The Garden of Eden: Part One

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverbeds. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:8-17)

Well, here we are. Adam (meaning “man” in Hebrew, derived from adamah meaning “ground”) is a living soul and God creates a garden for him. In today’s post we unpack the garden that God creates.

So let’s start by talking about what the Garden of Eden is. First of all, it is paradise. We get “paradise” from Philo’s first century greek translation of the Septuagint which is the seventy books of the Old Testament. In it he uses the word parádeisos (Gr.παράδεισος) to translate the Ancient Persian word pairidaēza which means “walled garden.”

Eden, from the Hebrewʿēdhen, means “delight” or “pleasure.” So clearly we are dealing with a very nice place. It is a walled garden. We like walled gardens. It allows for us to enjoy the beneficial and positive aspects of nature while the walls (here you can think of walls as culture, society or civilization) protect against the negative aspects and ravages of nature. There is balance and harmony between culture and nature in paradise. In fact, paradise is that well ordered balance and harmony between culture and nature and, in the New Testament, the balance between the suffering of life and meaningfulness. The nature allows for the culture not to become tyrannical and the culture allows for the nature not to become chaotic.

Paradise can be seen as a higher resolution version of God’s creation in Genesis 1:1 where the tohu va bohu which represents both potential and chaotic abyss is made into habitable order through the imposition of structure.

Eden is, for all intents and purposes, the holy city. It is Jerusalem. It is the ideal state. It is the ideal state of being, state of mind, adherence to the covenant, the ark, the crucifix. It is all of these things simultaneously.

Now here is where I feel it gets even more interesting. The word Eden, which means pleasure or delight, is derived from the Aramaic which means “well watered.” It is absolutely no wonder that a desert people would associate, even as deeply as in their own linguistic roots, the idea of being well watered with being pleasurable.

We can see just how well watered the garden is as the river that goes out of Eden is the font of all four major rivers (a blend of actual geography and mythical geography). But there is something more hiding in here that I believe requires extra attention — especially considering the dearth of scholarship dealing with it. That the garden is well watered in the second chapter of Genesis is clearly a call back to the fact that the abyss God creates the world out of is, in the first chapter, water. This is a theme that will constantly repeat throughout the biblical stories all the way to the very end. The idea here that is constantly repeating is that God doesn’t, like Marduk in the Babylonian story, simply conquer the waters, the eternal feminine, and make the world of her corpse. He adds structure to the waters allowing for them to realize their potential just as the water’s potential is a wellspring of birth for the rigid structure which is imposed upon her . The water in the ancient stories is chaotic, but not merely chaotic. It is also unbridled potential. This idea is latent in the Enuma Elis as well, but even more pronounced here. Without the structuring order the water is chaos, but without the chaos there is no potential for the structuring order to become a habitable world.

And so the waters which God confronted as void and without form are not merely dismantled, they are given form (and as such the dragon of chaos, while subdued in the proper order, lies beneath that order and will attack when the order breaks down). The chaotic water which at the beginning of time was void and without form becomes a river in Eden which springs into the four main rivers of the world and waters the garden in proper balance. And with this we have Eden. We have paradise. We have the well watered, walled garden of delight.

I cannot stress enough how the pattern laid down in Genesis one is repeated and played with throughout the entire text.  A certain amount of chaos has to be brought in for order to be fruitful and not to descend into tyranny (as we will see later on in Egypt) just as a certain amount of order has to be brought in for nature not to break down into total chaos (as we saw when the elder Mesopotamian gods killed Apsu unleashing Tiamat’s destructive potential). This is recapitulated in the relationship between man and god, man and the state and between the sexes repeatedly.

And in this balanced garden God puts for man every tree which is pleasant and food producing telling Adam to “tend and keep it.” Of importance here is that the garden is not merely self sufficient. Despite claims that this section has given man carte blanche to act as a super predator against nature (we will get to that in this weeks Unfashionable Observations), man has been created with purpose. His job is to keep and tend the garden. He is not merely there to enjoy the fruits. One of the very first hypotheses in Genesis is that man was not created for passive comfort, but to tend the garden. It is not toil for man to tend the garden, but rather should be thought of as a task for which he has been made and which he will find great joy and satisfaction in doing.

Giving the garden over to Adam and telling him to keep and tend it, God marks out two specific trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then God tells Adam, “of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” and this is where we start to get into the real meat of the story. Keep in mind, the prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the set up for the entire biblical drama. Our story begins in earnest when this prohibition is ignored, man falls into time and the full catastrophe of life and the entire biblical story is an investigation into the mode of being which will allow the conscious and self-aware man to return to paradise despite having eating the fruit.

