The Griffins of Xanadu Park (Gen 3:24)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²⁴ East of Xanadu Park, [he installed] … מִקֶּ֨דֶם לְגַן־עֵ֜דֶן

Last time, we discussed just the very first word of v. 24b, וַיַּשְׁכֵּן֩. (Relax, we’ll get to the Griffins in a moment.) We saw that some of the non-standard Aramaic translations understood that YHWH had “caused the glory of his Immanence [= himself] to dwell” outside the garden. What I didn’t add there is the next two words of Raanan Eichler’s translation of all four of them: “of old.”

When we originally saw this word קדם qédem, in Gen 2:8, I too translated it as “of old,” which the word can also mean. Here, though, the verse is explaining how YHWH is coping with the new situation, after the humans have eaten from the Tree of Sorting. There was no reason before to block them from reaching the Tree of Life, so I’m taking this קדם to refer to the location, not some previous time.

An interesting point about those targumim (before we leave them) is that two of the four that say “of old” also add “to the east,” just as I did. Eichler says (in a footnote):

This is likely an example of “double translation” which is common in the Palestinian targumim, in this case reading the Hebrew word קדם as both “east” and “ancient times.”

I wrote about this phenomenon of double translation in my article “Syntactic Double Translation in the Targumim.” It’s an early example of the Jewish perspective on the Bible, which looks for multiple meanings in the biblical text. The kind of extra literary dimension I’ve noted in many of these columns is just a small portion of the possibilities of multiple readings. In this forum, I’m restricting myself to the kinds of readings that I imagine a literary writer might have wanted to express.

We’ll talk more about why this is happening east of the garden, probably next time. I’ll just add one more quick note here, which I should have discussed back in 2:8, when this garden was originally planted. גן gan is the word that Modern Hebrew uses for a “park,” so as part of my plan to defamiliarize the text, I’m changing my translation of gan-éden here to “Xanadu Park.” (Look for the signs on the interstate to know which exit to use.) One basic aspect of a traditional English park is that it is enclosed, something we did not yet know about Xanadu Park that we’re going to find out quite soon.

Now for those Griffins.

… the Griffins אֶת־הַכְּרֻבִ֗ים

I’m indebted for this wonderful translation to William Propp’s Anchor Bible commentary on Exod 25:18. Since that’s the next place the word appears in the Bible, this will be our only chance to discuss the word on this blog until maybe the 22^nd century, so let’s go for it. Here’s Propp, in a condensed version of his (even longer) comment: