A Primordial Garden (Gen 2:8)

Into and Out of the Garden

⁸ … of old … מִקֶּ֑דֶם

Most Bible translations take this word to indicate where YHWH planted the garden. I’m taking it to mean when.

“From” קדם qédem can certainly mean “eastward,” as the KJV understands it; other translations say simply “in the east,” which is not exactly wrong but loses a slight possible nuance of this word in its directional sense. But qedem has another meaning too, which I think also works here. For the sake of shaking things up a bit to make us read the Bible with fresh eyes and ears, I’m adopting what (I now discover) is also the translation of Targum Onkelos: מִלְקַדמִין mi-l’qadmin ‘from the beginning’. Yes (before you ask), Onkelos translates בראשית, the first word of the Bible, as בְקַדמִין.

“In the East” has to be east of somewhere, but we don’t know where we are located. The Mormons, apparently, were told by Joseph Smith that Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, and according to John Day in From Creation to Babel, William Warren, a former president of Boston University, thought it was at the North Pole.

We do know when we are located, however, and it is at the dawn of human history. קדם literally means “in front,” and that metaphor was productive in two ways in Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages:

• “In front” = east because that is the direction in which people oriented themselves geographically in those days. East was at the top of the ancient map, as north is for us. That is why Yemen, meaning ‘right’ (as opposed to ‘left’), is at the far south of the Arabian peninsula.

• “In front” = the past because we can see the past; it is in front of our eyes. The future, which we can’ see, is behind us.

We have already spoken of Prov 8:22; here it is again, in the NJPS translation, with our word prominently featured:

The LORD created me at the beginning of His course

     As the first [קֶ֖דֶם qédem] of His works of old

What is Onkelos telling us about this garden by announcing the time of its creation rather than the place? Don’t we already understand that this is a story of beginnings, that everything we are being told now happened “of old”? The answer, I believe, depends on the fact that Aramaic does not have that “consecutive” tense that Biblical Hebrew has. So Onkelos is not telling us that the next thing that happened was that God planted a garden, but that God had planted a garden.

 The Hebrew text cannot be read that way, since it does use the consecutive tense. But a different Aramaic translation, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, makes quite clear its assertion that this garden had been planted earlier. In my English translation:

ואיתנציב במימרא דייי אלקים גינוניתא מעדן לצדיקייא קדם בריית עלם

The Memra of YHWH God had planted a garden from Eden for the righteous before the creation of the world [קדם בריית עלם].