Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
There are strong indications that this tale should come after Kayin (Cain) and Havel (Abel), and not before it, since the latter introduced Death into the world; an event which logically completes the process of Creation. And besides, there is no family connection.
First, to set the scene... In 2:6 we will learn that "a mist went up from the ground"; a pun may be intended, in that in Yehudit the mist is ED (אד), whence aurally Ed-en = "the place of the mist"; however the written word, Eden (עדן), has an Ayin (ע) not an Aleph (א), so what works aurally (and this was originally oral tradition), doesn't actually work when written down.
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| Isn't that the cutest map! I've put a proper map at the side so you can place it - Eden is the white bit in the top left hand corner, where it says Iraq |
However... the mist waters the ground in which nothing yet grows, serving the same function as the RU'ACH ELOHIM of the previous fragment: the "waters" of the heavens functioning as sperm for the earth. But this is merely a disguise, an etymological invention like so many in the Tanach. Edinu was the valley separating the Tigris from the Euphrates, and these are stated as the 3rd and 4th of the four rivers flowing out of Eden (Genesis 2:14). The first is Pishon (פישון), which is described as circumflowing Havilah, north-east of Arabia on the Persian Gulf. The second is Giychon (גיחון), which we are told circumflows the land of Kush, which is usually regarded as Ethiopia, though some allusions, and geographical logic, suggest it must be an alternate name for southern Mesopotamia - or even more likely, the land on both sides of the southern Red Sea, including what today is Saudi Arabia and Yemen on the east, Sudan and Ethiopia on the west, was known generically as Kush. As far as Genesis 2 is concerned, Giychon can only have been a river of Mesopotamia, thus making the four rivers the four heads (head in Yehudit is ROSH/ראש, and the Creation happened BERE'SHIT/בראשית - so there is another piece of word-play here) of Mesopotamia, as in the illustration above, and containing the whole story in a single region: the known region of Edinu. By insisting upon Giychon as Kush, the story is extended to the Nile, and Eden becomes the whole of the Fertile Crescent - unlikely, though not impossible; and if so, then certainly a later emendation of the text.
But even this is a disguise, because the Garden of Eden is neither the whole Fertile Crescent nor a mere valley between two great rivers; it occupies a space on the continent of mythology, which is everywhere and nowhere. It is a single sacred grove, the mountain home of the fertility goddess, her husband a version of the serpent Ophis, and their Creation, the Titan who is here named Adam, but whom the Greeks called Herakles (Hercules) or Prometheus.
Isaiah 51:3 and Joel 2:3 move Eden to the desert (or it may be that abandoned Eden has become a desert), while Ezekiel 28:16 puts it on the mountain of Elohim, which he says is Mount Saphon in Ashur (Assyria), for which see the note on Graves/Patai in the previous chapter). Amos 1:5 and Ezekiel 27:23 identify it with the Assyrian Bit Adini, which lay in Armenia at the presumed sources of the Tigris and Euphrates. Jeremiah 2:18 places the Giychon on the road to Ashur, while 1 Kings 1:45 makes Giychon (גִחוֹן) the sacred pool at the foot of the Kidron Valley in Yeru-Shala'im (Jerusalem), where Shelomoh (Solomon) was anointed Prince Regent; perhaps a later attempt to identify Yeru-Shalayim with the Garden of Eden.
The land of Havilah is generally thought to be in central Arabia, despite that region's lack of rivers (today anyway; perhaps anciently there were some). Genesis 10:7 makes Havilah a son of Kush, and a descendant of Shem through Yaktan.
Whatever the Babylonian origins of Eden, this story is not about Babylon, nor about Eden at all. It is the vital story with which Frazer opens "The Golden Bough", of the sacred king appointed to be spouse of the fertility goddess and guardian of her sacred grove.
