A Royal Garden The Ideology Of Eden

Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 2014
Vol. 28, No. 1, XXX-XXX, http://dx.doi.org/
A Royal Garden: The Ideology of Eden
Nicolas Wyatt
Snailmail address: 22 Hillway, London N6 6QA/New College, Edinburgh EH1 2LX
Email: niqmad3@gmail.com
ABSTRACT: Before “Paradise” became concerned with explaining the pre-
sent “fallen” condition of humanity, due to a primal sin, which later also be-
came eschatologised into the locus of a human post-mortem felicitous destiny,
it already symbolised royal power and the king’s role in the ritual manage-
ment 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.
Key Words Adam, Eden, Exile, Jerusalem, Kingship, Royal Ideology, Sacred
Tree, Zion
Introduction
It is probably fair to say that the narrative in Genesis 2-3 is one of the
foundation documents of western culture. It has certainly determined the
whole self-understanding of humanity in Jewish and Christian thought, with
an appreciable influence on Muslim anthropology. It has been universally
interpreted throughout most of its history as treating the creation of man,
followed by his “fall”—however that is understood—and giving rise to our
present universal “fallen” human nature. Paradise has been “lost,” to be
“restored” in the future, at the last trump.
But many elements within the story, both narrative and incidental features,
suggest that the original author(s) may have understood it very differently,
and as referring to their own time, and to conditions only recently imposed
upon them, only a much later Jewish, Christian and particularly Augustinian
hermeneutic giving rise to the final lapsarian interpretation. If we examine
these clues, we shall be enabled to appreciate the specifically royal
ideological ties which bind the story to an entire nexus of beliefs, and to

2 Nicolas Wyatt
iconographic, architectural and ritual forms. These in turn have a bearing on
why paradise subsequently became an eschatological theme, and also explain
many of the features of its exposition in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Within Jewish and early Christian thought the Enochic and similar
apocalyptic literature moved in an eschatological direction, with significant
input from the prevailing Persian and Greek cultures, as argued by J.
Bremmer.1
This material, with celestial and remote conceptions of Paradise,
remained in tension with the centre-of-the-world imagery to which our
present discussion will ultimately lead us.
The text of Genesis 2,4b-3,24
Let us begin with a brief study of the text, concentrating on those features
which are particularly relevant to the issues under discussion. My translation
runs as follows, arranged to indicate the quasi-poetic nature of the
composition:
a) The Creation of the Man and Woman
2,4b On the day when the Lord of the gods (yhwh ’ĕlōhîm) made earth and
heaven,
5 before any plant of the steppe was on the earth,
or any herb of the steppe had sprouted
for the Lord of the gods had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth,
and there was no man to till the soil;
6 a mist (’ēd—or perhaps rather: a mountain?) was rising up from the
underworld
and was watering the whole surface of the ground.
7 Then the Lord of the gods fashioned (wayyiṣer) the man (hā’ādām) from
dust2
from the ground,
and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
and the man became a living being.
8 And the Lord of the gods planted a garden in the beginning (miqqedem)
and he placed there the man whom he had fashioned.
9 Then the Lord of the gods caused to grow from the ground every tree
that is pleasant to the sight and good for eating,
and the tree of life in the middle of the garden,
and the tree of knowing all things.3
1. See his article “The birth of Paradise: to early Christianity via Greece, Persia and
Israel”, forthcoming in A. Scafi (ed.) The Cosmography of Paradise, Warburg
Institute colloquia (London: The Warburg Institute; Turin: Nino Aragno).
2. See discussion of c
āpār in Z. Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden
(New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press 2013) pp. 80-83. He translated
it as “clod”. This volume appeared only when this article was at proof stage. I have
been able to comment on only a few of his interesting interpretations.
3. Hebrew haddac
at ṭôb wārāc
—lit. “knowing good and evil” or “the knowledge of
good and evil.”

A Royal Garden: The Ideology of Eden 3
10 A river came out of Eden to irrigate the garden,
and from here it divided into four sources (rā’šîm).
11 The name of the first is Pishon:
this encircles the whole land of Havilah, where gold is found.
12 And the gold of this land is pure.
Bdellium and carnelian are also found there.
13 And the name of the second is Gihon (gîḥôn):
this encircles the whole land of Cush.
14 And the name of the third river is Tigris:
this flows this side of Assyria.
And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 And the Lord of the gods took the man and put him in the garden of
Eden to till it (lĕc
obdāh)
and care for it (lĕšomrāh).
16 Then the Lord of the gods commanded the man,
“From every tree in the garden you may indeed eat.
17 But from the tree of knowing all things you may not eat.
For on the day that you eat it you will certainly die…”
18 And the Lord of the gods said,
“It is not good for the man to be alone.
I shall make him a helper suitable for him.”
19 So the Lord of the gods fashioned from the ground all the living things
of the country,
and all the birds of heaven,
and he brought (them) to the man
to see what he should call them.
And what the man called every living thing,
that became its name.
20 Then the man gave names to all the cattle,
and to the birds of heaven,
and to every living thing of the country.
But for the man (himself) he did not find a suitable helper.
21 Then the Lord of the gods caused a deep sleep to fall on the man.
And he fell asleep.
Then he took one of his ribs4
,
and closed up the flesh in its place.
22 And the Lord of the gods turned the rib which he had taken from the
man into a woman,
and he brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said:
4 Zevit, What Really Happened, pp. 140-50, has an interesting alternative to this,
seeing ṣelac
as “penis” (!). But the expression ’aḥat miṣṣalc
ōtâw would appear to
preclude this.

4 Nicolas Wyatt
“At last!
Bone from my bone!
Flesh from my flesh!
This shall be called woman (’iššâ ),
for from man (mē’ îš ) this was taken.”
24 So a man supports5
his father and mother and cleaves to his wife,
and they are one flesh.
25 And the two of them were naked (c
ărûmmîm), the man and his wife,
and they were not ashamed.
b) The “Fall” of the Man and Woman
3,1 Now the snake was wiser (c
ārûm) than all the living things of the
country which the Lord of the gods had made,
and he said to the woman,
“Did God really say,
‘You shall not eat from every tree (in) the garden?’”
2 And the woman said to the snake,
“ From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat,
3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden,
God said,
‘You may not eat from it, nor may you touch it, in case you
Die.’”
4 And the snake said to the woman,
“You will not die.
5 For God knows that on the day that you eat from it
your eyes will be opened
and you will be gods (kē’lōhîm6
), knowing all things.”
6 Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food,
and that it was delightful to the eyes,
and that the tree was to be desired to make (one) wise,
and she took (one) of its fruit and ate it,
and gave it as well to her husband who was with her,
and he ate.
7 And both their eyes were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they plucked fig-tree leaves
and made themselves loin-cloths.
8 Then they heard the sound of the Lord of the gods strolling in the garden
5 Following the insight of Zevit, What Really Happened, pp. 156-57.
6. I interpret the idiom here as kaph veritatis, indicating identity rather than similarity.
See B. K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax
(Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), p. 203. They defined the usage thus: “the
logical outcome of comparison is correspondence or identity.” This is integral to the
royal ideological slant of the narrative.

in the cool of the day,7
and the man and the woman hid themselves from the presence of the
Lord of the gods
in the midst of the trees in the garden.
9 And the Lord of the gods called out to the Man, and said to him,
“Where are you?”
10 And he replied,
“I heard the sound (you were making) in the garden
and I was afraid because I am naked (c
êrōm).
So I hid.”
11 Then he said,
“Who told you that you were naked8
?
Have you eaten from the tree
from which I said that you must not? ”
12 And the man replied,
“The woman whom you gave (me) to be with me,
she gave me from the tree, and I ate (from it).”
13 And the Lord of the gods said to the woman,
“What is this that you have done?”
And the woman said,
“The snake deceived me, so I ate (from it).”
14 Then the Lord of the gods said to the snake,
“What is this that you have done?
Cursed are you above every animal
and above every living thing of the country:
On your belly (c
al gĕḥonĕkâ) you shall proceed.
And dust shall you eat all the days of your life.
15 And I shall establish enmity between you and the woman
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”9
16 To the woman he said:
“I shall make your childbearing pain very great.
In pain you shall bring forth children,
7. Given the symbolic aspect of Eden discussed here, the source of this figure is
perhaps to be understood as a cultic procession, with the image of the deity carried
out of the cella, perhaps for evening sacrifices: N. Wyatt, Myths of Power. A Study of
Royal Myth and Ideology in Ugaritic and Biblical Tradition (Ugaritisch-Biblische
Literatur, 13; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1996, p. 369.
8. Paronomasia: “naked” (c
êrōm, c
ărûmmîm) and “wise” (c
ārûm). Wisdom is in part
consciousness of one’s nakedness.
9. Is this a veiled allusion to the king’s role as re-enactor of the Chaoskampf in his
battles? On the theme see N. Wyatt “There’s Such Divinity Doth Hedge a King”.
Selected Essays of Nicolas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament
Literature (SOTS Monograph Series; London: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 151-189.

6 Nicolas Wyatt
yet for your husband shall be your desire,
and he shall rule over you.”
17 And to Adam10
he said:
“Because you obeyed the voice of your wife
and ate from the tree which I commanded you,
‘You may not eat from it!’
Cursed is the ground because of you.
In distress you shall work11
it all the days of your life
18 but thorn and thistle it will grow for you.
So you shall eat the vegetation of the steppe.
19 By the sweat of your brow you shall eat food,12
until you return to the ground,
for from it you were taken.
Dust indeed you are,13
and to dust you will return.”
20 Then the man named his wife Eve (ḥavvâ ),
because she was the mother of all living things.
21 Then the Lord of the gods made clothes of skin for Adam and his wife,
and clothed them.
22 Then the Lord of the gods said,
“Look! The man has become one of us14
, knowing everything
10. Or “Man” as name: there is no article. Similarly at 3,21. In 2,24, in contrast, the
article is lacking because the term is indefinite.
11. MT “eat” (tĕ’ōkălennāh). Perhaps to be corrected to “work” (tac
abdennāh)? Thus
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia apparatus, p. 5 (consonantal text to read hnlk)t for
hndb(t).
12. It is tempting to compare the phraseology here with the dream of Nebuchadrezzar
as interpreted by Daniel: Daniel 4,2-30. The book of Daniel is of course from much
later than Genesis 2-3 (see discussion below on dating), but may itself contain earlier
elements. The passage in question—also subversive of royal ideology—may con-
ceivably have been told originally of Nabonidus, and originated in the sixth century:
P. R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration. A Study of Hebrew Thought in the Sixth
Century BC (Old Testament Library; London: SCM Press, 1968), p. 36 and n. 97,
citing W. von Soden, “Eine babylonische Volksüberlieferung von Nabonid in den
Daniel-erzählungen,” ZAW 53 (1935), pp. 81-89.
13. Rather than “For dust you are.” Emphatic kî: cf. for Ugaritic C. H. Gordon,
Ugaritic Textbook (Analecta Orientalia, 38; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute,
1965), p. 76, §9.17; J. Tropper, Ugaritischer Grammatik (Alter Orient und Altes
Testament, 273; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 20122
), pp. 809-810, §85.7; and for Hebrew,
M. J. Dahood, Psalms III (AB, 17a; New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 402-406;
Waltke and O’Connor, Hebrew Syntax, p. 204, §11.2.9d. The bicolon is asyndetic,
not explanatory.
14. The plural usage implies the divine council as the place where these words are
uttered. On the concept see H. W. Robinson “The council of Yahweh,” JThS 45
(1944), pp. 151-157; F. M. Cross, “The council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah,” JNES
12 (1953), pp. 274-277; N. Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 338-352. Notice also the kaph

