The earliest authors of our Bible introduce us to the symbolic and living importance of trees. In the garden of Eden are “trees of every kind bearing fruit;” God created them (1:12; 2:9). When the story focuses on “the LORD God,” the reader is introduced to “the Tree of Life” and “the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” Both seem to be centered in the middle of the garden of Eden (2:8–9; 3:3). The only tree from which those made “in the image of God” (1:27) are prohibited to eat is “the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” (2:17). The LORD God warns that “as soon as you eat of it, you shall die” (2:17). “The woman,” who came from Adam and eventually will be named “Eve,” ate of the wrong tree because she did not possess “knowledge.” The compiler of many diverse myths obviously intended for us to contemplate that she intended to partake of “the Tree of Life,” even though she saw the tree was “a source of wisdom” (3:6). She obtains knowledge because she ate of “the Tree of Knowledge;” hence, she obtains insight, not wisdom, but loses everlasting life.
The garden of Eden story is about change. The androgynous Adam gives up a rib and a creature appears; Adam becomes Ish, a “he” and calls the creature Isha, “woman.” She denigrates into “Eve” who must suffer in childbirth and eventually die. Adam, now Ish, “man,” was created to name all animals and to enjoy tilling the Garden. He is unperceptive, simply obeys Isha, eats the forbidden fruit, blames Isha for his disobedience, and is condemned to till laboriously the dirt to which he will return, and is condemned to die. These creatures are transformed; but the Nahash is transmogrified. He is introduced as a “beast of the field,” created by God; and he is the most clever (or wise as in the Targumim) among them. He becomes a crawling serpent, losing his ability to speak and is disposed of feet and hands. He must now eat dirt (which is the source and destiny of Adam and Eve).1
Only one of the images featured in this stunning and complex story does not change. The featured fauna, “the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” has attractive and bewitching fruit and it loses one of its fruit. The other fauna, “the Tree of Life” is dead center in Eden. It is unseen and is not described as having attractive fruit, although at the end of the story it is imagined to have fruit. Neither the woman nor man is attracted to “the Tree of Life.” It does not change. It loses not one fruit. It is dead in the center, lost, unobserved. It cannot speak like the stone in 4 Baruch 9. It cannot provide shelter like Gilgamesh’s tree, Jonah’s Qiqayon, or Zosimos’ tree that drops fruit upon the holy man. This tree, “the Tree of Life,” is described neither actively nor passively, and is finally shut up in the Garden so that Eve and Seth, according to an early Jew, on seeing Adam’s aging body, cannot find it to obtain the “oil of mercy.”
The illusive fruit, the symbolic goal of the human search, is taken away, separated from all and guarded by “the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword” (3:24), but it was never touched (as the woman may have reported) nor even appreciated. The object, “the Tree of Life” symbolizes the human’s lack of perception, feeble actions, and eventual loss: Life. The tree—“the Tree of Life”—does not transmogrify, or even transform; it does not change. It remains stately and alone, by itself, in the center of the inaccessible garden of Eden that will be replaced in Jewish consciousness by a foreign garden: Paradise, in which all trees are ripe with fruit; sometimes they are the planted righteous ones who have a wreath of immortality. But Paradise is not perceived as the abode of “the Tree of Life.”
Early hominoids, like Hebrews and Jews, observed that the tree has the ability to descend deep into the earth. The tree sends its roots into the earth for nourishment and life. And it is from such regions that life-sustaining water bubbles forth and trees, as all plants, receive their origins and death-defying sustenance.
Humans are not like trees. Humans can descend into caves that lead into the earth; but they cannot descend beneath ground like a tree. Humans cannot perceive such origins; they lack knowledge, not knowing the source of water and life. Thus, the symbol of the tree was positive and an object of envy for humans who sought to know about the origin of life. Thousands of humans are born and die during the time a tree may live. Humans look up to trees, knowing they sheltered great grandparents and will shade great grandchildren. Trees can symbolize life; hence, in the dark recesses of our origins someone originated the concept of “the Tree of Life.”
In antiquity, the serpent appears in images and documents with the tree. That striking combination is obvious in three major myths: In the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the story of “the Woman” (soon to be the fallen Eve) in the garden of Eden, and in the account of Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides. Ancient art and sculptures depict a tree with an entwined serpent, and the symbology reappears throughout the history of art and literature, as I demonstrated in The Good and Evil Serpent.
The following studies of “the Tree of Life” in ancient thought from pre-historic times to modernity demonstrate the symbolic, central importance, and longevity of the multivalent concept known as “the Tree of Life.” Early humans, who seldom lived to 30, lamented the loss of life, perhaps feeling that they should be like the apparently eternal tree.2 Not surprisingly, therefore, a mysterious tree appears in almost all ancient contexts, rising prominently in most creation myths.
During the beginnings of Christianity, brilliant minds ruminated on Jesus’ live-giving death on the cross. It was sometimes portrayed in light of the tree, perhaps the tree of life; recall Acts: “But Peter and the apostles answered (and) stated: ‘We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree’ ” (5:29–30). Today, the life-giving importance of “the Tree of Life” is highlighted in synagogues when Jews lift up Torah leather scrolls with elegant wooden (or silver) rollers, called Etzei Chaim, “Trees of Life.”
James H. Charlesworth
Princeton
Fall 2016
If readers cannot perceive these transformations and losses in the Garden of Eden Story, they should read Genesis Rabbah and the Targumim. They should also study ophidian iconography and ponder the images of Iron Age serpents illustrated in The Good and Evil Serpent (Yale University Press, 2010).
When I was lowered into a paleolithic cave on the cliffs west of Jericho, I saw vast numbers of human bones. They were piled high. I thought that most likely early humans, who seldom lived to 30, were confused by the loss of life. Such burial caves, Maẓẓevoth, and monuments to the dead suggest that from earliest times our ancestors lamented that they were not like the apparently eternal tree.