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The order of Creation is varied between the two versions:
Genesis
1:1-2:3
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Genesis
2:4-3:24
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Heaven
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Earth
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Earth
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Heaven
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Light
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Mist
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Firmament
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Man
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Dry
land
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Trees
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Grass
and trees
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Rivers
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Heavenly
Bodies
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Mammals
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Sea-monsters
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Birds
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Birds
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Woman
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Mammals
and reptiles
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Humans
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We have here an entirely different version of Creation, and a different book from which the story is taken: "The Book of the Generations of the Heavens and the Earth". It was probably written (created and memorised; it was unlikely to have been written down, as writing for daily purposes had not yet been invented) as the text of a mimetic play to be performed at the sacred shrine, to celebrate the annual ceremony of marriage of the sacred king to the high priestess. The man chosen to be sacred king (May King) for the year would play Adam, the earth-god, and the part of Chavah would be split. As goddess and guardian of the shrine she would have overseen the rite from her high place (as Athena did in Athens); this role would have been played by the High Priestess. As maiden (May Queen) being married to the earth-god, she would have been played by a vestal virgin, like her sacred husband an initiate of the cult, probably brought up from birth by the priestesses; both of them Nazirites. A sacred marriage would have been performed, including ritual copulation in public. Various preparatory rites would have preceded it, and in some very ancient societies (graves in Somerset, for example, confirm this) the couple would then be ritually strangled, their bodies cut up, their blood drunk, their flesh eaten, their bones placed in the ground, in order that the earth receive the sacrifice and become fertile – the original eucharist. The marriage would either have taken place annually, or every 7th or 8th year, depending on the cult, or when Saturn completed its celestial cycle and returned to Cancer; with the early Beney Yisra-El, until the time of King David who served one such term in Chevron and then four in Yeru-Shalayim, the practice was septennial (seven years).
The Biblical version of the story, however, has been heavily bowdlerised, and we must reconstruct it.
Verses 4-6 give us the sacred mist enacting Creation. Played by an actor, this is the inseminating Ru'ach Elohim, the agent of the serpent-god. In the cult ritual, an actual snake would have been used, though one that had been trained. The India cobra-training which is now a circus trick remembers this ancient art, as does the story of Mosheh's first visit to the palace of Pharaoh (Exodus 5:1ff).
Verses 7-9. The goddess creates Man (masculine only), moulding him out of the earth. We watch her knead the clay and breathe on it. The sleeping actor comes to life. It is his task as earth-god to give names to all the Earth's creatures, which he now does. Verses 19-20 belong here.
Verses 10-14. The rivers. Possibly a late emendation, to give the tale a historical and geographical link. More likely symbolic: the four heads and the four corners are the classic ancient division, reflected in the Cross and the Mandala, and in the Yisra-Eli concept of the "four quarters of the heavens". This is the kingdom of the serpent-god, and of course rivers are always personified as snakes. In verse 14 the snake is "cursed": ARUR ATAH - though surely ARUR - ארור - is not a cursing but a naming of him, or as it now transpires, her: ARURU ATAH - ארורו אתה - "you are the goddess Aruru, whose other name is Tahamat" - which should therefore be ARURU AT.
Verses 15-17. In the Babylonian myth of Creation, Marduk gave his kinsmen charge over Creation; here the goddess does the same. The trees of the Knowledge of Good-and-Evil and of Life would have served as sacred pillars for the temple, possibly a two-columned entrance such as Bo'az and Yachin provided to the later Solomonic Temple in Yeru-Shalayim (Jerusalem); but given that most "natural" temples – i.e. unconstructed sites consecrated as holy and composed of trees, caves, rocks etc - consisted of either 7 or 12 trees, we can presume that these were merely two of the many, albeit the most important.
Verses 18, 21-25: Verse 22 is the key to this. VA YIVEN YHVH ELOHIM HA TSELAH ASHER LAKACH MIN HA ADAM - ויבן יהוה אלהים את הצלע אשר לקח מן האדם. Usually rendered as:
Verses 18, 21-25: Verse 22 is the key to this. VA YIVEN YHVH ELOHIM HA TSELAH ASHER LAKACH MIN HA ADAM - ויבן יהוה אלהים את הצלע אשר לקח מן האדם. Usually rendered as:
"Then YHVH Elohim made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man."YIVEN (יבן) means to build. TSELAH - צלע - as we have seen previously, does indeed mean "a rib", but buildings can have ribs too, and this one was part of the structure of the Temple, indeed quite specifically the women's court, from which the main courtyard was reached by a staircase containing fifteen steps, one for each day before the full moon. The Redactor chose to misunderstand this, for reasons that are obvious. The verse should translate as:
"Out of the women's court of the Temple, a maiden was brought forth for Adam."The wedding ceremony would have been very formal, each protagonist reciting the formula "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh" in much the manner of a modern wedding vow ("till death us do part" etc). Verse 24 is an addition to give validity to formal marriage; the fertility goddess would not have approved of, let alone required, marriage in this sense: what counted was the consummation and the posterity, not the probate on the pre-nuptial agreement.
