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A Biblical Garden with No Apple Trees
Who can recall the Biblical story of Ruth without also recalling her standing, as Keats wrote, “amid the alien corn”? And where would Adam and Eve reside in our imaginations without the Garden of Eden?
Most of us fill out the Biblical narrative with our own imaginary garden. Perhaps we imagine the acanthus growing straight like a Greek column or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as bearing winesap apples.
Wonder no more. Tucked away in New York City’s concrete jungle is a quarter of an acre of Biblical plants, trees and shrubs.
First opened to the public in a spring downpour in 1973, the Biblical Garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest cathedral, was the brainchild of Sara Larkin Loening, and the handiwork of C. Powers Taylor of Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York. The project is ecumenical. Its board members include the bishop and the dean of the cathedral, the rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, a rabbi and a Jewish scholar.
The garden’s pathways resemble the hard-baked soil of the Near East.
At the heart of the enclosed blooming garden are four delicate-looking apricot trees, which some people say was the fatal fruit eaten in Paradise. In fact, apricots are known as golden apples in Cyprus. Furthermore, Proverbs 25:11 observes that “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” probably a metaphor for apricots and their leaves, whose silver surfaces turn up in the wind. Quince trees, another choice for the forbidden fruit, stand near the apricots, and behind them are plum trees, yet another candidate for the cursed fruit.
Towering high on one edge of the garden is an impressive row of cedars of Lebanon, the prized trees whose wood was used to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Closer to the ground grows the mustard plant, whose seeds Jesus compared to the Kingdom of God, “which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew and waxed a great tree” (Luke 13:19).
Aloe, a medicinal plant well known to crossword puzzle fans, also graces the garden. This plant (as well as myrrh) was used to preserve the body of Jesus, and is said to have come from Ethiopia where it was also used in embalming fluid.
More common plants in the garden include cucumbers, onions and leeks, vegetables that grow in abundance in the Near East. The Israelites cried for these familiar foods during their journey through the desert (Numbers 11:5). A few handfuls of flax sway delicately in the garden’s soft breezes, and off in a shady corner papyrus, the bulrushes used to make Moses’ basket (Exodus 2:3, 5), grow from the soil of a tiny pond.
The love poetry of Song of Songs, so rich in nature metaphors, inspired the garden’s inclusion of lilies, pomegranates, saffron, roses and nuts.
The garden boasts a variety of mints and herbs, the fragrant and poisonous oleander, sorghum, an Italian cypress with long-fingered needles, lentils from which Jacob made the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright (Genesis 25:29–34), and tamarisk, from which the sweet-tasting manna that sustained the Israelites in the desert may have come.
Only one plant in the cathedral garden—the Judas tree or redbud—is not actually mentioned in the Bible, but it earns its spot because according to legend, Judas hanged himself from this tree, causing its blossoms to blush red with shame.
Two shaded stone benches and a grape arbor provide shelter from the summer sun and give a fine view of the garden. A pleasant hideaway for both Biblical botanists and tired tourists, the garden, located in Manhattan at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, is open year-round during daylight; a tour guide is available Saturdays from 11 to 2 in June, July and August. The gift shop inside the cathedral carries a number of books on Biblical botany as well as seeds to start a Biblical garden.
Recreating the botanical world of the Bible reminds us of Job’s words:
“For there is hope of a tree,
If it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
And that the shoot thereof will not cease.
Though the root thereof wax old in the earth,
And the stock thereof die in the ground;
Yet through the scent of water it will bud,
And put forth boughs like a sapling”(Job 14).
Archaeological Lecture Series in Jerusalem
If you’re planning a trip to Jerusalem soon, you might want to look over the schedule of Sunday archaeology lectures that will be given at the Rockefeller Museum in the coming months. On January 26, Ofer Bar 008Yosef, professor of prehistory at Hebrew University, will discuss “Nahal Hemar—An Early Neolithic Cave.” On February 23, Trude Dothan, professor of archaeology at Hebrew University, and Seymour Gitin, professor of archaeology at the Albright Institute, will talk about “Miqne-Ekron.” On March 23, Amihai Mazar, senior lecturer at Hebrew University, will speak on “Tel Batash-Timnah.” Finally, on April 13, Adam Zertal, lecturer in archaeology at the University of Haifa, will review the “Excavations on Mt. Ebal.”
