Antionah is trying to pick up where Zeezrom has left off. This is not a sincere question, but one designed to show that Alma is contradicting scripture. Thus, he juxtaposes Alma’s statement that a man might live forever in his sins with Adam and Eve who were exiled from the garden specifically to prevent them from partaking of the tree of life and living forever in their sins. Antionah thinks he has just caught Alma in a major doctrinal contradiction.
Literature: Gordon Thomasson has suggested that Antionah is a metonym, or name by association. The antion is the largest unit of the measures named in Alma 11:4. It also appears in the name Antionum, which is the city of the Zoramites (Alma 31:3). Similarly, ezrom (Alma 11:6) was an important element in the name Zeezrom.
Vocabulary: “Cherubim” is the plural of “cherub.” David G. Burke, director of the Translations Department, American Bible Society, notes that they were the Hebrew “functional counterparts of the colossal, human-faced winged bulls used in Mesopotamian architecture to guard the entrance of temples and palaces.”