(lit. good and evil).
So now, lest he stretch out his hand and take also from the tree
of life, and eat (it) and live for ever . . . ”15
23 So the Lord of the gods expelled him from the Garden of Eden,
(to prevent him) from16
tilling the ground from which he had been
taken.
24 So he drove the man out.
And he set in front of the Garden of Eden cherubs17
and the flame of the whirling sword,
to guard the way to the tree of life.
Discussion of the text
a) The rivers
Let us begin our discussion with the matter of the rivers.18
The rivers of Eden
echo the widespread appearance of four streams diverging from a common
source in ancient Near Eastern glyptic art. In both cases, it is one stream
which becomes many, here apparently outside the garden (Genesis 2.10). We
shall return below to the identity of these streams, and their significance for
the garden’s location.
veritatis (see n. 6). This background is the basis for my translation “the Lord of the
gods” (yhwh ’ĕlōhîm).
15. The sentence remains unfinished.
16. This unusual translation will be justified in the discussion below.
17. On these see N. Wyatt, “Grasping the Griffin: identifying and characterizing the
griffin in West Semitic tradition,” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 1
(2008), pp. 29-39. Griffins and cherubs were both winged quadrupeds, the former
with falconiform, later aquiline, heads, the latter with human heads. The biblical
seraphim were probably griffins rather than snakes as commonly supposed. See
further discussion below.
18. See E. D. van Buren, The Flowing Vase and the God with Streams (Berlin:
Schoetz, 1933); E. Noort, “Gan-Eden in the context of the mythology of the Hebrew
Bible,” in G. Luttikhuizen (ed.), Paradise Interpreted (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999, pp. 21-
36; T. Stordalen, “Heaven on earth―or not? Jerusalem as Eden in biblical literature,”
in K. Schmid and C. Riedweg (eds), Beyond Eden (FAT, 2.34; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2008), pp. 28-57; id., Echoes of Eden. Genesis 2-3 and Symbolism of the
Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and
Theology, 25; Leuven, Peeters, 2000), pp. 273-84; N. Stone, “The four rivers that
flowed from Eden,” in Schmid and Riedweg, Beyond Eden, pp. 227-250. The last of
these scholars summarised (pp. 227-28) the tradition from the Lives of the Desert
Fathers of the six inquisitive monks who searched for Paradise, finally discovering
that it was situated on top of a mountain. This tradition parallels the Jewish one of the
four rabbis entering Paradise: see G. Macaskill, “Paradise in the New Testament,” pp.
64-81 (69, and references, n. 28), in M. Bockmuehl and G.G. Stroumsa (eds),
Paradise in Antiquity. Jewish and Christian Views (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).

8 Nicolas Wyatt
b) A mountain tradition?
But the first problem to treat is the ultimate source of these rivers, the one
primary stream. Is it, as most translators have it, a distillation from a
mysterious “mist” (’ēd 19
) which wells up from the underworld? This would
have no obvious parallel in the iconographic tradition, however realistic it
may be. Cyrus Gordon’s suggestion that the term should be seen as relating
to a Cretan (Minoan) term for or name of a mountain, as in Mount Ida, the
traditional birthplace of Zeus, is intriguing. This would allow harmonisation
with the Eden of Ezekiel 28, which is situated on a mountain. Gordon noted
that
Ida, the high mountain in central Crete, was associated in antiquity with
artistic workmanship. The name “Ida” may be the clue to the source of major
elements in the Hebrew creation account, which are not of Egyptian or
Mesopotamian origin. Gen 2,6 states that “’ēd rises out of the earth and
waters all the surface of the ground.” The traditional rendering of “id as “mist”
and the pan-Babylonian identification with Sumerian id “river” are unsatis-
factory. Rivers do not rise; they descend. What rises from the earth to water
the ground is a mountain carrying its streams to the surrounding countryside.
Accordingly, it is worth considering that “ēd means Ida, pointing to East
Mediterranean elements in the Biblical Creation. There is one objection,
however, that requires clarification; namely, that the Greek form of Ida begins
with long î-, whereas “ēd reflects short i-.20
Gordon also cited hdm id in the Ugaritic text KTU 1.4 i 34, though this text is
preferably to be corrected to hdm *il, and hdm here is in any case probably
Hurrian (atmi, admi), not Minoan.21
But this caveat does not affect Gordon’s
overall argument. Further support for such a harmonisation can be found in
the vision of a future paradise in Isaiah 11,6-8 (see v. 9).22
And even if
Gordon’s particular argument be rejected, it remains a useful heuristic tool in
pointing us in the right direction: the welling up of the primal stream still
implies an upland, that is mountain, scenario. For what it is worth, it should
19. Cf. Akkadian edû, with the sense of flood, high tide, wave: A. Leo Oppenheim
(ed.), The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 4, E (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1958),
pp. 35-36, J. Black et al., A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (Santag, 5; Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 20022)
, p. 66. LXX πηγή already interpreted: “spring, source.” On this
term cf. Hesiod, Theogony, p. 282.
17. C. H. Gordon, “Homer and the Bible, the origin and character of East
Mediterranean literature,” HUCA 26, 1955, pp. 43-108 (62); cited N. Wyatt, The
Mythic Mind. Essays on Cosmology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature
(London: Equinox, 2005), p. 227 n. 12.
21. W. G. E. Watson, Lexical Studies in Ugaritic (Aula Orientalis Supplementa, 19;
Barcelona: AULA, 2007), pp. 43-44. Note the Hurrian elements adduced by Zevit,
What Really Happened, pp. 112-13, 190.
22. See N. Wyatt, Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Ancient Near East (The
Biblical Seminar, 85; Sheffield: Equinox, 2001), pp. 244-245.

be observed that on the Mari fresco, to be discussed below, the foreground at
the bottom shows a scale-pattern, which is the conventional way of
representing mountains in glyptic art.
The mountain would, as in the description here, not only arise out of the
netherworld, but implicitly afford an entrance to it, a feature of cosmic
centres such as this garden represents, if my argument is cogent. This
centrality is borne out by the reference to the four rivers, logically
(schematically) radiating out from the centre. This approach would also
obviate the necessity felt by some scholars to see in Genesis 2-3 and Ezekiel
28 two different conceptions of Eden (one with, and one without, a mountain).
It makes more sense to see two allusions to the same common symbolic
tradition, and indeed in this instance to see one (Genesis) as literarily
dependent on the other (Ezekiel), as we shall see. Margaret Barker’s
observations may also allow us to see these gardens harmonised in Isaiah 14,
which, while not explicitly Edenic, surely represents the same mythical nexus,
though it has now diverged, and deals more specifically with a mortuary
context. In Isaiah 14, the disobedient royal figure is the king of Babylon, or
some other great power, but the narrative is a West Semitic myth. Barker
argued that:
Ezekiel’s oracles [in chapter 28] are clearly in the same setting [as that of
Isaiah 14]. The first deals with a fallen god, and the second apparently with
the first man in Eden. If we read the two together, in the light of the fallen
figure in Isaiah, we see that the two figures are one, and that the problems in
reading this text come from our using categories and distinctions quite alien
to Ezekiel. The fallen god and the figure expelled from Eden were one and
the same. Thus Ezekiel forms a link between Isaiah 14 and Genesis 2-3.
Ezekiel’s Eden is a strange magical place: I believe that we glimpse here the
mythology of the old temple … 23
The kind of intertextuality Barker recognised here is exactly the level of
sensitive comprehension that is essential for the appreciation of the mythical
world of biblical literature. Furthermore, Bernard Gosse, followed by Terje
Stordalen, also noted that the oracle of Ezekiel 28,12b-15, directed in its
present form against the ruler of Tyre, would originally have been addressed
to the high priest (for which we should perhaps read rather the king) in
Jerusalem.24
The question is even worth raising—though any answer must
remain speculative—as to whether the melek ṣôr in 28,11 (and the
corresponding nĕgîd ṣôr in 28,1) really does designate the ruler of Tyre, and
not rather the “ruler of the rock”, that is, the sacred mountain in Jerusalem.
23. M. Barker, The Older Testament. The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal
Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1987), pp. 234-
235.
24. B. Gosse, “Ezéchiel 28,11-19 et les détournements de malédictions,” Biblische
Notizen 44 (1988), pp. 30-38; Stordalen, “Heaven on earth,” p. 33.

10 Nicolas Wyatt
This is all the more plausible in a world of divine kingship, since “Rock” (ṣôr)
was a title of Yahweh himself.25
We may further note that Targum Pseudo-
Jonathan on Genesis 2,15 involves an allusion to a mountain; though it is not
explicitly identified with the garden, this may be implicit:
And the Lord God took Adam from the mountain of the service, the place
from where he had been created, and made him dwell in the Garden of Eden,
so as to be serving in the Torah and observing its commandments.26
The location of Eden at the centre of the world
Much ink has also been spilt on the vexed problem of the location of Eden,
but the idea of four rivers radiating out from a single source (the reverse of
what happens in nature, except at deltas) suggests the idea of a centre and its
relationship to the cardinal points. Equally artificial is the location of El’s
dwelling in Ugaritic tradition, which is also a cosmic centre, as described in
Ugaritic texts KTU 1.2 iii 4, 1.3 v 5-7, 1.4 iv 21-22, 1.5 vi [-3 to -1, to be
restored], 1.6 i 33-34:
Then he set his face indeed towards El at the source of the rivers,
amidst the springs of the two deeps . . . 27
Though I previously took these rivers to be plural (four in number,
corresponding to those of Genesis 2),28
I think now that they may well be
rather two, as riverine aspects of the two deeps of the second colon cited.29
One lay above the firmament, and one below the earth or netherworld, as in
Hebrew cosmology. A remarkable citation of this in the Qur’an (18.61-62)
indicates the longevity of the cosmology behind the formula.30
The identity of the rivers
As to the identity of the rivers, two, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are
immediately recognisable. The other two have been regarded as problematic.
The Gihon was identified with the Nile by the LXX of Jeremiah 2,18,
followed by Josephus, Antiquities 1.1.331
, who also in the same passage
25. See M. C. Korpel, “Rock,” pp. 709-10 in K. van der Toorn, B. Becking and P. W.
van der Horst (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
19992
).
26. ET M. Maher, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis. Translated, with Introduction
and Notes (The Aramaic Bible, 18; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992) p. 23.
27. N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit (The Biblical Seminar, 53; London:
Equinox, 2nd
edition 2002), p. 52 n. 64.
28. Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 52 n. 63.
29. Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, p. 196. Cf. D. T. Tsumura, Creation and Destruction.
A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake IN:
Eisenbraus, 2005), p. 136 n. 59.
30. Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, p. 227 n. 13.
31. Cited as 1.39 by J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis
(ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910), p. 61.