The lecture series—now in its 16th year—is co-sponsored by the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College. For more information, when you arrive in Jerusalem call 282–131.
Newsday’s Condensation of a BAR Article
Articles that appear in BAR are frequently referred to in the general press. The following article, based on “You Too Can Read Hieroglyphics,” BAR 11:04, by Carey A. Moore, appeared in a Newsday article by Roy Hanson:
What Say?
“Nobody around here can speak Egyptian. For that matter, nobody around anywhere can speak Egyptian.
“Ancient Egyptian, we mean, what Cleopatra spoke. Not what modern Egyptians speak, which is Arabic.
“There are people who can read Egyptian, and people who can write it. Not many, granted, but there are some. But there is nobody who can speak it. So says the Biblical Archaeology Review, which called our attention to this matter. Anyway, nobody can speak Egyptian, so if Cleopatra (the real Cleopatra, not Elizabeth Taylor) were reincarnated, which the Egyptians, at least, thought likely, you couldn’t talk to her anyway.
“Ancient Egyptian was written in hieroglyphics and, as in Hebrew, only the consonants were written, not the vowels. This makes it pretty hard to figure out how it was pronounced. People do speak Hebrew, of course, but that’s because there has always, all through the centuries, been somebody speaking it.
“What they do, the people who can read hieroglyphics, is this: They stick an “e” in between each of the consonants. So if you met the reincarnated Cleopatra, you might say, ‘He, de ye ceme here feten?” In pidgin Egyptian, of course. And she wouldn’t know what the helel you were talking about. Elizabeth Taylor wouldn’t either.”
Peter Campbell Craigie Dies
Professor Peter Campbell Craigie died on September 26, 1985, at age 47, from injuries received in a car accident. At the time of his death, he was vice president (academic) of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. His wife Elizabeth and his children Gregor and Gillian survived the accident, which occurred as a result of mechanical failure.
Born in Scotland, Peter Craigie served as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force. He completed degrees at the University of Aberdeen, the University of Durham and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland before coming to McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, for his Ph.D. studies. Craigie was an important figure in Canada in the study of religion and a strong and vigorous advocate of the humanities. He was, in this current year, the president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Craigie’s scholarly legacy will be most closely associated with his studies of Ugaritic literature. (See
The Canadian Society of Biblical Studies is establishing a memorial fund, aimed at creating a lectureship in religious studies in Peter Craigie’s name to bring scholars of international stature to lecture in Canada on the occasion of the annual meetings of the Learned Societies. Contributions (made out to the “CSBS: Craigie Fund”) should be sent to S. G. Wilson, Department of Religion, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada. Tax-deductible receipts will be issued. The family will be notified of the names of donors to the fund.
Bigger Than King Tut—New Egypt Exhibit Tours United States
If you are in Provo, Utah, between now and April, you will have a chance to see an exhibit of 72 Egyptian artifacts that date from about 1290 to 1224 B.C. A third larger than the famous King Tut exhibit, which toured the United States in the 1970s, “Ramses II: The Pharaoh and His Time” features an eight-foot-tall granite statue of a childlike Ramses II being watched over by the falcon god Horus, a number of gold objects including a pair of enormous, carved bracelets probably worn by Ramses himself, several toiletry items including a kohl (eye makeup) pot and a razor, and the lid of the wooden sarcophagus in which Ramses II was reentombed after his burial chamber was looted in antiquity.
Some scholars believe Ramses II to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. During his 66-year reign he oversaw a prodigious building program, erecting temples, monuments and statues, and, after fighting the Hittites in the battle of Qadesh, he was a party to one of the first known peace treaties.
The exhibit, which is already in progress at the Monte L. Bean Museum of Brigham Young University, is on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It closes in Provo on April 5. It will then be shown at Expo 86 in Vancouver, British Columbia, from May 3 to October 15; at the 010Jacksonville Art Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, from November 15 through March 15, 1987; in Memphis, Tennessee, from April 15, 1987, through August 31, 1987; and finally, in Denver, Colorado.
