The Tree of Life (Gen 2:9)

Into and Out of the Garden

Gen 2:9 begins this way, in the translation I’ve been offering: “YHWH God caused to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for seeing and good for eating …” and it continues:

⁹ … and the tree of life וְעֵ֤ץ הַֽחַיִּים֙

Besides every tree that was desirable for looking or good for eating, the second half of the verse adds two more trees that are being singled out for special mention. This one is “the tree of life.” Or should that be “the Tree of Life”? The one thing it isn’t is “a tree of life.” The definite article, etz HA- ḥayyim, shows us that. (More on the grammar in Lessons 13–14 of my Hebrew course.)

We saw just this in v. 7, when YHWH created HA-adam. It made sense enough there, because we had already met this earthling in Genesis 1, and we could read 2:7 as explaining in more detail how “the” earthling we saw in Genesis 1 was made.

Now, however, the text is writing as if we have already met this tree. Yet we haven’t, at least, not in the Bible. Where are we expected to know it from?

The answer, I think, is that everybody just did know that the myth about the first human might be expected to have this element in it — a tree of which one might eat and then live forever, though we only learn this incidentally in the Bible, when God mentions the possibility in 3:22.

The saga of Gilgamesh, which we mentioned incidentally when we had a look at Ezekiel 28, has a famous tale in which Gilgamesh seeks a plant that will give him immortality, finds it, but then has it taken from him while he sleeps, by a snake, no less. Siduri, the barmaid at the end of the universe, consoles him with these words:

You will never find the life for which you are looking.
When the gods created man they allotted to him death,
but life they retained in their own keeping.
As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things;
day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice.
Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water,
cherish the little child that holds your hand,
and make your wife happy in your embrace;
for this too is the lot of man.

If that sounds familiar though you have never read Gilgamesh, you may be thinking of these lines from Ecclesiastes 9:

⁷     Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God. ⁸ Let your clothes always be freshly washed, and your head never lack ointment. ⁹ Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun—all your fleeting days. For that alone is what you can get out of life and out of the means you acquire under the sun. [NJPS translation]

It is clear that the author of Qohelet (as that book and its narrator are called in Hebrew) was a well-read man, and that the tales of Gilgamesh, which he also quotes in 4:12 with the saying about the threefold cord, were part of his library. (If you want to learn more, see Nili Samet’s article, “The Gilgamesh Epic and the Book of Qohelet: A New Look.”) For present purposes, what’s important is that single ה, that letter telling us that this is the tree of life, letting us know that this will be the Genesis version of the story of our futile search for immortality.

 … was also in the garden בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן

Wait a minute! Where is the verb “was”?