The Garden of God

The City in Biblical Memory, 2014

Exegesis, 2024

Mention of the garden in the Bible begins in the opening chapters of Genesis (2:8). In this passage, the garden is a plantation of the Lord in Eden, in which he later puts man to care for it. In biblical literature, the motif of the garden presents several images. The aim of this study is to examine some of the aspects of the garden from Genesis to the New Testament, including intertestamental literature.

The present article is concerned with ancient 'realms of memory’ reflected in the Mystical Priestly tradition that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a tradition associated with the Zadokite priests (kohnim bnei Zaddok, Sadducees) that was partly known previously in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. The priestly mystical tradition that expressed profound interest in early biblical history and priestly myth was concerned with the beginning of holy place, associated with Garden of Eden/Paradise; in the foundations of holy time associated with Enoch son of Jared, the seventh in the generations of Adam, the first human being that was placed in Paradise and was designated as a scribe, a witness and a knowledgeable priest who had learned the eternal pre-calculated solar calendar of 52 Sabbaths from the angels; and in the foundation of holy ritual associated with daily incense offering by angels and priests according to the sacred solar calendar. Incense offering according to the mystical-priestly tradition had originated in Paradise, and was first offered in the Garden of Eden by Enoch son of Jared, and was offered together by angels and priests ever since Enoch's time and his descendants, the priests. The incense ingredients link the sacred place – the Garden of Eden, from which they were removed – to the sacred time, that is, the fixed, predetermined, seven-based cultic cycles marked by the offering of incense. The Garden of Eden, the pre-calculated solar calendar and the incense offering that was connected with paradise; all associated with holy angels and with Enoch, were connected to the mystical-ritual unity of holy place, holy time, and holy ritual in the ideal Jerusalem Temple and its heavenly paradigm in the celestial sanctuaries in Paradise.

There is so much more to the story of Garden of Eden than what is typically revealed in a Sunday School Class. And while many will never see beyond this veiled view those who do often approach the subject from beyond the contextual framework and from a modern bias. When stripped of such obstacles one will begin to see that the symbolism within the story, and the context, brings with it the possibility of truly beginning to understand who God is, what He intended (and intends) mankind’s relationship with Him to be, and how one may develop a sound theological perspective of this relationship.

Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 2023

Genesis 2–3 is among the most beloved yet misunderstood texts in the Hebrew Bible. Many biblical and post-biblical interpretations focus on themes of sin, death, and God’s banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. These have fostered misapprehensions regarding the value of God’s creation and the dangerous image of an “Old Testament God of wrath.” This essay uses space-critical analysis to focus on the spaces of Eden—from ground to bodies to gardens—to show that Ivan Illich’s notion of “conviviality” best captures Eden’s true ethic of cooperation, environmental caretaking, and the positive portrait of a gentle God who makes humans by hand.

Interpretations of the trees in the Garden of Eden misunderstand their significance by focusing on sin or a theological "fall." A tradition-historical approach to the motif of trees in ancient Near Eastern literature and imagery reveals their multivalent quality. Trees are connected with fertility and goddess devotion but also with the power and divine sanction given to kings and dynasties, and with the potency of sacred space, on which humans and the divine come together and meet. As cross-temporal motifs, trees are regularly associated with life-giving and blessing (a plant of rejuvenation; a tree of life); a connection of trees to knowledge and meaning appears as well, in wisdom literature, and in the book of 1 Enoch. Language of a world tree or cosmic tree, though useful conceptually, is a modern imposition on the ancient evidence. More evident from the ancient setting is the image of felling trees, which indicates the downfall of human leaders, especially kings, because of their hubris. Ultimately, sacred trees have an ambivalent value, as a source of both contestation and progress.

Torat Moshe: Essays in Honor of Rabbi Moshe Shamah’s Eightieth Birthday and the Jubilee of Sephardic Institute, 2023

Various parts of Tanakh make explicit reference to the Garden as a point of comparison to such diverse places as Egypt, Sodom, Assyria, and Israel. Considering the important place of the Garden in the minds of various prophets as well as in modern culture, it is worth taking a journey to learn more about it. What is the significance and symbolism of the Garden? Is it a real or mythic place? Can we return to it, and would we want to even if we could?

Before "Paradise" became concerned with explaining the present "fallen" condition of humanity, due to a primal sin, which later also became eschatologised into the locus of a human post-mortem felicitous destiny, it already symbolised royal power and the king's role in the ritual management of the state. And before the Garden of Eden came to be understood as "in the east," or in some other place remote from the present real world, it was understood to be located in Jerusalem, as the setting of the royal cult. Adam the gardener was originally a type of the king. This paper examines the evidence for these elements in the biblical Eden story (Genesis 2-3) and in Mesopotamian and Egyptian iconography and ideology, and attempts to set the final form of the tradition within its historical context, the destruction of the state in 597/586 BCE and its non-monarchical succeeding period under Persian rule.

Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae, 2022

This article combines two goals. The first is to show the gardens of the Bible as the background settings for the most important encounters between God and man, and the second is to define the genius loci of these places. The challenge was to isolate the physical features of the gardens of the Bible as carriers of spiritual aspects. The introduction presents the role of nature and the garden as the theatre of God's Glory (mentioned by Calvin). It explores moreover the sacred aspects of historical gardens and then describes the nature of individual gardens of the Bible and the events that took place there, closing with the results of observations ordered by parameters that make up the western-defined genius loci (spirit of the place), such as: things, earth, sky, order, and character. At the end of each description of a garden, the challenge of defining its spirit was taken for the first time. The inspiring phenomenon of gardens and the conscious use of selected elements will meet not only aesthetic expectations but also the spiritual exploration of contemporary people.

Biblical Archaeology Review (digital content), 2023

What do the Book of Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh have in common? Surprisingly, Chapters 1-11 of Genesis reached their final form during the eighth-fifth centuries BC w of Judah were in sustained contact with Mesopotamian polities. And for this reason, Ge with the Epic of Gilgamesh stories of wily serpents, demigods, a catastrophic flood, sup and herculean feats of engineering. Moreover, an unprovenanced cuneiform tablet from published in 2014 adds one more commonality: an edenic divine abode desecrated by Parallels Between the Garden of Eden and the Sacred Cedar Forest In the first half of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Gilgamesh is intr full of potential but reckless in his rule over the city of Uruk. As a result, the gods create