identified the Pishon with the Ganges. But Jeremiah himself had used the
term šiḥôr for the Nile32
, and the explicit identification with the Gihon can
thus only be dated with certainty from the time of the Greek translation, ca
300 BC. On the contrary, it was the Pishon that was interpreted by Manfred
Görg33
as the Nile, from the Egyptian expression p3 šny, “the encompassing
one,” the river being conceptualised as an extension of the cosmic ocean
surrounding the world. This is perhaps more compelling than Neiman’s
proposal34
to link the Pishon to Hebrew peten, “snake,” a metaphor for the
serpentine ocean, though the term discerned by del Olmo,35
who proposed
that bāšān (Ugaritic bṯn, usually cited as cognate with peten) should be
recognised as having serpentine and maritime associations in various
geographical contexts, followed up by myself, 36
seems to be another
reasonable etymological possibility. So I have suggested in a discussion of
oceanic language that in Deuteronomy 33,22 we should understand the text
as follows:
Dān gûr c
aryê Dan, the whelp of a sea-monster
yĕzannēq min-habbāšān springs forth from the Serpent (sc. the Ocean).
This meaning is concordant with Dan’s original maritime location in the
Shephelah (cf. Judges 5,17) before its migration to northern Galilee. A link
with the sea peoples is suggested for Dan and Asher by Judges 5,17 and for
Zebulun by Genesis 49,13. The Egyptian and Ugaritic etymological
proposals for Pishon are both attractive.
32. This was explained as “the pond of Horus” (š[y] ḥr) by L. Koehler and W.
Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1999), iv p. 1477. They followed the proposal of Erman-Grapow, Handwörter-
buch, 4: p. 397). The older assessment by F. Brown, S.R. Driver and C.A. Briggs, A
Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), p.
1009, that it is based on the lemma šḥr, “black”, is also a possible explanation,
though they labelled it “doubtful.”
The reference to the Gihon in Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) 24.27 does not, contrary
to some views, identify the Gihon and the Nile. See below at n. 52.
33. M. Görg, “Zur Identität des Pishon (Gen 2,11),” Biblische Notizen 40 (1987), pp.
11-13, endorsed by Stordalen Echoes of Eden, p. 278 n. 150.
34. D. Neiman, “Gihon and Pishon: mythological antecedents of the two enigmatic
rivers of Eden,” Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies
(Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1977), pp. 321-328; Wyatt, The Mythic
Mind, p. 192.
35. G. del Olmo Lete, “Bašan o el “infierno” cananeo,” in P. Xella (ed.), Cananea
Selecta. Festschrift für Oswald Loretz zum 60. Geburtstag = Studi Epigrafici e
Linguistici 5 (1988), pp. 51-60.
36. Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, p. 204. See reasons ad loc. for taking other Hebrew
leonine terms as synonymous with labbu (lit. “lion”) with the sense of “(sea)
monster.”

12 Nicolas Wyatt
Regarding the Gihon of Genesis 2,13, Neiman also proposed an
interesting link between the Hebrew gîḥôn, which he associated with the
snake’s belly (gāḥôn—gĕḥonĕkâ) in Genesis 3,14 and with Greek
ʾΩκεανος.37
The latter, in encircling the Greek world, is like the Gihon,
which “encircles the whole land of Cush”. Whether or not this be regarded as
a viable etymology, it is at least a likely paronomasia, and the Gihon also had
a local reference, as the stream supplying Jerusalem with water, and also used
in royal rituals, as in 1 Kings 1,33-34. 38-40 (Solomon’s coronation), and
presumably in Psalm 110,7:
Minnaḥal badderek yišteh From the stream from the throne he
drinks,
c
al-kēn yārîm rō’š and thus he raises up heads38
I have taken derek in this latter passage to represent the idea of “dominion”,
translated here metonymically as “throne”, to be compared with Ugaritic drkt,
as perhaps in Job 12,24 and Psalm 107,40. The Gihon in Jerusalem is perhaps
also alluded to in Psalm 36,9-10:
yirwĕyun middešen bêtekâirw They are filled with the abundance of
your house,
wĕnaḥal *c
ēdenĕkâ tašqēm and the stream of your Eden gives them
to drink.
kî-c
immĕkâ mĕqôr ḥayyîm For with you is the fountain of life:
*bĕ’ērĕkâ nir’ê-’ôr in your well a light is seen
reading the Masoretic text plural c
ădānêkâ (“in your delights”) as singular
*c
ēdenĕkâ, and Masoretic bĕ’ôrkâ (“in your light”) as *bĕ’ērĕkâ (“in your
well”), in parallel with mĕqôr, “fountain,” of the preceding colon. “They” of
the first colon here are “the gods and the sons of man” of v. 8.39
The stream is
to be associated with the throne, as will be demonstrated below. If the
proposed singular reading *c
ēdenĕkâ be accepted, we have a clear, implicit
identification of Eden with Jerusalem, since “your house” of the preceding
colon can only be the Jerusalem temple.40
The implications of the identity of the rivers for locating Eden
What are we to make of these riverine data in terms of actually locating the
garden? It hardly provides compelling evidence for a Mesopotamian location,
as for those who took the name Eden (c
ēden) to represent the Sumerian EDIN
37. Neiman, “Gihon and Pishon’; Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, p. 192. LXX for gîḥôn is
Γηων.
38. See Wyatt, Myths of Power, p. 54.
39. See Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 66-67.
40. For further examples of prophetic allusions of this kind see Ezekiel 47.1-12
(discussed below), Zechariah 14.8-11 and Joel 4.18, noted by Stordalen, “Heaven on
earth,” pp. 33-34.

= Akkadian edinu, the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates.41
Such a
location ignores the claims of the Pishon and the Gihon for inclusion within
the writer’s immediate purview. To reject the original identification of the
paradisal and the Jerusalem Gihon in view of this evidence, on the strength of
its later identification with the Nile ( Jeremiah LXX et al.) would seem to me
to be perverse. What we have here are two different explanations for the data,
which on any analysis remain incompatible. (On Neiman’s analysis,
mentioned above, the two are even reconciled.) To my mind the local
significance of the Gihon for Jerusalem is to be taken seriously, in view of
the evidence we have adduced.42
Even if the etymology of the cosmic Gihon
be unknown, and unconnected with the Jerusalem stream (the latter means
“Gusher”43
), which is quite improbable, it is hard to believe that the
similarity—or even identity—of the two names was not clearly in the
author’s mind. That is, he was intentionally evoking Jerusalem, even if not
wishing to name it.44
This would also preclude any location of Eden further
east, as far afield as Armenia, as proposed by a number of scholars,45
or even
41. F. Delitzsch, Wo Lieg das Paradies (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich, 1881), pp. 4, 6, 79-80,
cited by A. R. Millard, “The etymology of Eden,” VT 34 (1984), pp. 103-106; he
traced the acceptance of this explanation down to E. A. Speiser, Genesis (AB, 1;
Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 16, 19. Millard himself rejected the
explanation, in favour of the Aramaic term c
dn, “enrich, give abundance.” See also
Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, pp. 284-86, and Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and
Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, II, p. 792.
42. It should be clear that the claims of the Gihon in Jerusalem to be linked with that
of the Eden narrative cannot be squared with claims for identification with the Nile.
43. Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, p. 189: gîaḥ, “to burst
forth.”
41. Noort’s confident rejection of the equation, “Gan-Eden,” p. 28 n. 34, is
unsupported by any justification, and seems cavalier. Regarding his identification of
the Gihon with the Nile, see discussion above. Görg’s explanation of the Pishon as
the Nile (see at n. 30) at least has philological plausibility.
45. A. H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the
Religion of the Ancient Babylonians (Hibbert Lectures; London: Williams and
Norgate, 1887), pp. 237-238, envisaged Eridu, a view revived by M. Dietrich, “Das
biblische Paradies und der babylonische Tempelgarten,” in B. Janowski and B. Ego
(eds), Das biblische Weltbild und seine altorientalischen Kontexte (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2001), pp. 281-323 pp. 302-320. J. Day, Yahweh and the Gods and
Goddesses of Canaan (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements, 265;
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000, pp. 29-31 and D. Rohl, The Lost
Testament. From Eden to Exile: the Five-Thousand Year History of the People of the
Bible (London: Century, 2002), pp. 27-29, located it in Armenia. Note also the brief
(and inconclusive) survey of views in C. J. Collins, Genesis 1-4. A Linguistic,
Literary and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg NJ: P & R Publishing, 2006), pp.
119-120. See also J. Delumeau, History of Paradise. The Garden of Eden in Myth
and Tradition (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 155-174. Göbekli Tepe in south-
eastern Turkey has also been identified as Eden: S. Thomas (nom de plume Tom

14 Nicolas Wyatt
India, as suggested on various mediaeval maps.46
Furthermore, it would
certainly remove Eden from the “never-never land” category some other
scholars seem determined to apply to it.47
The four rivers represent the three
major systems of the ancient Near East and the world-ocean, but crucially
link them with the sacred waters of the city of Jerusalem itself. The point of
allusions to the Tigris and the Euphrates in a Jerusalem-centred text is surely
to extend the sacrality of the latter, the place from which the Jews had been
deported, to the place of their exile (a feature which obviously has a bearing
on the dating of the text). We see a similar pattern of the implicit inclusion of
the place of exile within the sacred territory in the stories of Jacob’s dream
and of Moses’s vision of the burning bush.48
Miqqedem in Genesis 2,8
The one feature within the text which might support an oriental location is
the use of miqqedem in 2,8. This Hebrew expression, commonly translated in
this passage as “in the east”, is however to be understood here as a temporal
rather than a spatial formula, meaning “in the beginning,”49
so that it has no
bearing on the garden’s location, which is to be deduced on other grounds.
We have in the description of the rivers a somewhat convoluted account
of a classic cosmic model: the river emerges from its source at the true centre,
and flows out via various branches to an ocean which surrounds a circular
world. This is certainly the understanding of ancient cartography, mutatis
Knox) The Genesis Secret (London: Harper, 2008). See also discussion in A. Scafi,
Mapping Paradise. A History of Heaven on Earth (London: British Library 2006).
Zevit, What Really Happened, pp. 96-113, located Eden in Urartu (Armenia), biblical
Ararat.
46. Among various examples, we may note the Vercelli world map (ca 1191-1218),
where Paradise is located in India (Scafi, Mapping Paradise, figs 6.2a and b: pp.
132-133), while on Higden’s Polychronicon (ca 1350, figs. 6.3a and b, pl. 4: pp. 134-
135) it lies northeast of India, in both cases on the edge of the cosmic ocean. The
Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca 1300) is similar. Christopher Columbus and Amerigo
Vespucci were even tempted to locate it in the New World! See M. Bockmuehl,
“Locating Paradise,” p. 192 in Bockmuehl and Stroumsa, Paradise in Antiquity.
47. See M. Barker, The Gate of Heaven (London: SPCK, 1991), p. 103, and cf. Noort,
“Gan-Eden,” p. 28: “in the stories of Gen 2-3 Paradise is not located; it is far away.”
See also id., p. 33: “… the narrator wants to offer a mystified location for Paradise…
he does not want to locate Paradise in an accessible and locatable place.”
48. See respectively Wyatt, The Archaeology of Myth (London: Equinox, 2010), pp.
1-12, and The Mythic Mind, pp. 13-17.
49. See N. Wyatt, “Interpreting the creation and fall story in Genesis 2-3,” ZAW 93
(1981), 13; cf. id. The Mythic Mind, pp. 127-129; Stordalen, “Heaven on earth,” pp.
28, 41-43; id., Echoes of Eden, pp. 207, 261-264. Cf. Koehler and Baumgartner,
Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, III p. 1069-1070, where it is considered the radical
sense.

