Before he will speak about the ‘newness of Spirit’, however, Paul drives from cover a question that appears to be lurking beneath his argument that the fruit of the Law-defined union was death. Does that not mean that the Law is sin? The conclusion cannot be entertained (Let it not be!), but the fact remains that in some sense it is the Law that has produced Israel’s state of wilful disobedience, with the resulting prospect of destruction (cf. 4:15; 5:20); and if that is the case, how can it be said that the Law is holy and righteous and good (7:12; cf. Ps. 19:8-9; 119:137)?

The key to understanding this paragraph lies in the recognition that Paul is speaking about the Jewish Law, but that he does so analogically: the story of the Law is like the story of Adam’s disobedience (cf. Wright, Romans, 563: ‘Paul’s point is precisely that what happened on Sinai recapitulated what had happened in Eden’). Adam was given the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; but the snake, taking the opportunity provided by the commandment (‘Did God actually say, “You  shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’), deceived (ēpatēsen) Eve (Gen. 3:13); they coveted the fruit; and it became death to them. In the same way, Israel was given the Law, including the commandment against covetousness; but Israel was deceived (exēpatēsen) by sin, which exploited the Law in the same way that the snake had done; Israel coveted the fruit of disobedience, and the outcome it now faces is destruction.

In this way, Paul reinforces an allegation that has been running the Letter - that Israel is no better than the rest of humanity (see on 4:13-15). The argument from Genesis 3 is important not because Paul has in mind principally the general human condition - the I is not a universal everyman (against Dunn, Romans, 381) but the typical Jew, whose possession of the Law merely exacerbated the problem of Adam’s disobedience. His concern is with the condition of Israel and the consequences of its failure to keep the Law; but the underlying cause of the failure is that the nation is unavoidably vitiated by the same sinfulness that afflicts all the descendants of Adam. Otherwise, the commandment would have been for life - the idyllic and blessed life that is described, for example, in Deuteronomy 28:1-14 (cf. Lev. 18:5; Ezek. 20:11; Matt. 19:17).

The analogy could perhaps be pressed further to include the thought that between Abraham and Moses Israel was in a state of innocence, or that the making of the golden calf at Sinai corresponded to Adam’s primal act of rebellion (cf. Moo, Romans, 436-437); but this is more than Paul means to say in this passage.

To the extent, of course, that Paul experienced the tensions and paradoxes in his own life as a devout Jew, the I is also Paul himself. This aspect of the typology is developed in the next section.