’m well aware that there are many words, phrases, idioms, and expressions that cannot be fully translated into English, and can at most be roughly approximated. Even some seemingly readily translated words may have slightly different connotations than its counterpart in its source language. This is not such a problem when we’re just translating a mundane newspaper report. But it’s different if we’re translating a work with heavy philosophical, religious, and literary qualities. Here we have a passage from an ancient culture’s most sacred text, narrating events which form its most foundational myths.
Secondly, we have another layer to the problem that we’re translating from a language (biblical Hebrew) that nobody uses in the same way anymore. Nobody is 100% sure what a certain biblical word means or corresponds to in English. So how is a Biblical Hebrew dictionary made? The answer is context. Scholars take note of all the occurrences of a Hebrew word (or related words, including possibly its cognates in other ancient Semitic languages) in ancient texts and try to decipher its semantic range. Less easily understood words are illuminated by more easily understood words, which in turn might illuminate the latter - a never-ending iterative process.
Most words have no single meaning - there is always a range of acceptable interpretations, due to both uncertainty (we have limited sources) as well as actual variations in the way people used those words. Oftentimes a single English word or phrase isn’t adequate to express this range of interpretation. However, as a translator you are forced to pick a particular interpretation which 1) conforms to the intended translation philosophy of the Bible version you’re working on (dynamic, formal, paraphrase, etc.) 2) conforms to the stylistic preferences of the translation, which may have its own quirks, and 3) still doesn’t stray too far from your own preferred interpretation. Because at the end of the day laypeople who are reading primarily for personal and devotional reasons don’t want to have to deal with this uncertainty.
This hopefully illustrates how only analyzing the Bible in translation is inadequate to resolve arguments about tricky passages with a rich diversity of interpretive history. This is why more specialized scholarly papers and books are published regarding the proper translations of certain Hebrew or Greek words and all professional biblical scholars work with the text in the original languages. To make scholarly claims about a biblical passage without referencing the original language is like criticizing a physical theory based on a popular presentation without knowing the mathematics. (Which is exactly what many creationists do.)
I’m not a Hebrew scholar either, and I’m well aware of my own limitations. But as we like to say, there’s a difference between someone who knows that they don’t know, and someone who doesn’t know that they don’t know. And I know enough to sense that the arguments in this thread are not high quality, because the methodology is all wrong.
In this thread, we see Faizal initially analyzing the KJV and claiming that “I don’t really see any other reasonable interpretation of the bare facts of the story.” And then later, when George is not convinced, he quotes the NIV, which happens to better support his preferred interpretation. This is of course not the proper way to interpret the Bible. Even a first year seminary student (or a reasonably experienced church layman) with limited Hebrew knowledge would know to read the passage in multiple reputable English translations first and then try to triangulate the meaning by comparing them (while being aware of their different translation philosophies), instead of settling down on a preferred interpretation and seeking out translations which happen to support it.
Next, we have this argument based on purely the English language, which is frankly rather embarrassing:
The more proper question here would perhaps be: if the author meant to indicate “lest he continue”, is there actually another Hebrew word corresponding to “continue” that we would expect him to put in there? Or is the Hebrew expression as it is ambiguous enough to accommodate both Faizal’s and George’s translations? What happens if we consider the surrounding context? What happens if we consider other instances in the Hebrew Bible with similar sentence structure and tense as in this verse? These are questions which cannot be simply answered by reading Genesis in the KJV.
Even just taking Gen. 3:23 by itself, there’s a lot of questions here that can’t easily be gleaned by reading the English text. For example what does “us” refer to? Isn’t God just one entity (Deut. 6:4)? Is this some sort of “royal we”, does it actually refer to multiple gods, angels, or what? And before you accuse me of “not being faithful to the text” by bringing in other texts, as I said above, none of these texts were meant to be read in isolation from other relevant texts. Even the very fact that Genesis 2-3 is part of Genesis which is in turn part of the Pentateuch which is in turn part of the Hebrew Bible was the result of a centuries-long series of deliberate editorial and authorial decisions.
How would the original audience of Genesis have understood the “tree of life”? How would Second Temple Jews have understood it? Are there references to it in other texts, including extra-biblical ones? (Hint: there are actually some other references to it even in the Hebrew Bible itself, not to mention the NT.) How do we know from this verse (as Faizal argues) that eating from the tree of life once instantly gives you permanent eternal life? Would the Hebrew text be different if the author intended to say that one needed to eat continuously from it? Same sort of questions for the phrase “good and evil”.
Conclusion: translators are indeed experts, but you’re not really “listening” to them if you’re only reading the Bible in a single translation. “Listen” to them by reading professional commentaries on the passage, reading and comparing multiple translations and doing a proper literary analysis in context before settling on an interpretation.