mutandis—which lasted until the Middle Ages!50
—and also corresponds to
the notion of cosmic rule, in which kings reign “from sea to sea.” 51
The reasons outside the text that have appeared to reinforce the spatial
sense of miqqedem here are, firstly, the misapplication of the term edinu
noted above, and secondly the supposition that since Abraham came “from
Ur of the Chaldees” (Genesis 11,31), events prior to his migration to
Palestine must be located in the east, since even a spatial sense for miqqedem
in Genesis 3,24 would locate the garden west of the place of expulsion. The
patriarchal tradition, though couched in primordial terms, actually concerns
the exile of the Jews following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587-86 BCE,52
so that Abraham’s departure on his long journey west is not an account of a
primordial (Bronze Age) journey, but rather a cipher for the exiles’ return,
following the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 539. Genesis 2-3 serves as a
narrative of an original, archetypal exile, prefiguring the historical one.
Other biblical support for the location of Eden in Jerusalem
A reason from within the text for supporting the line I take53
—that Eden is in
Jerusalem—is the fact which we noted above, that there is only one river
actually within the garden. Given the post-exilic dating now increasingly
recognised for the story, this is best understood as a deliberate allusion to
Ezekiel 47,1-12, which in the prophetic vision of the new temple, describes a
stream flowing out from beneath the stone pavement on the eastern side of
the temple building, and then flowing south out of the temenos, and on down
to the Arabah. This passage is echoed in Revelation 22,1, modelled on
Ezekiel, referring to:
the river of the water of life, shining like crystal, coming out from the throne
of God and of the lamb …
and 1 Enoch 14,19:
and from beneath the throne were issuing streams of flaming fire
47. See W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Mesopotamian Civiliza-
tions, 8; Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998; A. Scafi, Mapping Paradise.
51. See the selection of texts in Wyatt, Space and Time, pp. 81-88, 115-20, and cf. H.
P. L’Orange, Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship (Oslo: H. Aschehoug,
1953).
52. See D. J. Clines, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (JSOTS, 10: Sheffield: JSOT
Press, 1978), passim.
53. See also Barker, The Gate of Heaven, pp. 57-103; Stordalen, “Heaven on earth,”
passim; L. E. Stager, Jerusalem and the garden of Eden, Eretz Israel 26 (1999), pp.
183*-194*; id. “Jerusalem as Eden,” Biblical Archaeological Review 26 (2000), pp.
36-47, 66; H. Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from Solomon to the Golden Dome
(London: Publisher, 2007), pp. 22-23; A. Wood, Of Wings and Wheels. A Synthetic
Study of the Biblical Cherubim (BZAW, 385; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p. 49;
Bockmuehl, “Locating Paradise.”

16 Nicolas Wyatt
though this text has pluralised the river. Here are the justifications for
recognising a throne in Psalm 110,7. As to the origin of this spring, it can
only seriously be understood as emerging from the c
ĕben šĕtiyyâ, the “stone
of foundation” which formed the bedrock floor of the temple cella. This is
widely identified with the rock under the Dome of the Rock, with its
conspicuous crevices, into which water was poured during the New Year rites,
to prime the source of all life.54
Furthermore, it is implicitly identical with the
Gihon, the city’s only supply of water. Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) 24,25-27,
which evidently shares the cosmological presuppositions of Genesis 2, states
that Wisdom brims like the Pishon, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan (!),
the Nile (!) and the Gihon,55
homing in on the local river, before extending
out again in vv. 28-34 to the universal sea. The almost chiastic form of this
passage, “in from the cosmic rivers and out again to the cosmic ocean”,
highlights the geographical and cosmic centrality of the Gihon and implicitly
of Eden. The passages above appear to locate the throne of God (and thus of
the king56
) over the c
ĕben šĕtiyyâ, from which the stream flows.
In earlier engagements with this problem, I have identified Eden with the
“garden” mentioned within the topography of Jerusalem, the so-called
“King’s Garden” (gan hammelek)57
. Some other scholars have also endorsed
this view.58
The precise location of this garden is unknown, but it was
probably situated adjacent to the royal palace and the temple, which were
evidently part of one overall construction. It was associated with royal burials,
and it is perhaps on this account—if my identification is correct—that post-
biblical tradition located the burial places of various ancient patriarchs here.
Adam is buried in Eden according to Jubilees 4,29, and in the earthly
paradise, while his soul ascends to the heavenly paradise above (third
heaven), in the Life of Adam and Eve (Apocalypse version), with Abel in
37,1-6; 40,6 and with Eve in 43,1.59
The following passages are also worth
noting, Testament of Dan 5,12:
the saints shall rest in Eden,
54. See R. Patai, Man and Temple (London; Nelson, 1948, p. 41 (B. Tac
an 25b).
55. Note that in this passage the Gihon and the Nile are distinct, in a series of six.
56. Note the double function of the throne, of deity and monarch in Psalm 110.1, I
Chronicles 28.5, 29.23, in Barker, The Older Testament, pp. 113, 149, 230, 247;
Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 278, 316.
57. See Wyatt “There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 55-59 and 61-76 for specific discussions;
and for tangential discussions presupposing Jerusalem symbolism, the references in n.
41. See also Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “Exploring the garden of Uzza: death, burial
and ideologies of kingship,” Biblica 87, 2006, pp. 1-21.
58. D. Neiman, “Eden the garden of God,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 17 (1969), 109-124 (cited in Stordalen Echoes of Eden, p. 33).
59. J. H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha vol. 2 (Anchor Bible
Reference Library; Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 65, 289-295; for Adam’s
burial by Enoch see Charlesworth, vol. 1 (1983), p. 311 n. 48Cb.

and in the new Jerusalem shall the righteous rejoice
and 1 Enoch 61,12:
All the elect who dwell in the garden of life (shall bless him).60
This aspect of the garden belongs primarily to a discussion on the relation of
this garden to a post-mortem Paradise, but it is reasonable to think that this
eschatological element derives from the older ideological sense that I am
attempting to reconstruct here.
Another candidate for the garden might be part of the so-called “House of
the Forest of the cedars of Lebanon,” an important annexe to the temple
which housed an armoury, presumably used for ritual purposes since the
shields were all made of gold (1 Kings 10,16-17. 21 = 2 Chronicles 9,15-16.
20).61
Barker identified Eden with the temple itself, 62
as did H. J. van Dijk.63
But perhaps we err in trying to make modern logical distinctions of this
kind, where the ancients happily superimposed such levels upon one another.
Perhaps the garden motif was intended to embrace the various aspects of the
sacred landscape. On one level of understanding, the garden is a synecdoche
for the whole kingdom, the land flowing with milk and honey. 64
A
remarkable confirmation of this is the vision of the restored Jerusalem in
Isaiah 51.3, where Zion and Eden are equated:
Indeed Yahweh has had compassion on Zion
he has had compassion on all her ruins,
and will turn her wilderness into Eden
and her wasteland into the garden of Yahweh.65
It is evident that in the time of Deutero-Isaiah—the exilic period—Eden did
have the larger reference. Here Zion itself is a synecdoche. The later
eschatological Paradise of Christian doctrine was identified with the “City of
60. Cited in Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” p. 68. See further, M. Goodman,
“Paradise, gardens, and the afterlife in the first century CE,” pp. 57-63 (and p. 57 n. 2,
citing Targum Isaiah 45.7 and Targum Zechariah 2.14-4.7 on the perpetual dwelling
of the righteous in Eden), and G. Macaskill, “Paradise in the New Testament,” pp.
64-81.
61. On this see Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” p. 183.
62. Barker, The Older Testament, pp. 25, 233-237; The Gate of Heaven, pp. 57-103,
esp. 62, 64.
63. H. J. van Dijk, Ezekiel’s Prophecy on Tyre (Ez. 26:1-28:19): a New Approach
(Bibbia e Oriente, 20; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1968), p. 117, cited
without complete approval by Noort, “Gan-Eden,” p. 25 n. 26.
64. See N. Lohfink, Das Siegeslied am Schilfmeer (Frankfurt: J. Knecht, 1965), pp.
91-92, cited by Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, p. 50; see also the discussion in
Stordalen, Echoes of Eden, pp. 307-316.
65. Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” p. 67. See also Stordalen Echoes of Eden, pp.
321-324 (though I am not convinced by his view that vv. 1-3 should be seen as a
unity).

18 Nicolas Wyatt
God,” the “New Jerusalem,” of Augustine’s account, based on Revelation 21-
22, and the subsequent iconographic tradition. And the whole was filled with
arboreal imagery. For such imagery (as architectural form) in the temple, see
1 Kings 6,29.32.35; 7,15-22; the tabernacle (some of its features are trans-
parently elements of the [second] temple); the menorah (an almond tree):
Exodus 25,31-40; the palace: 1 Kings 7,6-7; and the House of the Forest: 1
Kings 7,2.66
More relevant to our present discussion, and in pursuit of
possible royal ideological aspects of this garden, is the conclusion to the
Genesis account. This states (3,24) that
[the Lord of the gods] set in front of the garden of Eden cherubs
and the flame of the whirling sword,
to guard the way to the tree of life.
The cherubs were sphinxes, and are frequently found in royal contexts, as
armrests on thrones,67
attendants at or browsers on trees, and so on. Hebrew
distinguished śĕrāpîm, “griffins,” from kĕrūbîm, “sphinxes,” though the
Greek γρύψ, cognate with kĕrūb, meant “griffin,” evidently associating them
at least unconsciously. 68
The primary function of both forms appears to have
been as guardians of boundaries, being, if my analysis is correct, derived
from the forms of the Ka of the king in Egyptian ideology. So their presence
here should not surprise the reader. What does perhaps cause surprise is that
the man, thrown out of the garden, suddenly becomes aware of these
creatures from the wrong side of the fence, as it were. But the sphinxes were
probably already there, guaranteeing his safety within the garden. This is
supported by the cherub apparently provided as a guardian to the king69
(of
Tyre) in the garden in Ezekiel 28,14.70
The sword is another matter, being
unmentioned elsewhere. But since a sword is an essential attribute of the king
as warrior, we may see something of this symbolic dimension in it. It is
consonant with the idea of the House of the Forest as armoury. Or it may
have something of a cultic overtone, since ḥereb can have the sense of a
ritual harpe (a cognate term).71
66. Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 182-184.
67. Wood, Of Wings and Wheels, pp. 9-31, argued cogently against the idea that the
biblical cherubim formed Yahweh’s throne.
68. Wyatt, “Grasping the Griffin.” Hebrew śārāp is best explained as deriving from
Egyptian srfw, “griffin.” Both griffins and sphinxes appear, together with kuribu
figures, on the Mari painting discussed below.
69. Alternatively, the cherub was the king himself: G. Widengren, The Ascension of
the Apostle and the Heavenly Book, King and Saviour III (Uppsala Universitets
Årskrift, 1950.7), p. 97; cf. Barker, The Older Testament, pp. 235-236; Noort, “Gan-
Eden,” pp. 23-24 (p. 24: “there is no ‘better’ reading”).
70. See the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos.
71. See Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 70 n. 2. My layout of the text above, making the
allusion a bicolon, would accommodate any of these interpretations. If it is to be read