And then Chapter 3. The ending of chapter 2 where it does is logical, for in the original there is nothing more to say. The tree of the garden was the sacred tree, probably a willow in this case, under which the high priestess, through her sacred serpent, would deliver oracles. To eat of that tree was literally to receive knowledge of good and evil, for one of her tasks was to pronounce judgment, moral and legal; it was also her task to explain the mysteries, hence it is the fruit of life and death as well. The Genesis story has a problem, in that there appear to be two trees. In fact, there was only one, its fruit metaphorical; the aim of the story in Genesis is to anathematize the oracles, which were by the time of the Redactor considered idolatrous. That the serpent should speak is not surprising: oracles were always given "through the mouth of the serpent", which we will witness again and again in the Tanach, most especially with Mosheh's personal Caduceus Pole, the brass banner Nechushtan. The Edenic serpent would have been acted by a priestess in serpent mask, though, as in the witch's scene in Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 1), we can assume that hallucinatory drugs were also involved, most commonly haoma.
The addition of guilt has always appalled me in this fable. Why did they who wrote the final version of this myth feel so ashamed of human nakedness? Why so scared of the legitimate human marriage? But their Puritanism leads the story. Man and woman are driven apart, clothed, unsexed except within the strict rules of marriage. The regenerative serpent is not simply bifurcated but broken, the priestess herself forced to crush its head with her heel. Where the cult was originally designed to foster fertility, now conception, and parturition, become a form of punishment. Where men could once delight in women, and vice versa (pun intended!), now sex becomes a hair shirt and their lives are reduced to toil. And worst of all - you shall wear clothing and earn your living farming. The ruination and enslavement of human life through the puritanism of Original Sin.
Verse 22. And yet! "Man is become as one of us" - the inference is that knowledge of good and evil was previously reserved for the gods, but that Humankind has now acquired access to that knowledge, and that the source and key to that knowledge is sex itself, the means of survival and continuation, of continuing Creation, which Humans from now on can take care of for themselves.
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| Gonzalo Pérez: Saint Michael Vanquishing The Devil, in the National Gallery of Scotland |
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For notions of Paradise and a Fall, see Graves/Patai p78; also for the Akkadian myth of Adapa, found on tablets at Tel Amarna, Akhenaten's capital.
The Persian (Zoroastrian) myth of Meshia and Meshiane, who live on fruit alone until the demon Ahriman persuades them to deny God... out of this comes the serpent as Devil and the Devil as fallen Angel... but also the Norse Creation myth of Ask and Embla.
The Greek Garden of the Hesperides, whose apple trees bore golden fruit, was guarded by the serpent Ladon (also known as the Drakon Hesperion, whence our word "dragon"); it belonged to Hera before she married Zeus. Ladon was eventually destroyed by Herakles with Zeus' blessing (because Zeus too wanted to stop the goddess cults). Like the Garden of Eden, it was jewelled; Perseus went there with the help of Athene, goddess of Wisdom.
The Sumerian jewelled garden, visited by Gilgamesh, owned by Siduri, goddess of Wisdom; the sun god Shamash was its guardian (the fire-wheel is one of his symbols of course).
Would there have been owls in the garden of Eden? Just a thought. They were generally sacred to the wisdom goddesses. And likewise with the later Chochmah (Job 12:12, Proverbs 8:1 et al), if the orthodox (both my links here are to orthodox translations) are not misreading the opening chapters of Proverbs and finding a goddess where none existed; is she a variant of this same wisdom-goddess, or a late Hellenic intrusion, out of Sophia (whose name gave us the word "philosophy")?
And lastly, based on the above, but postponed for answering when we get to that book: can we identify the later female Judges with these oracular shrines? Logically we can.
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