New Israeli Museum Displays Hecht Collection
A museum of art and archaeology, the Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, is now open at the University of Haifa in Israel.
The permanent exhibit, entitled “The People of Israel in Eretz Israel,” is arranged according to subject and chronology, beginning with the Chalcolithic period (fourth millennium B.C.) and ending with the period of the Mishnah and Talmud (second to seventh centuries A.D.). Among the many unique objects are pottery, jewelry, seals, coins, and stone and bronze artifacts. One seal, made of brown jasper and decorated with a lyre, was the subject of a BAR article, “What Did David’s Lyre Look Like?” BAR 08:01.
Selected works of art are exhibited on the upper levels of the museum, and additional archaeological and artistic exhibitions are planned. Writes Reuben Hecht, “I believe that this museum has to become a source of inspiration and a living center of creative research in [ancient Israel’s] archaeology and art.”
The museum’s donors originally displayed their archaeological collection at Reuben Hecht’s Dagon Silo Company in Haifa. Born in Belgium in 1909, Reuben Hecht immigrated to Israel in the 1930s to start a grain import storage and distribution business. But Hecht resumed to Europe in the late ’30s to organize clandestine immigration into Palestine. All the while, whenever he could, he acquired artifacts of the Holy Land, amassing a personal collection that now ranks as one of the largest in Israel.
Time Is Running Out
In a beautiful review of Yigael Yadin’s book on the Temple Scroll in the Times Literary Supplement (London), May 3, 1985, the distinguished historian Geza Vermes writes:
“On a more personal note, the Dead Sea Scrolls have offered to my generation of students an immense opportunity. Yigael Yadin, beyond doubt the most scintillating of the younger researchers in the early 1950s, is the first to have departed from among us. The Temple Scroll is his worthy memorial. But it is also a reminder to us all, especially to those who have been tardy in responding to the challenge of their privileged task [the publication of the remaining Dead Sea projects], that time is running out.”
It’s Official: Stager and McCarter Accept New Teaching Positions
On July 1, 1985, P. Kyle McCarter became the William Foxwell Albright Professor in Biblical and Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. McCarter came to Johns Hopkins from the University of Virginia, where he was professor of religion. A reviewer of books for BAR, author of an upcoming review-article in Bible Review and a member of the BAR Editorial Advisory Board, McCarter is known to many participants at BAS vacation seminars. Last summer, McCarter’s well-known skill as a teacher was enjoyed by students at a BAS seminar on the Bible at Montreat, North Carolina. In July, 1986, McCarter will teach a BAS Seminar on the Johns Hopkins University campus.
Lawrence Stager will be leaving his post as associate professor of Syro-Palestinian archaeology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago on July 1, 1986, to become Harvard University’s Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel. Stager, who received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, has taught at the Oriental Institute since 1973.
Last summer, Stager initiated new excavations at Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. With varied field experience in Israel, Cyprus and North Africa, Stager is known to BAR readers as co-author (with Samuel Wolf) of “Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?” BAR 10:01.
Archaeology Films for Hearing Impaired
Megiddo: City of Destruction has been added to the archives of the Judaica Captioned Film Center, Inc. The center prepares existing films for use in classes for the hearing impaired.
Narrated by the late Yigael Yadin, this newly captioned version of the film serves as an introduction to archaeological methods and to Biblical archaeology.
Other films available from the center include For Out of Zion, an introduction to Judaism, and Noah and the Flood, an animated version of the story from Genesis. There is no charge for use of the films beyond the cost of shipping and handling. For more information, write to Judaica Captioned Film Center, Inc., P.O. Box 21439, Baltimore, Maryland 21208–0439.
Corrections
In “Should the Exodus and the Israelite Settlement in Canaan Be Redated?” BAR 11:04, the chart shows the beginning of Middle Bronze II according to the generally accepted date (G.A.D.) at 1800 B.C.; William H. Stiebing advises us that it should be about 1950–1900 B.C.
Photo credits for a number of the artifacts pictured in “Ancient Ivory—The Story of Wealth, Decadence and Beauty,” BAR 11:05, were given only to the photographer. Credit for the Beer-Sheva and Megiddo ivories should also have been given to the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, in whose collection the artifacts reside.
A Biblical Garden with No Apple Trees
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