“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
This is perhaps evidence of a primordial fall of ‘the gods’ (the serpent would also be evidence), the fall not recounted directly in Scripture, but referred to by Our Lord (Luke 10: 18). These ‘gods’ (the Hebrew word elohim can mean either ‘gods’ or ‘God’) wanted knowledge of the forbidden, ultimately so as to go beyond good and evil and establish their own rule against the Creator God. The serpent, speaking of their eyes being opened, knows of what he speaks. The fact that he seems not to be dead (at least in a literal, bodily sense) also supports his contention that disobedience will not result in (literal) death.