The problem of the number of trees in Eden
The Garden of Eden boasted two trees, one of knowing all things and one of
life.72
Since they actually fused in later tradition, we may wonder whether
their duality was not always problematic, or whether they really constituted
one tree under two modes, varying according to the literary function of
different parts of the narrative. We are led to this suspicion by the precise
phraseology of various parts of the text. Thus Genesis 2,9 states:
Then the Lord of the gods caused to grow from the ground every tree that is
pleasant to the sight and good for eating,
and the tree of life in the middle of the garden,
and the tree of knowing all things.
The second tree here appears almost as an afterthought—in an appositional
phrase—and certainly cannot logically, according to a straightforward prose
understanding of this verse, which is usually presupposed, also be located as
a separate tree at the centre of the garden, where we would expect to find it.
To complicate matters, in 3,2-3, this statement appears to be contradicted:
Then the woman replied to the snake, “The fruit of the trees in the garden we
may eat, but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden
God has said, ‘you may not eat from it, nor touch it, in case you die.’”
This passage can only refer to the tree of knowing all things.
A contrary argument was advanced by Andreas Michel and Tryggve
Mettinger, to the effect that each tree relates to the “middle of the garden” by
“split coordination.”73
But this looks like an elegant case of special pleading.
A better solution was suggested to me by Anthony J. Frendo, that we
should recognise here an example of waw explicativum, in which the phrase
introduced by the particle further expounds the meaning of what precedes.
Thus the latter part of 2,9 is to be understood, following his suggestion, as
the tree of life in the middle of the garden,
that is, the tree of knowing all things.74
as poetry, we should not be too demanding of a formal logic. But verse frequently
performs exactly as Anthony J. Frendo suggested (see n. 74): successive cola draw
out implications or hints addressed in the first colon of a strophe.
72. Interestingly, Philo placed the first tree (of knowing all things) outside the garden,
because to have it inside would contradict the command to eat from every tree (2.16):
Legum Allegoriae I, XXXI (97): C. D. Yonge, The Works of Philo (Peabody MA:
Hendrikson, 1993), p. 36. But the logic of this is to require Adam and Eve to leave
the garden in order to sin, which is not the understanding of Genesis.
73. A. Michel, Theologie aus der Peripherie: die gespaltene Koordination im
Biblischen Hebräisch (BZAW, 257; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 1-22; Mettinger,
The Eden Narrative, pp. 21-22.
74. A. J. Frendo, personal communication. For the phenomenon see Waltke and
O’Connor, Biblical Hebrew Syntax, pp. 648-49 (§39.2.1b) and D. W. Baker, Further

20 Nicolas Wyatt
That is, the second colon is an explanation of the first: the same tree performs
two functions. The recognition that we have verse here, not prose, reinforces
this view: the second colon draws out the implications of the first. Thus the
same tree is to be understood.
So just as Jean Margueron found the one tree in the courtyard to
correspond to two in the painting in the Mari palace (on which see further
below), we may think similarly that the two trees in Eden are really one.
Mettinger, surveying the extensive discussion over the number of trees, and
the problem of priority if there is only one, pointed out that the characters in
the story, Adam and Eve, know of only one tree.75
They learn of the second
—if they ever do—only on finding that they have forfeited access to it, rather
like their discovery of sphinxes (cherubs). Furthermore, one of the
ideological features we shall note below contradicts the idea that eating from
this tree intrinsically constitutes a crime. But the real issue to appreciate is the
rich symbolism of the tree or trees, however understood. The final
explanation offered here emphasises the symbolic richness.
The significance of the tree(s) in Eden
Now what is this symbolism? While we may suppose that general themes of
fertility, security and utility were always present, at times specifically royal
significance was attached to trees. This is clear from its role in Assyrian
palace rites, in which the king or priests acting on his behalf, or even divine
figures, appear to pollinate the fruit of the tree.76
M. Giovino showed,
however, that this common explanation of the “Assyrian sacred tree” is not
strictly accurate, since the stylised device is probably an artificial
construction rather than an actual tree, and the supposed act of pollination is
more likely one of unction,77
though perhaps the question of the precise
examples of the Waw Explicativum, VT 30 (1980), pp. 129-136. Cf. Zevit, What
Really Happened, pp. 93-94: he rejected this explanation, wanting to retain two trees.
75. Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, pp. 5-11.
76. Thus most recently B. N. Porter, Trees, Kings and Politics. Studies in Assyrian
Iconography (OBO,197: Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht; Fribourg: Fribourg
University Press, 2003). The entire history of scholarship on the matter was surveyed
and evaluated by M. Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree. A History of Interpretations
(OBO, 230: Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht; Fribourg: Fribourg University
Press, 2007).
77. Giovino, Sacred Tree, p. 82, citing S. Smith, “The relation of Marduk, Assur and
Osiris,” JEA 8 (1922), p. 44 and n. 3; E. A. W. Budge, A Guide to the Babylonian
and Assyrian Antiquities, 3rd
edition (London: British Museum. Department of
Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, 1922), pp. 43-44. On the Assyrian tree as
representing the king, see S. Parpola, “The Assyrian Tree of Life: tracing the origins
of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy,” JNES 52 (1993), pp. 161-208 (167-
168). The sets of trees in the Assyrian throne-rooms may have represented royal
ancestors, and gave these spaces a garden-like appearance. See S. Richardson, “An
Assyrian garden of ancestors: room I, northwest palace, Kalḫu,” State Archives of

nature of the ritual must remain open. This suggests that the “tree” somehow
represented kingship in the Assyrian context,78
the sacral power of which was
reinforced by the anointing process. And Babylonian and biblical usage both
confirm that this symbolism was international.79
Although it is probably beyond proof in the absence of clear evidence, it is
tempting to see the asherah (’ăšērâ) of the Judahite cult as a similar artificial
construction, a surrogate tree, representing the goddess Asherah (a royal,
solar goddess, who probably served also as the patroness of the city). As the
mythic mother of the king,80
Asherah would certainly have been recognised
by her devotees and the symbolism of the cult as the mother of the nation—
incarnate in the queen mother, the Gebirah (gĕbîrâ), and so again intimately
linked with royal ideology—a close counterpart to Eve (ḥavvâ) as the
“mother of all living things” (’ēm kol ḥāy) in the Eden narrative. Following
this intuition, it is tempting to go further and see in Eve’s handing to Adam of
the fruit which grants knowledge, a metaphor for the role of Wisdom, who in
Proverbs 1-9 appears to be the goddess Asherah restored in post-exilic
literature to favour as an abstraction.81
Thus the patron goddess gives to her
son, the king, the gifts of life and wisdom.
The theme of the garden is very widespread as a symbol of cosmic order,
and as we shall see, above all of royal management of the cosmos. The
Assyria Bulletin 13 (1999-2001) 145-216; see also F. Stavrakopoulou, “Tree-hogging
in Eden: on the restriction of divine wisdom in Genesis 2-3,” pp. 41-53 in M. Higton,
J. Law, and C. Rowland (eds), Theology and Human Flourishing: Essays in Honour
of Timothy J. Gorringe (Eugene OR: Cascade, 2011).
78. A symbolic tradition graphically reflected in Ezekiel 31,8-9.
79. On the tree as symbolising the king in biblical thought see Wyatt, Space and
Time, pp. 169-172 (Daniel 4,7-19, Numbers 17,1-8 [Hebrew 16-23], Zechariah 3,1-
10; 4,1-14); Stavrakopoulou, “Tree-hogging”, pp. 44-48. See also the “shoot”
metaphor used in such passages as Isaiah 4,2; 11,1; 14,19; 37,31; 53,2, Zechariah
6,12; Testament of Judah 24,4-6; Psalm 1,3; Hosea 14,9, and Lamentations 4,20 (the
shadow is that of a tree), passages discussed by G. Widengren, The King and the
Tree of Life in ancient Near Eastern Religion (King and Saviour, IV, Uppsala
Universitets Årskrift 1951.4), pp. 49-58 (and passim), and Stavrakopoulou, “Tree-
hogging.” In Psalm 1.3, the k in kĕc
ēṣ is surely kaph veritatis—see n. 1—and this is
in origin a royal psalm, according to W.H. Brownlee “Psalms 1-2 as a coronation
liturgy,” Biblica 52 (1971), pp. 321-336, an assessment summarily rejected by H.-J.
Kraus, Psalms 1-59. A Commentary (Minneapolis MN: Augsburg), 1988, p. 114, but
without adequate argumentation.
80. See Psalm 19, discussed Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 61-76, and Psalm
110,3 LXX, discussed Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 270-271.
81. B. Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Social World of Biblical
Antiquity, 1; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983), pp. 51-54; M.S. Smith, The Origins of
Biblical Monotheism. Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts
(Oxford, 2001: Oxford University Press), pp. 172-173; id. The Early History of
God. Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd
edition, Grand Rapids
MI; Eerdmans 2002), pp. 133-134.

