A King in Eden
Into and Out of the Garden
And now — as promised — for something completely different. Or, all right, somewhat different, and yet curiously the same. To learn more about Eden and the garden into which the first earthling has just been put at the end of v. 8, we turn to the book of Ezekiel, and specifically to Ezek 28:12 ff., addressed to the King of Tyre.
Tyre is the southernmost city on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, a dozen or so miles north of today’s border with Israel just above Rosh Hanikra. It was originally on an island — “in the heart of the seas,” as Ezek 28:2 puts it — but has been connected to the mainland since the time of Alexander in the 4th c. BCE.
It was the naval hub from which Phoenician ships traveled throughout the Mediterranean, the mother city of Carthage (קרת חדשׁ / qrt ḥdš ‘NewTown’), and its king Hiram was an essential player in the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem by Solomon. Four centuries later, its king became one of Ezekiel’s targets.
Moshe Greenberg explains, in his Anchor Bible commentary to Ezekiel:
According to the following narrative, the figure addressed was an inhabitant of the Garden of Eden, later expelled—a figure somehow related, therefore, to the first human in the Paradise story of Gen 2–3.
It’s a difficult text and I am no expert on Ezekiel, but the crucial words are these, in v. 13:
In Eden, the garden of God, you were בְּעֵ֨דֶן גַּן־אֱלֹהִ֜ים הָיִ֗יתָ
What can this text tell us about the story we are reading in Genesis 2? I am well out of my depth in discussing that and will rely on more learned colleagues for most of what I’m going to say here. My main purpose in this post is to make clear that what we read in the Bible is not the only way those stories were told — and that some of these stories were told by peoples other than the Jews / Israelites, and in other languages.
That is true even of events we know to have happened in a particular location at a particular time, like the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian army of King Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The Bible itself tells that story in more than one way (see 2 Kings 18–19, Isaiah 36–37, and 2 Chronicles 32), and we have an Assyrian description of the same event.
It is even more true of mythical events. When I say “mythical,” that’s not the same thing as saying “fictional.” Nor do I want to get involved in the scholarly discussions I remember from my grad student days, undoubtedly still going on, about what “myth” means. I’m using the word to describe tales of the primordial past in a world that is clearly not the world of historical events.
The stories of Sherlock Holmes are completely fictional, but there is nothing mythical about them. They take place in a recognizably 19th-c. London in which people send telegrams. Contrast the Israelites wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan for 40 years, being fed by manna from heaven while their clothes and shoes do not wear out (see Deut 8:4 and 29:4). That is mythical even if it happened. As perhaps we’ll have a chance to see one day, the Israelites cross through the sea on dry ground into mythical territory in Exodus 14, and they stay in mythical territory, and mythical time, until they cross the Jordan River dry-shod in Joshua 3.
The creation of the very first human being and his being placed in Eden are mythical in that same sense, and Ezekiel’s naming Eden as גַּן־אֱלֹהִ֜ים gan-elohim ‘the garden of God’ clearly tells us that he is describing that same realm of myth even though Tyre is a real place that had a real king. The fact that Ezekiel says to the king בְּי֥וֹם הִבָּרַאֲךָ֖ ‘on the day you were created’, using bara from Gen 1:1 and 1:27, is another indication that his Eden is our Eden.
I’ll go further and point out, as the commentators to Ezekiel do, that the nine gems that adorn the king of Tyre are 9 of the 12 gems on the breastplate of the High Priest, as described in Exodus 28 and 39. That notion of the Tabernacle as microcosm that we’ve mentioned before is certainly at play again here.
Another link between the Tabernacle and Eden is the cherubim that form part of the ark cover in the Tabernacle (and later in the Temple). As we’ll see in this column before too long, there are cherubim associated with Eden too — and, though the text is difficult, they are mentioned in vv. 14 and 16 of Ezekiel’s passage on the king of Tyre as well.
Go to the commentaries, if you like, to go deeper into that passage, and into Ezekiel 31, where the trees of Eden are mentioned. We will see them in Genesis much sooner than we’ll see those cherubim. My point is just that the biblical stories are not a listing of facts but a selection of stories from the multiple versions in which our ancestors told their tales of the ancient past.
There is much more in this vein, and told in much more scholarly fashion, in an article by Avi Winitzer called “Assyriology and Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv.” By Tel Aviv he means not the city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast — about ten times farther from Rosh Hanikra than Tyre is, but an easier trip because you can travel directly — but the original Tel Aviv that gave the modern city its name, the one in Ezek 3:15, by the Chebar Canal.
In Hebrew תל אביב means Springhill, but in Ezekiel it is from Akkadian til abūbi ‘mound of the Flood’ — the primordial Flood that we’ll read about later in Genesis. That too was told about in multiple ancient versions, including the famous Epic of Gilgamesh. Winitzer traces a complicated relationship between Gilgamesh and Ezekiel (that’s the “Assyriology and Jewish Studies” of his title) and between Eden and the Flood in those texts, Genesis, and earlier Mesopotamian texts as well. He even suggests that the difficult phrase תֻּפֶּ֤יךָ וּנְקָבֶ֙יךָ֙ in Ezek 28:13 is a reference to tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh Epic!
And there is much more, which I cannot claim to have absorbed. We are in Mesopotamia, after all, here in Genesis 2. Six verses from now we will see the Tigris and the Euphrates themselves, which gave the land “between the rivers” its name.
If you, like me, are a bit dizzy just now, relax — next time, we’ll return to our close reading of the actual text of Genesis. Let’s just not lose sight of the fact that we are peering into the ancient past through a frustratingly small window.