A Garden in Xanadu (Gen 2:8)
Into and Out of the Garden
8 YHWH God planted a garden וַיִּטַּ֞ע יְ׳הוָ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים גַּן
As soon as I read this, I instantly flashed on the construction of the Tabernacle.
A bit of background to that comment: I’ve said before that the Tabernacle is understood to be a microcosm — that is, a miniature cosmos — and that the Bible itself seems to be silently presenting it in that way. So it’s not surprising to find some links between the creation stories and Exodus 35–40. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve just recently read those chapters on the Jewish calendar (here’s my Torah Talk post on that episode for those who missed it) and they are fresh in my mind.
It’s not the connections with Genesis 1 that I’m thinking of right now, but something that the traditional commentators love to explain: why the order of the instructions (in Exod 25–31) differs from the order of events when the actual Tabernacle is made. I’ll let Rashbam, the grandson of the great French commentator Rashi, explain:
They shall make an ark of acacia wood. When Bezalel actually makes them, he constructs the Tabernacle first and the utensils (Ark, lampstand, table) later—after all, where would he put them before the Tabernacle was constructed? But when they are commanded, the first step in fulfilling “make Me a sanctuary” (v. 8) had to be the commandment to make the Ark. The Ark is the whole reason the sanctuary must be made.
[from his comment to Exod 25:10, in my Commentators’ Bible translation]
Here in Genesis 2, the background information given us in vv. 5–6 is that there are no plants yet because there is no one to do the work (לַֽעֲבֹ֖ד la’avod) of taking care of them. The events that follow don’t seem to be the best possible match for the situation. If you are God and find yourself needing a gardener, what do you do first?
Create the plants and then make your worker there among them?
Mold your future employee and then make the plants grow where he is? Or …
Mold your worker, plant a garden somewhere else, and then move him into the garden?
Of the possible ways this story could be told — and no doubt you can think of others — the 3rd option seems the least likely. You now have on your hands a living, breathing human being, who most probably has a number of questions on his mind: “Where am I? … Who am I? … Who are You? … and where are You going?”
Well, I am going off to plant a garden. As they say at the Amazon pickup location, “Hang tight. Your stuff will be ready in about 1 minute.” Why the story is told in this order is very confusing to me. My best guess is to assume that we are not being told the entire back story.
We do know that there were other stories about this garden. I’m going to devote next week’s free Sunday post to one of them, from elsewhere in the Bible; there’s not enough room left today for that long a discussion. So I’ll continue moving through Genesis 2 on Tuesday and Thursday and try to land somewhere that it will be natural to talk about the other garden story on Sunday.
Meanwhile (excuse me if I feel like LeBron James leaving the Cavaliers for the first time on national television) … the location of God’s new garden.
8 … in Xanadu בְעֵ֖דֶן
Yes! YHWH planted this garden in Xanadu!1
עֵדֶן is Eden, of course, capitalized in English because this is a name. Normally we simply transliterate names, but we are still in the mythological realm here in Genesis 2, and I wanted to convey not merely the sound of the word — by the way, that capital E is standing for a Hebrew sound that’s more like a capital A, long A — but also the flavor it’s imparting to our story. Here’s how HALOT explains it:
n.top. [fancy lexicography for “place name”]; homophonic with I עֵדֶן from which it is probably also derived: “land of bliss”, “happy land”
In other words, the word éden ‘bliss’ gave Eden, the location of this garden, its name. Indeed, the LXX translates גַּן־עֵ֫דֶן, not here but in Gen 3:23–24, as παραδείσου τῆς τρυφῆς ‘the orchard of delight’ (NETS) — and. yes, that first Greek word is paradeisos, an originally Persian word that made its way not only into Greek but also into Biblical Hebrew פַּרְדֵּס (see, e.g., Song 4:13). So I suppose I could actually have called Eden “the Big Rock Candy Mountain” or, perhaps better, “Never-Never Land.”
I chose “Xanadu” for several reasons:
Its three consonant sounds share two sounds with Eden.
Per the OED, Xanadu can be used to mean “a place suggestive of the Xanadu portrayed in Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, with its dream-like magnificence and luxury.”
Once I thought of it, it amused me too much to give it up.
I actually thought for a moment of translating עֵדֶן as “Shangri-La” because of what’s going to happen [spoiler] at the end of Genesis 3. But Coleridge apparently created Xanadu from the Chinese name Shang-tu, so I imagine James Hilton, in Lost Horizon, must at least subconsciously have been thinking of Xanadu too.
We’ll encounter a cognate of עֵדֶן down the road in Genesis 18. For now, let’s be aware that we are in a place that is on earth but not of earth. Like Shangri-La, it is supposedly somewhere on the planet but (now) inaccessible to us. What God puts there is not a dome, but it is enclosed, and the name Eden suggests that what’s inside the enclosure is a world of pleasure.
We have one more word to discuss before we finish the first half of v. 8, but I am running out of space, so we’ll save that one for Tuesday. Today, I want to point out one more thing about this garden.
Like ha-adam, who does not become Adam as early in the Bible as most of us think, this garden is in Eden (or Xanadu, if you will still indulge me). It is not yet the Garden (with a capital G) of Eden. Stay tuned to watch when that happens; it will be soon, in Genesis 2, but not quite that soon — probably next month — in this column.
I encourage you to follow the link and read or reread this wonderful poem. If you keep Eden in mind while you read it, you will wonder whether Coleridge himself was not also at least partially thinking of Eden.