22 Nicolas Wyatt
Avestan word pairidēza, borrowed into late Babylonian as pardēsu, into
Hebrew as pardēs, and Greek as παράδεισος,82
appears to have meant
originally “rampart,” and hence a ramparted place, such as an enclosed royal
garden. The central figure in the garden is therefore implicitly the king, as
borne out by Ezekiel 28,12-19. The biblical evidence is by no means the
earliest attested treatment of the theme, and can be shown to be heir to a long
tradition stretching back over more than a millennium.
The pottery metaphor (Genesis 2.7)
The term used of the fashioning of the man, yāṣar, has the specific sense of
manufacturing a pot. This metaphor occurs frequently in biblical thought
with reference to the creation of people in general, in Isaiah 29,16; 30.14;
41.25; 64.7; Jeremiah 18,1-12; Lamentations 4,2, and of enemy kings in the
coronation Psalm 2,9.83
But there is reason to think that this is not merely a
neutral, if graphic, constructional figure. It is always used collectively of the
nation, and perhaps the psalm citation hints at its primary reference: it is a
royal metaphor, a well-known motif in Egyptian royal ideological contexts.
Thus a relief in the mammisi (“birth-house”) at Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple
at Deir el Bahri shows the ram-headed god of Elephantine, Khnum,
fashioning the king (! Hatshepsut was a woman) and his Ka on the potter’s
wheel, with an accompanying descriptive text:
Utterance of Khnum the potter, Lord of Herur:
‘I have formed thee of these limbs of Amun, Presider over Karnak.
I have come to thee* to fashion thee* better than all gods.
I have given to thee* all life and satisfaction,
all stability, all joy of heart with me;
I have given to thee* all health, all lands;
I have given to thee* all offerings, all food;
I have given to thee* to appear upon the throne of Horus like Ra, forever;
I have given thee* to be before the Kas of all the living,
while thou* shinest as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, of South and North,
according as thy* father who loves thee* has commanded.” 84
82. Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, p. 963; CAD, vol. 12, P
(2005), p. 182; W. Hinz, “Achämenidische Hofverwalting,” ZA 61 (1971) p. 295. See
also discussion in J. Bremmer, Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient
Near East (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008), pp.
35-55 (he insisted on a Median aspect), and also the essays by Bremmer (above, n. 1)
and A. Panaino (“Around, Inside and Beyond the Walls: Names, Ideas and Images of
Paradise in Pre-Islamic Iran, With an Appendix on Old Persian <pa-ra-da-ya-da-a-
ma>”) in Scafi, The Cosmography of Paradise.
83. Also in Romans 9,21.
84. J.H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1906), ii p. 82, §203. The asterisks identify feminine forms.

As part of a cumulative argument, we may discern the same metaphor in
Genesis 2,7. In case there is doubt about the specific nuance, we should
consider Jeremiah 1,5, in which the prophet describes in Yahweh’s words his
prophetic calling in the idiom of royal usage, also familiar from other
Egyptian parallels:
Before I fashioned you (’eṣārĕkâ: √yāṣar) in the belly, I knew you,
and before you came forth from the womb, I consecrated you.
Subtending the fashioning motif, Jeremiah mixes two further metaphors:
“consecration”—a ritual form—and knowledge—ultimately a sexual image,
and used here of divine paternity—are effectively equated. We may compare
this with the following, of Sesostris I:
I conquered as a lad, I was mighty in the egg … He appointed me lord of the
Two Lands as a child, before the swaddling-clothes were loosed for me, he
appointed me lord of mankind 85
and of Piankhi, both:
Whose mother recognized that he would rule in the egg … 86
and:
I said of you when you were still in your mother’s body,
that you would be ruler of Egypt,
for I already knew you in the seed,
when you were still in the egg,
that you would become Lord...87
The dust metaphor (Genesis 3,19)
The making of the man explicitly out of dust88
is another royal metaphor, as
discerned by Walter Brueggemann. “It is terminology used to speak of the
elevation of a man to royal office … Behind the creation formula lies a royal
formula of enthronement,” he observed.89
Its double edge, as the seemingly
neutral medium in 2,7 (“from dust from the ground”)—which however
already implies autochthony and therefore a primal claim to territory—but as
part of the curse in 3,19 (“Dust indeed you are, and to dust you will return”)
85. Breasted, Ancient Records, i p. 243, §502, of Sesostris I.
86. Breasted, Ancient Records, iv p. 419, §817.
87. W. Beyerlin, Near Eastern Religious Texts Relating to the Old Testament (OTL;
London: SCM Press, 1978), p. 29, cited Wyatt, Myths of Power, p. 292—see also pp.
288-291.
88. On the terminology of soil, see J. L. Kelso, “The Ceramic Vocabulary of the Old
Testament,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Supplementary
Studies, No.5/6 (1948), pp. 1-48. On p. 5 he cited Job 10,9 as similar in sense to
Genesis 2,7. Cf. Zevit, What Really Happened, n. 2 above.
89. Brueggemann, “Dust,” p. 2. He cited 1 Samuel 2,6-8a, Psalm 113,7 in support.

24 Nicolas Wyatt
is an echo of the oracle of Yahweh delivered to Baasha by Jehu son of
Hanani in 1 Kings 16,2-3:
I raised you up from the dust and I made you prince over my people Israel...
Now I shall sweep away Baasha and his dynasty after him, and I shall make
your dynasty like that of Jeroboam son of Nebat.
And just as one king’s elevation from dust to kingship is achieved only at the
expense of his royal opponents, so the partial future redemption of the man
hinted at in the curse of the snake in 3,15 (a clearly messianic oracle) is
counterpointed by the snake’s diet of dust in 3,14. The same imagery,
Brueggemann noted, is found in Isaiah 47,1 and Jeremiah 49,22-23, where
the redemption of Judah will be at the expense of Babylon, whose citizens
will eat dust; and Yahweh’s agent Cyrus also makes his foes eat dust at Isaiah
41,2.
The king as gardener
The putting of the man in the garden (itself, as we have seen, a royal garden)
is another royal ideological motif. He is placed in the garden to till it and care
for it. Not only is this transparently a figure for the king’s general duty of
care for his realm, but it alludes quite directly to his cultic duties too. He is to
perform c
obdâ. This refers to the cultivation of the garden, but also the cult in
the garden, for he is Yahweh’s c
ebed, his “servant.” The title c
ebed yhwh,
familiar to us from the servant songs of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 42,1-9; 49.1-7;
50,4-11 and 52,13-53,12), means not simply “Yahweh’s servant,” but more
specifically “Yahweh’s gardener,” where “gardener” is a royal title of ancient
pedigree. Widengren devoted a monograph to this topic.90
He stated that the
Sumerian nu-kiri6, Akkadian nukarribu (sic: read nukaribbu, syll. LÚ.NU.
GIŠ.SAR91
), amounted to a royal title. Two examples of its apparently royal
usage are in the Legend of Sargon:
Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener.
While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love 92
and Gilgamesh vi 64-67:
You loved Išullānu, your father’s gardener,
who regularly brought you a basket of dates,
daily making your temple gleam.
You looked at him covetously and went up to him...93
90. Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life.
91. CAD, vol. 11, N2, 1980, pp. 323-27, W. von Soden, AhW (1965-81), p. 802.
92. J. B. Pritchard, ANET (1969), p. 119. Cf. W. W. Hallo (ed.), The Context of
Scripture, volume 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), p. 461:
Aqqi, drawer of water, set (me) to his orchard work.
During my orchard work, Ishtar loved me.
93. A. R. George, The Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.
623.

This implicitly ritual usage can certainly be understood as a plausible nuance
of the Hebrew use of the term. The Assyrian iconography of the king
anointing the tree appears to have the same reference.
Now if the man was placed in the garden to tend it, what of his expulsion?
The common view is that it was after this event that Adam went out to
practise agriculture (Genesis 3,23). The Jewish Publication Society trans-
lation of this verse is representative:
So the Lord God banished him from the garden, to till the soil from which he
was taken.
But this understanding ignores the reason for him being placed in the garden
to begin with, that is, to till the soil (with its cultic and royal ideological
implications), and also ignores the overtones of the dust motif, in which his
royalty lay in part in the means of his creation, from dust. To give his dusty
origin, on this understanding, as the reason for him tilling the soil once
expelled from the garden also ignores the fact that on the pregnant sense of
this as a metaphor for raising a man to the kingship, it could no longer be a
serious motive for his later work. Like Baasha, this king has been swept away.
The syntax of 3,23 allows a contrary understanding, however, which makes
far better sense in the context:
So the Lord of the gods expelled him from the garden of Eden, (to prevent
him) from tilling the ground from which he had been taken
This is to take the infinitive construct lac
ăbōd to have a privative rather than
purposive sense.94
The verse is not about agriculture as the new lifestyle at all;
it is on the contrary about the cessation of the cultivation—and implicitly the
cult—within the garden. This interpretation is supported by the description of
what is to follow the expulsion (Genesis 3,17-19):
Cursed is the ground because of you.
In distress you shall *work it all the days of your life
but thorn and thistle it will grow for you.
So you shall eat the vegetation of the steppe.
By the sweat of your brow you shall eat food . . .
The “vegetation of the steppe” in this passage is not agricultural produce,
since the steppe is uncultivated land, but the grubbings of the hunter-gatherer
and the nomad or of the dispossessed. Or if agriculture is involved—which
seems unlikely, given the royal ideological dimension—it is on marginal land,
and to no effect, yielding “thorn and thistle,” the hall-marks of the steppe.
This new uncultivated life is a powerful metaphor for deportation and exile,
implying the enforced cessation of the temple cult. Nor is the “sweat of your
94. Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” p. 57; Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (Analecta
Orientalia, 38: Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute 1965), p. 92, §10.1, noted by
Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, p. 508.

26 Nicolas Wyatt
brow” an allusion to agricultural work, but simply to unremitting toil for
mere survival.
A curious confirmation of the royal view of Eden in the context of the
cultivation motif, which also throws light on early Christian exegesis of the
Eden narrative, occurs in the resurrection narrative in John 19,41; 20,11-1695
:
Now where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new
tomb in which no one had been buried . . . Mary was standing by the
tomb, weeping. And as she wept she looked inside the tomb, and saw
two angels, in white, sitting one at the head and one at the feet where
Jesus’s body had been lying. And they said to her, “Woman, why are
you weeping?” She replied, “They have taken away my lord, and I do
not know where they have put him.” And as she said this, she turned
round, and saw Jesus standing, but did not realise that it was Jesus. Jesus
said, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”
Thinking that he was the gardener, she said to him, “Lord, if you have
taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I shall take him
away.” Jesus said, “Mary!” She recognised him, and said in Hebrew,
“Rabbouni!” (that is: Teacher).
Far from mistaking Jesus for the gardener—the occasion is saturated with
irony—Mary recognises him: with the resurrection, the gardener expelled in
Genesis 3 is now restored to his home. Paradise is restored. And nor is there
yet anything necessarily eschatological about this event, even in nuce. It has
already happened, within the Johannine narrative, as a “historical” event. If it
is also eschatological, it is “realised eschatology”!
Royal wisdom
We noted above the problem of the second tree. It is arguable that it is at
odds with the next royal feature, of the man naming the animals (Genesis
2,19).96
A persistent feature of royal power is the innate wisdom of the king,
represented as we have seen by the image of the king receiving the fruit of
wisdom. He is not as other men: he knows the secrets of the universe. He is,
after all, divine. Such a perception is seen, for example, in two passages in
Job, 15,7-9 and 38,4-7 (and the whole of 38,4-30):
Were you born the first, Adam,
and brought forth before the hills?
95. For discussion see Wyatt, “There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 61-76. See also J.
Schaper, The Messiah in the garden, pp. 17-27 in Bockmuehl and Stroumsa,
Paradise in Antiquity.
96. See the assessment of J. F. A. Sawyer, “The image of god, wisdom of serpents
and the knowledge of good and evil,” in P. Morris and D. Sawyer (eds), A Walk in
the Garden. Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden (JSOTS, 136;
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), pp. 64-67 (p. 65): Genesis 1 and 2 give
very similar views of man: having dominion and naming animals are equivalent
concepts.

