Population Transfer (Gen 3:23–24)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²³ … from the Garden of Xanadu, to work the earth from which they had been taken.

מִגַּן־עֵ֑דֶן לַֽעֲבֹד֙ אֶת־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֻקַּ֖ח מִשָּֽׁם׃

Part of the pleasure for me of writing this column is that I really do have to read every single word of the (Hebrew) Bible carefully. The nature of the format, though, means that sometimes I end up burying the lede. So here is a heads-up: before we’re done today, we’re going to see a subtle shoutout to the exodus from Egypt.

Now we return to our regularly scheduled text at the end of v. 23.

Last time, I put a link on “Xanadu” because I didn’t have space to discuss the word, and I thought some newcomers might be surprised to see עֵ֫דֶן éden translated that way. I want to come back to it now for a brief discussion, because the geography is interesting.

Remember that, although we like to refer to the garden itself as Eden (which I’ll call it for now for the sake of clarity), that’s not correct. It’s the Garden of Eden because Eden is the name of the region in which it’s located. The humans are being dismissed from this garden, but Eden is bigger than the garden. They will still be in Xanadu, just not inside the pleasure-dome.

Have we mentioned that the man / the humans are ha-adam? And that the “earth” they were originally made of is ha-adama? Let’s mention it again just to be sure. On this blog, where a verse can take a week or more to talk through, it’s been a while since we saw that word, so here is a quick refresher from earlier in our chapter:

¹⁹ You will eat — at the cost of sweat on your face — until your return to the earth, for from it you were taken.

YHWH is initiating his own “back to the land” movement. In v. 19, it sounded as if ha-adam (presumably there it was “the man”) would be returning to the earth after he died. Now, in vv. 22–23, ha-adam in the form of both/all the human beings is returned to the earth immediately, to get started on the hard agricultural work he was threatened with in v. 19.

This is an even quicker “return” to the earth than is promised in that verse, one that is intended to make sure that the more permanent kind of return will eventually happen. Death is certainly implied by what YHWH says in v. 19, but you would think it would have been at least part of the threat and perhaps even the headline. Strangely, death in this episode is not the immediate, terrifying menace it is in the movies (or the news), but the inevitable end to life that it really is for us all.

Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Torah commentary, also emphasizes that this is a “return”:

Man was created from earth outside of Eden and is now returned to his place of origin.

We will have to think more about this when we turn to v. 24. First, a quick reminder about the earth “from which they had been taken.” Woman was “taken” from man (see 2:23), just as humanity in general (ha-adam) was taken from the ground (ha-adama). They are leaving the garden, but in doing so — and ultimately, in dying — they are going back where they came from. To me, it seems the implication is that the humans were designed for death from day one — or perhaps I should say Day Six.

²⁴ He expelled the humans. וַיְגָ֖רֶשׁ אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֑ם

Quick! For 10 points — who else in the Bible dismisses workers and expels them?