The Garden of Eden as God's First Sanctuary
2013; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0792-3910
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Religion, Digital Communication
ResumoVisualization can be a powerful tool for understanding the Bible. Many people relate to the Bible as a book to be read, so that the fact that for most of its history the Bible was heard, rather than read, often comes as a surprise. Engaging with the Bible aurally relies on the listener's ability to visualize the heard words--to concretely see the pictures behind the words. These visual images, without words, convey many of the Bible's important ideas. When I applied visualization to reading the Garden of Eden story, a dramatic and nuanced picture emerged. Attention to the story's visual setting and details described in the Bible made me aware of specific visual, concrete imagery. The new layers of meaning that emerged, some of them alluded to in later biblical texts and some in midrashim, are mostly ignored by mainstream Jewish interpretations of the Eden story. Most of us, when asked to describe the setting of the Garden of Eden, picture the tree, the snake and the woman, sometimes with the man in the background, and little more. This changes after we pay specific attention to the visual setting. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom He had formed. And from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad. A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches ... The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till and tend it (Gen: 2:8-10, 15). They heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden ... and the man and his wife hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden ... So the Lord God banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and stationed east of the garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen: 3:8, 23-24). Putting the story's visual clues together leads to placing Eden on a mountain top, because the rivers flow downward from there. It is an enclosed space with only one entrance, for otherwise the cherubim could not have successfully guarded access to the tree in the center of the Garden. The Garden is oriented eastward. And finally, included in the picture of the Garden are cherubim and a fiery ever-turning sword. As each detail builds on the previous one, a complex scene emerges. Eden is not only a lush garden but also a sacred space, sharing characteristics with other mountain-top shrines found throughout the ancient Near East. The parallels between the Garden of Eden, the desert Tabernacle and the later Holy Temple in Jerusalem and other Near Eastern sanctuaries are striking. The wonder is why this connection is generally not apparent to the average reader of the Bible. When visualization first led me to these parallels, I was not aware that scholars have written about the Garden of Eden as a sacred sanctuary. Their articles are based on studies of ancient languages, exploration of archeological sites and intensive comparative textual study. (1) Amazingly, any reader can also arrive at this same understanding through the simple process of visualizing the text. That Eden was originally understood as a sanctuary can be confirmed by examining the Bible for supporting evidence. A partial listing includes the description of the Tabernacle as God's dwelling place: And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them (Ex. 25:8). Implicit in the Garden story is the idea that Eden was God's dwelling place, where He dwelt in close proximity to the first man and woman. In Deuteronomy the Temple is called God's habitation (12:4). While this is not the precise language used in Genesis, the Garden is portrayed as the place where God's presence abided. When They heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day, they recognized Him (implicitly from other encounters), and Adam and his wife hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Gen. …
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