Meanwhile, Back in Xanadu (Gen 2:15)

Into and Out of the Garden

[As noted last time, the free post this week is today, Tuesday.]

¹⁵ YHWH God took the earthling and put him into the Garden of Xanadu.

 וַיִּקַּ֛ח יְ׳הוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֑ם וַיַּנִּחֵ֣הוּ בְגַן־עֵ֔דֶן

We have just finished vv. 10–14, a passage of geography with 4 rivers, 3 countries, and some extremely valuable principal products. Now we return to the mythical story of the creation of humanity, where v. 8 told us:

YHWH God planted a garden in Xanadu of old and put there the earthling He had molded.

What we have now is a “repetitive resumption.” I was taught in graduate school to call this technique Wiederaufnahme, but now I’ve learned from my friend Zev Farber (at the link) that the English name came first. It always sounds more impressive to use the German terms, even in a case like this one, where the German word is shorter than the English expression.

As Zev explains in his essay, this is the way biblical writers resume an earlier thread that has been interrupted. Today we might use punctuation marks like dashes or parentheses, spacing, or a different font size to set off the interpolation from the main text, but these techniques had not yet been developed. Instead, the biblical writers literally repeated words from the end of the thread. Once readers were reminded of where they had been, the previous thread could be picked up and followed further.

Sometimes it seems obvious (to those who are willing to accept this sort of editorial intervention) that a different writer has put new material into an older text. Sometimes it’s clear that the original is making a parenthetical remark. Since we don’t know how the different biblical writers worked, it’s not impossible that the same writer could make a later addition to his own work.

V. 15 is most definitely doing exactly this work, of telling the reader, “Now, back to our story.” The question is why it was important for our author to interrupt the tale of the creation of humanity at this precise point in the story in order to move us (imaginatively) from mythical Xanadu to mundane Mesopotamia. The only answer I can come up with is this.

The interruption comes just after the introduction of two special trees among all the other trees in the garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Sorting. The other trees are presumably those we still have — oak and elm, apple and pear, and so forth. But those first two trees are Xanadu-specific. They are not found outside the garden. They are part of the miraculous, mythical world in which our story starts, not of the world in which we live now.

I’m thinking, therefore, that the shift from mythical to earthly geography is foreshadowing the shift from Xanadu to down-to-earth Mesopotamia that chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis will recount. It replicates the story to come, but in miniature. At the same time, it reinforces the notion that human beings were created in a miraculous way, in a mythical land, but one that is connected to, not detached from, our “ordinary” world. Just turn around and walk back upriver and you can get there once again. There are no guardians at the gate if you travel by water.

As I’ve just explained it, the geography lesson is a literary insertion. It is doing the same work that the author of Version 2 of creation wants done, moving us from Middle-earth (so to speak) to planet Earth. We’ve just spent a fair amount of time looking at the five verses of the geography lesson in detail.

My explanation for their being in the story at this particular place involves moving our camera out far enough to see Genesis 2–3 as a whole. This is the story I’ve been calling “Into and Out of the Garden.” Because the movement of this story seems to match the movement of the geography lesson, it makes sense to me that the same author may have written both. This insertion would be parenthetical, not meant to interrupt or contradict the story in which it’s placed.

Now, though, let’s zoom out one more level and see what we can see by looking at …

Gen 2:10–14 inside Genesis 2–3 inside Genesis 1–3

Let me remind you that the picture we saw in Version 1 of creation was left without a plot. Creation was dynamic, not static, yet there was no movement forward, no path toward anything except more creation in the same place, species after species reproducing its own kind “on the earth” (and in sea and sky) in a place not merely mythical but unnamed and ungraspable.

Only now, with a river that eventually flows into the Euphrates, do we see that the original creation is in our own world. It is not something imaginary. I’ve mentioned before that the Bible sometimes tells the same story from God’s perspective and from ours. That may be the case here in a more profound way than simply two different camera angles.

God’s world, the Version 1 world, just is. Our world, the Version 2 world, moves. To put it another way, our world has a story arc. If God’s world has a story arc too, it is not merely not the same story as ours, it is an arc in a different dimension, a story our Bible is not going to tell us.

Now, however, we’ve been shown the sneak preview of our version of the story. When we return to the story interrupted by this geography lesson, the plot will begin to pick up speed. The engine that drives it — you might call it the MacGuffin — will be the two unique trees.

Christians (if I understand them) think that the Bible is a book about God. We Jews think it is a book about us — and our relationship with God. If we zoom out even further, to that level, we’ll find in the creation story a story about exile, the exile of the earthlings from Xanadu matching that of the Jews from the land of Israel. Genesis 2–3, like the geography lesson, moves in one direction. But the inclusion of Genesis 1 tells us that our original home is still flourishing, opening the possibility of return.

One more quick note: Only now is it “the Garden of Xanadu”; in vv. 8–10 it is a garden in Xanadu. I’m guessing that when it was created, we were told its location (with that evocative name); now, especially after some time has passed while we traveled from Xanadu to the Euphrates, it has become a landmark. When we return to it, next time, we will discover at last the reason for the creation of humanity.