So what is this Tree of Knowledge? Just what kind of tree is it?

To answer this question we have to think about the human ability of abstraction. If you have a set of things and you abstract out of them a common element, there is a very strong case to be made that the common element is more real than the things in the set from which it was abstracted. That, after all, is the point of abstraction. There would be no point of abstracting if this were not the case.

If you can’t take a set of things and say there is something common across this set of things that is more important than the differences between them there would be no reason to bother with abstractions in the first place.

If this sounds odd in any way, you can think about it in terms of numbers. If you take a set of ten different things, you can abstract out of ten different things the number ten. The number ten isn’t any of the particular things or an integral part of any of the different things. However, you can abstract the concept of the number ten out of a set of any ten things and, in many ways, that abstract concept — the number ten — is far more real than ten physical items. The abstract concept will last eternally unlike the particular objects it has been abstracted from, and further, once you have abstract concept of numbers you can get mathematics and a human with mathematics can, in fact, move mountains.

Now, in the story of Adam and Eve, the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents a sort of cognitive transformation — the birth of self consciousness, awareness of being in time, mortality and finitude and vulnerability.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an abstraction across all trees and the fruit of that tree is an abstraction of the fruit across all trees. The abstraction of fruit across all trees is “food.” And so the thing that is common across all fruit of all trees is that it is food.

However, this is merely a first level abstraction, we can still abstract more — and this is where it gets very cool … and this sentence is one I want you to really think about. The food that is stable across the entire domain of food isn’t food…it is information — knowledge. Why? Because humans, when they became aware of their limitations in time and became self-conscious also figured out that knowing where the food is is more important than the food itself (give a man a fish / teach a man to fish). Knowledge is meta-food and meta-food is meta-fruit and that is why the fruit on the meta-tree is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Here is where it gets even cooler! Back in 1995 at Xerox PARC, Peter Pirelli and Stuart Card presented a paper titled “Information Foraging” where they mapped out the brain circuitry which mammals use for foraging food and information. Neuroscientists Nathaniel Daw and Benjamin Hayden, in the early 2000’s, studying Pirelli and Card’s foundational work, pointed to the fact that the exact same cognitive circuit in the brain is used for knowledge and novelty foraging.

They proved that the human brain adapted evolutionarily conserved foraging mechanisms, rooted in the dopamine system, prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex to seek and process information. Neuroimaging studies show humans optimize their search for information by balancing exploration and exploitation which is the same as how other mammals balance the search for new food sources versus exploiting known ones. Studies indicate that dopamine release, which drives reward-seeking in animals, also activates when human’s encounter novel or useful information which suggests shared neural pathways. This is all to say that new knowledge and new sources of food are, for the human brain, the same thing.

Knowledge is meta-food. Food is Meta-Fruit — fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This idea is embedded deeply into the story of Adam and Eve. The idea here is that the meta-food, information, is absorbed into you becoming knowledge by eating the meta-fruit. After all, the trees are meta-trees, not ordinary trees just as paradise is not an ordinary place and Adam and Eve aren’t just ordinary people and the logos that God speaks into the void at the beginning of time is no ordinary word.

This is more to reality than just what we see. Human beings think abstractly and the only reason to think abstractly is if there was something to think about that wasn’t like the things available to us in our senses and, I argue, amongst the things going on in Genesis 2 is an explanation of this. In fact, one of the questions which underpins the entire biblical corpus is “what is most real?” and this is a question we will be spending a lot of time on in the weeks and months to come.

The ingestion and incorporation of knowledge in the form of the meta-fruit of the meta-tree is what awakens man to the future. Because man is woken to the future he understands that knowing where to find food is more important than the food in his hand (and knowing where to find the nest of snakes is more important than the snake in front of him). In a nutshell, he discovers the future. Because he discovers knowledge of the future he now must contend with not just the world before him, but the world projected outwards. Nests of snakes, not the snake in the tree. The source of food, not the food in hand.

This abstract conceptuality  given to man through knowledge of the future is what makes man aware of death and why God warns Adam that if he eats of that meta-fruit of the meta-tree he will surely die. He won’t die as soon as he eats it, the immediate world will no longer be the domain of man, but he will become acutely aware of the necessary death in the future, which transforms his meaningful work to toilsome labor and opens his eyes to all future iterations of himself and the world.

And so we have Adam in the walled, paradisal garden. There is balance and peace as he lives in the moment aware only of his job to keep and tend the garden and the prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.