And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food…

Genesis 2:8-9

At the beginning of Genesis 2, we’re told that the Lord plants a garden. It’s an interesting thing to do as a first action following the creation of the world. In fact, it’s really something that deserves to be thought about.

Note: This is the second installment of the “Heaven & Earth” series. To read the previous installments, click here.

The Great Garden

I think it’s worth thinking about what our conception of the Garden of Eden has been throughout our life. Is it a lush, open paradise? A quaint, secluded plot of land? Where are the trees? Are they both in the middle of the garden? Are the two trees — The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil — intertwined together? Are they entirely separate trees? Get those thinking juices flowing, and think about how you’ve perceived the Garden.

Now, what makes the Garden of Eden different in your mind than a regular garden? What makes it a “holier” garden? Is there a certain light or glint in the air? Perhaps the garden itself isn’t holy, but the air itself exerts a sense of holiness, one amplified when inside the garden? Or is the ground itself holy first and foremost? Can a normal garden be holy? Or is that something reserved for just Eden?

We are told that the Garden of Eden was a spectacular garden — a beauty unlike anything else in which the presence of the Living God walked alongside man. Gardens in the Ancient World weren’t uncommon though; we know today that they were characteristically made by kings as a way to display extravagant wealth. The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, for example, was evidently a keen gardener, as he describes in the following passage:

"I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak, and called it Abundance Canal. I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince,fig, grapevine... Like a squirrel I pick fruit in the garden of delights..." [1]

But if such a garden was created by a human king, imagine what Eden must have been! Think of the similarities between the two gardens: we are told that God spreads the plants that bear seeds upon the earth and that all the trees in which there are fruit bear seeds for eating in Genesis 1:29. At the beginning of Genesis 2, God plants a garden in the land of Eden (whose name, by the way, means delight), and God causes “every type of tree, desirable to look at and good to eat” to spring from the soil (Genesis 2:9). What a paradise it must have been!

A Temple in the Midst of the Garden

But back to earthly kings: these kings would make these gardens as status symbols, as a way to show what they could accomplish. On top of that, consider the land they are doing this in — the ancient near east is a dry and desert land. To build a garden is not just to show the opulence and ability to create it, it’s also to show that you have access to enough water to maintain that garden. These kings would show their power elsewhere, too, namely through the building of monuments and temples. Most of these ancient temples followed the same pattern, and the only people allowed inside these temples were the priests. The farther into the temple you went, the more restrictive it became. These types of temples would become more common later on in the story of the Bible, and those buildings would symbolize many things, such as the idea of the entirety of God’s creation being its own temple to God. To people that lived in the ancient world, temples were where God or other gods lived and resided in our physical world — it is where their domain overlapped ours. But here, something is different. Here, at the dawn of creation, God’s first action is not to build a temple, but to plant a garden. Here, in the land of delight, God planted a garden, and that garden the first temple, because God is in the garden, and His domain overlapped with ours for the first time. In fact, the priests later on in the Bible would be told to “work and to keep” the temple — this is the exact same job description given to humanity in the Garden! God’s space is overlapping with humanities, and the main job was to help maintain it.

The idea of the creation of God and the Garden of Eden being a temple in its own right may seem like a leap to us, but to the ancient listener, the connection would have been instantly understood due to the usage of seven days. At many points, seven days is used as a common ritual for temple dedication, like in Leviticus 8:33-35, when a seven-day ceremony dedicates the tabernacle in the wilderness, or in 1 Kings 8 when Solomon dedicates the new temple in Jerusalem with back-to-back seven-day celebrations, or in Ezekiel 43, when the prophet foresees a new temple in Jerusalem and a seven-day dedication with it.

The Meaning of Rest

In Jewish thought, numbers each take on their own meaning, and the number seven is a symbol for God because seven symbolizes completeness and wholeness. After all, it was in seven days that God finished His work. On the seventh day, God rested, and God’s creation is complete. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes a little bit about this in his book The Sabbath (I wrote a little piece on it two years ago — my, how time flies). In it he writes:

The words: "On the seventh day God finished His work" (Genesis 2:2), seem to be a puzzle. Is it not said: "He rested on the seventh day"? "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth" (Exodus 20:11)? We would surely expect the Bible to tell us that on the sixth day God finished His work. Obviously, the ancient rabbis concluded, there was an act of creation on the seventh day. Just as heaven and earth were created in six days, menuha was created on the Sabbath.

...
Menuha which we usually render with "rest" means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil, strain or activity of any kind. Menuha is not a negative concept but something real and intrinsically positive. This must have been the view of the ancient rabbis if they believed that it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, that the universe would be incomplete without it.

...
To the biblical mind menuha is the same as happiness and stillness, as peace and harmony. The word with which Job described the state after life he was longing for is derived from the same root as menuha. It is the state wherein man lies still, wherein the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. It is the state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and no distrust. The essence of good life is menuha. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters" (the waters of menuhot). [2]

This word menuha can mean “rest” or “tranquility.” It’s strongly tied to the word shabbat, which means “to cease.” It’s where we get the word sabbath. On the seventh day, God ceased His work. But what does God do after he ceases His work? Does he walk away from a completed project, washing His hands of it, putting it up on a shelf along with other completed curios? Absolutely not!

For that, we need to look at another word used in talking about the Sabbath and rest. The verb is nuakh, which means “to rest” or “to settle” and the noun form is menukhah. Fun fact, nuakh is also where Noah’s name comes from, but that’s a story for another time. The word menukhah is used to describe how locusts settle in a field or how a group of people settles in a land. It implies the beginning of a new activity, something appropriate for a new time or a new place. So when God is resting at the end of creation, and when He plants a garden in Eden to celebrate, it’s not an image of God kicking back and relaxing, having spun the world into existence and now ready to leave it to its devices. Instead, it’s the point that God stopped bringing order to creation in order to sit down at what had been created. God ceases His work, and then He settles in for the long haul.

And on top of that, let’s go back to thinking about those temples we talked about earlier. Often, in those pagan temples, the center of the temple would have some sort of image or idol of the pagan god that was being worshipped. But we’re told that this isn’t the case in the Garden Temple in Eden. God doesn’t fill his new temple with an image of a false idol. He fills it with His creation — humanity — and flips the whole idea on its head in doing so. Humanity, created in imago Dei, the image of God, is placed in the Garden Temple. So that instead of having to look at some statue to be reminded of the image of our God, or of what our God is like, we can look to each other, and recognize that we have been made in His image, and be reminded of the Temple that God sanctified by the planting of a garden. We are reminded of God’s domain completely overlapping with ours, Heaven literally on Earth, His domain filling through and rushing into ours, all in the midst of a Garden Temple of new life.

[1] Translated in Stephanie Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” Garden History, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Summer, 1993), 4.

[2] Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 21-22.

Featured image courtesy of the BibleProject, available at www.bibleproject.com.