Have you listened in at the Council of God
and taken all wisdom to yourself?
What do you know that we do not know,
or understand, which we do not?
and
Where were you when I prepared the foundations of the earth?
Say, if you have understanding
Who determined its measurements? {Surely you know!}
Or who stretched the measuring line over it?
On what were its pillars based?
or who laid its cornerstone...?
Both passages challenge Job. Who is he to quarrel with God? The explicit
point of the first passage, implicit in the second, is that Adam, the son of
God—the king—who spoke to God face to face, would both listen in at the
council of God97
and know all wisdom. Job as a commoner cannot. The
invention of the second tree in the narrative seems to be a reflection of post-
monarchical thought, seeing the king’s misuse of wisdom as an act of hubris.
Thus the tree of knowing all things is a cipher for the king himself, whose
presence in the garden has turned out to be problematic. The assessment of
wisdom as a bad thing was already hinted at in the critique of the monarchy
given in Deuteronomy 29,8; 30,11-14,98
and found expression in such later
texts as 1 Enoch 7,1 (where angels teach women magic and herb-lore), 8,1
(where Azazel teaches men metallurgy, cosmetics, jewellery and alchemy),
8,3 (where other angels teach herb-lore, incantations, astrology), 61,1-2 and
69,1-12 (which speak of angels who revealed secrets).99
There is no intrinsic
reason to judge all of this material to be late in authorial terms, even if it
occurs in late compositions: it probably reflects fairly faithfully the world-
view of the author of Genesis 2-3.100
This all reads, as does Genesis 3, like a
rather jaundiced evaluation of a monarchical system which had overreached
itself and brought divine punishment down on the nation. The tree is
therefore reinterpreted, and given a second, ironic role, so that while it could
have been the key to immortality, it actually cheated the man and his wife.
The irony is the same as occurs in Gilgamesh and Adapa.
The king as divine
97. The setting of Isaiah’s inaugural vision (Isaiah 6) is modelled on a royal pattern.
98. Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 280-82.
99. Though it is to be noted that Enoch himself is a model of the new king, initiated
into all wisdom.
100. The fact that Genesis 2-3 is undoubtedly later than the final form of
Deuteronomy raises the question as to whether it was partly inspired by
Deuteronomistic teaching.

28 Nicolas Wyatt
One final motif concerns the man’s intrinsic divinity,101
from the moment he
eats of the fruit. 3,5 reads:
on the day that you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be gods
(kē’lōhîm) . . .
and 3,22 has God say
“Look! The man has become one of us, knowing all things. . . ”
Rather than read this as a comparison (“like gods … like one of us”), it
seems preferable, in view of the special status of the man—the king—to read
the k of kē’lōhîm as yet another example of kaph veritatis, indicating identity
rather than comparison.102
It is perhaps as part of this primordial and divine
status that we should also recognise in the man an androgyne: his female
aspect is extracted from him only at the point at which his rib is withdrawn
(2,21).103
Dating the Eden narrative
101. See now A. Y. and J. J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God (Grand Rapids
MI: Eerdmans, 2008).
102. See n. 1. The same idiom occurs in Psalm 1.3—see n. 64. Noort, “Gan-Eden,” p.
25; he appears to agree, though he also retained the comparison on pp. 24-25. See
also my study of Psalm 82 (Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 357-365) in which I argued
that the point of the judicial scene envisaged in the psalm is not the demotion of old
gods, as is generally thought to be the point of the scene described, but the reduction
of Judah’s divine kings to merely human status:
‘I had thought that you were gods,
and all of you were sons of the Most High.
But like Man shall you die
and like the first of rulers shall you fall!” (Psalm 82,6)
The passage not only demotes the kings of Judah, but compares their fall to Adam’s
fall—he being the first king, “the first of rulers.” On the general divine condition of
the king see Wyatt, Myths of Power, pp. 283-322, “There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 191-
220.
103. See C. Carmichael, “The Paradise myth,” p. 48 in Morris and Sawyer (n. 80):
“an undifferentiated one”; for a gnostic view see P. Alexander, “The fall into
knowledge: the Garden of Eden/Paradise in gnostic literature,” pp. 91-104 (96) in
Morris and Sawyer (n. 80); Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, pp. 238-55. The Testament of
Adam 3,2 contains a promise of Adam’s future deification—that is, as restoration of
his original status—(Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha, [vol. 1] p. 994). Outside the
Bible, see R.E. Freed, Art in the service of religion and the state, pp. 110-130 (p. 113)
in R.E. Freed, Y.J. Markovitz and S.H. D’Auria (eds), Pharaohs of the Sun,
Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamun (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999) (arguing
for Akhenaten as androgynous), and K. L. Younger, “The Phoenician inscription of
Azatiwada, an integrated reading,” JSS 43 (1998), p. 14 (out of 11-47) for King
Azatiwada of Ivriz as androgynous, “father and mother” of his people, in l. 3. As
Younger noted, n. 15, this probably had the sense of “compassionate”. But the
metaphor is striking.

All this symbolic language is addressed to the real political world. While
couched in the language of timeless myth, and of the universal human
condition, the Eden story really speaks of the historical situation of the post-
exilic world, after the destruction of the monarchy and before the construc-
tion of the second temple. In so far as it is a universal story, it speaks
volumes for the significance of the king in the national psyche, and especially
when the idea was emancipated from the cut and thrust of a real monarchy,
and idealised.
How precisely it is to be dated within this period is another matter. We
should abandon any attempt to date it to the tenth century on the basis of the
old documentary hypothesis. Similarly with Zevit’s recent attempt to fix it in
the ninth century.104
Nothing within the text requires such an understanding.
It is certainly later than Ezekiel, or at least those passages identified above in
chapters 28 and 47 (terminus a quo early sixth century). The fact that the
story is not retold with any variation, except for the post-mortem
rehabilitation of Adam, until the Christian reinterpretation by John, suggests
that events such as the rise of Zerubbabel or of the Hasmonean monarchy
either had no lasting impact as redeeming the condition the story describes,
or more probably that these events had not yet occurred. And yet Zerubbabel
had raised considerable expectations, being the grandson or great grandson of
Jehoiakin, the king deported in 597. This latter, preferable scenario would
give a terminus ad quem of Zerubabbel’s time, that is ca 520 BCE.105
This
would also be consonant with the status of the temple, still not yet fully
rebuilt and reconsecrated. The Genesis 2-3 narrative may therefore be
interpreted as a midrash on the theme of the demise of the kingdom,
concentrating on all those symbolic aspects which had been fundamental to
its existence.
Bremmer’s treatment of the Eden narrative, dealing in particular with the
ideological content of the term παράδεισος, and in particular its eschato-
logical usage as developing in the intertestamental literature, has no direct
bearing on the issue of the original date of the story, since the Greek term,
assigned only with the composition of the LXX, naturally brought its own
literary and ideological baggage into the discussion. The Hebrew text used
not pardēs, which would have reflected that derivative ideology, but gan,
which perpetuates a much older one, with antecedents in the wider Semitic
world.
The Garden in the broader Ancient Near Eastern context
Let us try to set the Garden of Eden in the broader ancient Near Eastern
context. Conceptually, Eden may be identified in principle with other
104 Zevit, What Really Happened, pp. 46, 48. His argument was self-defeating,
since he cited many prophetic passages clearly ignorant of the story, while
maintaining that the story was older than them.
105. Ezra 5,2.

30 Nicolas Wyatt
“gardens” in ancient Near Eastern tradition, such as the scene in the Mari
coronation painting, as well as with royal Assyrian gardens, throne rooms,
and so on. This is because they all shared a common symbolism, without any
particular one being derived from any other.
Jean Margueron stated that no garden has yet been identified in the palace
at Mari,106
but the investiture painting shows that at least the concept was
present, and was evidently important for ritual purposes. It is most likely that
the palm court (court 106) was the garden, even if a somewhat unconven-
tional one, used precisely for ritual purposes in conjunction with the throne-
room, even if the precise rites have left no record. And the vase and streams
motif was common and widespread in ancient Near Eastern glyptic art;
moreover, the famous marble statue of the goddess holding a vase from
which water flowed was actually situated at the threshold of the throne room,
the whole architectural complex thus functioning as a symbolic garden.107
The famous wall-painting from the royal palace at Mari, 108
already
building on a rich tradition, depicts the scene commonly known as the rein-
vestiture of King Zimri-Lim of Mari, after he had regained his throne, though
Margueron has now argued109
that it actually belonged in the reign of his
father Yahdun-Lim. Its date is to be estimated as ca 1840-20 BCE, no greater
precision being possible.110
The location of the painting is a guide to its spatial interpretation.111
It is at
the side of the door going from the palm court (court 106) into the throne-
room of the palace. This lateral location suggests—and this can only remain
within the realm of possibilities—that it may have been duplicated on the
other side of the entranceway. It is reasonable to see it having served as a
thematic linkage between the two areas, the court and the throne-room
connected by the antechamber, communicating between the two and
transferring the symbolism of one into the other, or of each to the other.
Thus the spacious courtyard, originally with a palm tree in the middle, seems
to have represented a garden, and the painting shows four trees of indetermi-
106. J. Margueron, Mari, Métropole de l’Euphrate au IIIe et au début du IIe
millénaire av.J.-C. (Paris: Picard, ERC, 2004), pp. 499-500.
107. Van Buren, The God with Vase.
108. Margueron, Mari, p. 424 pl. 56. See also pp. 508-10 and Stordalen, Echoes of
Eden, pp. 99-101.
109. J. Margueron, “La peinture de l’investiture et l’histoire de la cour,” pp. 106,
114-25 in Ö. Tunca (ed.), De la Babylonie à la Syrie en passant par Mari. Mélanges
J.-R. Kupper (Liège: Presses Université de Liège, 1990); id. Mari, p. 509.
110. See chronological table in I.E.S. Edwards et al. (eds), The Cambridge Ancient
History, vol. 1 part 2 (3rd
edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p.
1001.
111. Margueron, Mari, p. 425 pl. 58.

