Getting Back to the Garden of Eden

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The main problem with the Garden of Eden is that we’re no longer in it. According to Genesis 3:22–24, the first humans were banished from paradise by God, and he stationed fierce creatures at its entrance to bar any future entry. The humans are banished so that they won’t be able to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and live forever. The exile from Eden guarantees that people will be subject to death. The path to immortality is sealed off, and there’s no obvious way back to the Garden. Or is there?

One of my favorite blues lyrics says, “Everybody wants to know the answer,/ but no one asks the question why;/everybody wants to go to heaven,/but no one wants to die.” People in biblical times didn’t want to die either, but the Garden of Eden story says that death is unavoidable.¹ The reason for death seems to be based on the chief element of the human body—soil or dust from the earth (Genesis 2:7)—and death is sealed by the banishment from Eden. If people had stayed in Eden, they might have had the chance to eat the fruit from the Tree of Life and live forever, transcending their earthly origin. But as the story goes, we are stuck with our earthly nature: “for dust you are, and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). Back to the earth we must go, our bodies recycled into soil.

But elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, there seem to be hints of alternate routes back to the Garden of Eden. In these other corners of Eden, death seems to be overcome, or at least suspended in time. How can death be overcome? This is a central theme in the New Testament, and the answer given there is, of course, through Jesus’ redemptive death and resurrection. But in the Hebrew Bible, too, there are ways that promise eternal life, skirting the fierce creatures that guard the path to the Tree of Life.

The first way is through worship at the Jerusalem Temple. In some of the Psalms, the spiritual experience of worship at the Temple is described as a kind of eternal life in paradise. In the beautiful imagery of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”), the psalmist describes a state of perfection in God’s gracious care. “He restores my life,” says the psalmist, “I lack nothing.” Even the shadow of death and the fear of evil are warded off by God’s protection. At the end of the psalm, we learn that the psalmist is feasting and celebrating and wants to remain forever in “the House of Yahweh.” This phrase literally denotes the Temple of Yahweh, which is the place of feasting and joy par excellence in Israelite religion. Other psalms, such as Psalm 27:4–6, make this location clearer, explicitly identifying “the House of Yahweh” with the Temple and the celebration of sacrifice.

The Temple is the place where one can experience the presence of God and a sense of perfect life and eternity. Psalm 36:8–10 draws the connection with the experience of Eden even closer:

They feast abundantly on the rich
fare of your House;

You let them drink from the river of
your delights.

With you is the fountain of life;
In your light we see light.

As many commentators have observed, this passage is redolent of the Garden of Eden.² But now the Temple is the location of the “fountain of life” and the “river of your delights”—which can literally be rendered the “river of your Edens.” Here life, meaning eternal life, is once again available to the worshiper, who drinks it deeply in the courtyards of God’s House. It may be that this is not a permanent attainment of eternal life—since one has to leave the Temple sometime—but as long as one is there, perfect life and eternity are present.

The second way back to the Garden is by the path of wisdom. In Proverbs, wisdom is equated with the Tree of Life (Proverbs 3:18). This image is generally taken to be a descriptive metaphor for the benefits of wisdom, but the sense of this image may go deeper. Wisdom is the source of life (Proverbs 4:22–23, 10:11) and one of the principles by which God created the universe (Proverbs 3:19, 8:27–30). If one follows the path of wisdom, one gains wisdom’s “love,” “life” and “peace.” In contrast, those who follow the path of folly are destroyed, for theirs is the path of death (Proverbs 2:18–19, 9:18). Wisdom, it seems, offers a perfect existence in a more than metaphorical fashion. It is the Tree of Life in that it gives a perfect life to those who are nourished by it. Perhaps this is an Eden of a different sort, but it is still an idyllic life, a way of living in paradise.

The third way is the path of apocalyptic. Beginning in Isaiah and Ezekiel, the future restoration of Israel is described as a new life in the Garden of Eden. In the coming transformation of the world, “He will make her wilderness like Eden;/her desert like the Garden of Yahweh” (Isaiah 51:3). Ezekiel sees a vision of a great river 047flowing from the future Jerusalem Temple; this river will restore the land (even the barren region of the Dead Sea!), and trees will miraculously bear fruit perpetually (Ezekiel 47). Israel will be a new Eden. Elsewhere we are told that this will be an era when lions will lay down with lambs and innocent children will play safely with poisonous snakes, neatly reversing the curse in Eden (Isaiah 11:6–9, compare with Genesis 3:15). Yahweh will swallow up death, finally solving the problem of death after Eden (Isaiah 25:8). Human life will be crowned with “eternal joy” (Isaiah 35:10, 51:11). This new era will be a restoration of the perfect existence in the Garden of Eden.³

Is it really possible to return to the Garden of Eden? Is a life of perfection and immortality within our grasp? All we can be sure of is that people earnestly desire to return to the Garden. “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.” Eden is where we come from, says Genesis, and we still hope that somehow we can get back in.

The main problem with the Garden of Eden is that we’re no longer in it. According to Genesis 3:22–24, the first humans were banished from paradise by God, and he stationed fierce creatures at its entrance to bar any future entry. The humans are banished so that they won’t be able to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and live forever. The exile from Eden guarantees that people will be subject to death. The path to immortality is sealed off, and there’s no obvious way back to the Garden. Or is there? One of my favorite blues […]