nate species—though they are probably to be identified as date palms—with
figures of a lamassu goddess112
standing between each outer pair.113
The inner two are flanked by winged sphinxes and griffins, above and
below respectively,114
common motifs in royal palaces, since both mythical
animal forms are royal symbols.115
There are two registers in the central
tableau, which, while located in the garden, represent respectively the ante-
chamber housing the statue of goddess and vase, and throne room beyond.
The upper register lies behind the lower, in a primitive form of perspective.
The lower has two goddesses standing, holding vases, from which streams of
water flow. As these blend and fall, they become four streams (one original
stream becomes two and then four). The upper scene, viewed as it were
through the flowing streams, since it lies “behind” them, has the goddess
Ishtar hand Zimri-Lim (or if we follow Margueron, Yahdun-Lim) the ring
and the rod,116
symbols of his kingly office. They are flanked by two
attendant deities.117
The diagrammatic treatment given by Margueron suggests that the
painting or paintings, if paired, allowed persons entering the throne-room to
anticipate their progress towards it from the court. Thus the inner trees
(doubled)—correcting Margueron—represent the palm in the centre of the
court. The goddess (a single figure) with the vase who stands immediately
inside the antechamber leading to the throne-room by its two entrances, one
at either end, is preceded by the two vase-holding goddesses of the painting.
The painting allows the viewer to “see” through the antechamber wall to the
scene in the throne-room beyond.
All the motifs here present, the trees, the rivers, the divine figures, the
king (robed), and the sphinxes and griffins, which will trigger responses in
the reader familiar with the biblical narrative, were already clichés in Marian
and wider ancient Near Eastern iconography. They occurred widely on
cylinder seals, on statuary and reliefs, and in derivative forms occur
throughout the ancient Near East over a protracted period of time. And
112. See J. Black and A. Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia.
An Illustrated Dictionary, London: British Museum, 1992, p. 115.
113. Did they symbolise the cardinal points? On the significance of orientation see
Wyatt The Mythic Mind, pp. 125-50. Since it is the inner trees which are flanked by
sphinxes and griffins—see immediately below—I am inclined to think that
Margueron’s diagram errs on this matter, and that the arrows in the diagram should
point to the two inner trees.
114. Apart from the problematic Susa example, griffins do not clearly appear in
Assyrian art before the first millennium. But West Semitic iconography already used
the motif in the second millennium, derived from Egypt, and Mari belonged in some
respects to this western tradition. See Wyatt, “Grasping the Griffin,” pp. 29-39,
where many second millennium West Semitic examples are cited.
115. Wyatt, “Grasping the Griffin.”
116. See Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols, p. 156.
117. Margueron Mari, p. 511 fig. 499.

32 Nicolas Wyatt
wherever found, their significance was not simply decorative, but ideological.
Their impact may of course have been limited to the literate classes who
formed the palace and temple personnel and the civil service. They would be
the people who carried seals, for example. But they had a common vested
interest in maintaining the mystique evoked in such devices. However, many
royal motifs did filter down in attenuated forms, to be recognised by all as
symbols of royal authority.
This temporal and spatial ubiquity suggests that the motifs maintained a
relatively stable symbolic value throughout the two millennia from at least
2000 BCE. This is significant when it comes to assessing later, apparently
quite distinct materials, such as the tree(s) in the biblical Eden narrative.
While biblical scholars are generally at pains to insist on the sui generis
nature of this tradition, it is more consistent with our broad understanding of
ancient Near Eastern culture to think in terms of a common repertoire, a
koine. This is in no way to underestimate local distinctions, where these are
accessible to our understanding. But all too often our sense of the distinctive-
ness of biblical motifs is a measure of our ignorance of their ancient Near
Eastern roots.
Now if we put aside all the distinctive narrative elements of the biblical
Eden story, we are left with those elements (almost stage props) which made
up the Marian repertoire and which, though never attested in toto elsewhere,
were so much a part of the general iconographical scene as to be reasonably
understood to belong there too, as for example in Ebla and Ugarit.
Royal and patriarchal burials
One final point at this stage in our discussion brings us back to the theme of
patriarchal burials in the garden, an extension to universal time of the local
tradition of the royal burials also taking place in the garden. This also marks
the process of “eschatologisation” of the tradition.
The kings had been discredited, like Adam, a point consistently argued by
the Deuteronomistic historians (cf. n. 100). Was a secondary, unspoken
purpose of the narrative perhaps a formal discrediting of the old mortuary and
necromantic practices which would have typified the ancient monarchy, in
which dead kings (cf. the Rephaim) would be invoked and celebrated in
kispum rites118
and oracular enquiries? This is a question worth asking, for
there is clear evidence, long largely unrecognised by scholars, of these as
vital features of the pre-exilic world.119
The Eden burial tradition is selective,
118. Perhaps it was fear of their attraction as figures of cult that partly explains the
prominence given to the Rephaim. See Wyatt, The Archaeology of Myth, chapter 3,
and reference in next note.
119. See further on the post-mortem significance of the garden in N. Wyatt, “After
death has us parted: encounters between the living and the dead in the ancient
Semitic world,” in G. del Olmo Lete, J. Vidal and N. Wyatt (eds), The Perfumes of
Seven Tamarisks: Studies in Honour of Wilfred G. E. Watson (AOAT 394; Münster:

however, and Hebron proved to be an important rival tradition, presumably
dating from a time when Jerusalem was not regarded as cosmic centre,
perhaps within the exilic or also early in the post-exilic era. This is because
following Josiah’s reform, only Jerusalem could conceivably have had this
central function down to the exile, and the alternative tradition can scarcely
predate the situation in Jerusalem from the period 597-586, since the
patriarchal narratives also betray many late features, and appear to reflect the
exile as a present fact. Abraham and Sarah had been buried in Hebron,
according to Genesis 23,1-20; 25,9-10120
, as had Jacob (Genesis 50,12-13),
and implicitly Isaac (Genesis 35,27-29). All Jacob’s sons were buried there
according to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.121
So the question arises as to the relative claims of the two sites, and the
implications of these rival burial traditions. There was obviously a
considerable historical gap in the Jerusalem and Eden tradition, between the
burial of the last pre-exilic king, and the rehabilitation of the site in the Adam
tradition. The Hebron tradition must have filled this gap, and once
established in the post-exilic period, was never fully eclipsed. But it never
developed an eschatological character, while the earlier Eden tradition, once
resumed, did so precisely with this new quality.
External influences may also have played a part in the development of a
post mortem reference for Paradise, which was evidently already under way
before its full Christian interpretation in this mode. We may briefly cite just
two.
Firstly, Ugaritic tradition spoke rather mysteriously of the threshold of the
netherworld and the end of the world (which while distinct, are related122
) in
the following terms:
sbn[y lq]ṣt [a]r[ṣ] we travelled to [the ends of the earth],
c
d lksm mhyt123
to the edge of the abyss;
Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), pp. 259-292, and references cited there, concerning the kispum
rite and its analogues.
120. But contrast Testament of Abraham 20,18-19, according to which Abraham will
dwell in Paradise. But as Goodman noted, “Paradise, gardens...,” p. 58 in Bockmuehl
and Stroumsa, Paradise in Antiquity, this text has many Christian interpolations. This
passage may therefore have served to subvert contemporary Jewish thinking.
121. For an important recent re-evaluation of the patriarchal narratives with regard to
land tenure, and the importance of Hebron in particular, see F. Stavrakopoulou, Land
of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (London:
T&T Clark, 2011), especially chapter 2.
122. See the joint chapter on cosmology by N. Marinatos and N. Wyatt, Levantine,
Egyptian, and Greek mythological conceptions of the beyond, pp. 383-410 in K.
Dowden and N. Livingstone (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Greek Mythology
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2011).
123. The damaged text is restored by comparison with KTU 1.16 iii 2-4. See Wyatt,
“There’s Such Divinity,” pp. 140-41. There appears to be further text between these
cola in the present text, but not in the Kirta passage, and it is in any event unreadable.

34 Nicolas Wyatt
mǵny lnc
my arṣ dbr we came to Paradise, the land of pasture,
lysmt šd šḥlmmt to Delight, the steppe by the shore of death.
mǵny l bc
l npl larṣ We came upon Baal fallen to the earth:
mt aliyn bc
l dead was Valiant Baal,
ḫlq zbl bc
l arṣ perished was the Prince, Lord of the Earth!”
(KTU 1.5 vi 3-10)124
I have deliberately chosen provocative translations of the terms nc
my (lit.
“gracious [place]’) and ysmt, as “Paradise” and “Delight,” in the foregoing
translation, because it is my contention that the location is precisely an
entrance to the netherworld, as the limen between two ontological realms,
just as Eden is implicitly in the biblical story. And the Ugaritic material
undoubtedly echoes mortuary aspects of Ugaritian royal ideology. It is
perhaps the germ of an idea which develops more fully in late biblical
thought. The cosmological centrality of Eden, for which I have argued, in no
way diminishes its liminality (as the threshold between two orders of reality),
which is horizontal (inside versus outside) as in the present passage, which
appears to be on the cosmic seashore, with another transcendent realm lying
beyond. This will immediately become clear in comparison with what
follows here. We may suppose that the later speculation concerning the
location of Paradise at the ends of the earth, rather than at its centre, is a
product of the merging of the eschatological conception of it with Greek,
Persian and other cosmological enquiries, together with the spatial
interpretation of miqqedem; but the Ugaritic evidence, already hinting at it, is
more akin to the Mesopotamian description in Gilgamesh.
The Greek counterpart to this mysterious realm is the “meadow of
asphodels” of the Homeric tradition. This is mentioned by the dead Patroclus
(Iliad 23.73) and in Circe’s instructions to Odysseus (Odyssey 10, carried out
in 11). This place too is on the further side of Ocean, not below the earth.125
These two views of an eschatological garden place it beyond the earth-
surrounding ocean. The roots of this idea may perhaps be found in Gilgamesh
10.72-194,126
where Utnapishtim, to whom the hero pays a visit, lives on the
further shore of the ocean. In this respect, these ideas are to be distinguished
from the eschatologised version of Eden in John 20,11-16, cited above, which
My choice of “abyss” for mhyt (following F. F. Hvidberg, Weeping and Laughter in
the Old Testament [Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962], p. 28 n. 3) is contextual,
determined by the parallel term arṣ. Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language (HdO, I 67;
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 20042
), p. 537, understands “meadow, irrigated land, fertile land,”
but acknowledges various interpretations, including this. As a place “at the ends of
the earth,” it is hardly of agricultural quality! Cf. šd in the following colon. On the
cosmology, see Wyatt, The Mythic Mind, pp. 38-54.
124. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, p. 126.
125. See N. Marinatos, “The so-called hell and sinners in the Odyssey and Homeric
cosmology,” Numen 56 (2009), pp. 185-197.
126. George, The Gilgamesh Epic, pp. 683-691.

appears to retain its central location, in what will become the heavenly
Jerusalem.
Conclusion
Our discussion has argued the case for understanding the primordial nature of
the Garden of Eden and Paradise (miqqedem), its evident reference to the
historical life of the Judahite monarchy, and its potential for an eschatological
understanding. If we wish for a comprehensive term to characterise it,
recognising the various dimensions of the concept, then perhaps we may call
it “transhistorical.” It is the historical aspect of this, over against the mythic
emphasis of the primordial and eschatological dimensions, which is the most
sensitive to its transcendent qualities, for which I have argued here. For the
royal cult, in a garden inhabited by gods (Yahweh is “lord of the gods”: yhwh
“ĕlōhîm: see n. 14), sought both to preserve the former, the king’s cultic
activity maintaining the archetypal divine institution, and to incorporate the
latter, since each deceased monarch was ideally interred within the garden,
and thus remained among its population. Both were to be incorporated
through the cult into the eternal present actualised in the ritual life of the
kingdom. It was the destruction of the state, expressed in the metaphor of
expulsion from Eden, which released the futuristic aspect from this ancient
nexus, and permitted its development into a fully eschatological dimension.

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