The Garden of Eden: Don’t Sweat it!

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If you know your Bible, you know that when God expels Adam and Eve from Eden, God tells Adam, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). This occurs just after God curses the earth to sprout thorns and thistles to impede Adam’s farming and just before the dreadful final pronouncement, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This all makes sense in the context of Adam’s prior job which was to “till” and “keep” the garden God had planted in Eden. In Eden, Adam was a farmer, and he would still be a farmer in the wild world outside Eden. The difference is that outside Eden, Adam would have to work hard to grow food—or, put another way, food would require sweat equity.

It’s the story’s reference to sweat that intrigued me. Sweat is a normal feature of our cultural language; think of Winston Churchill’s iconic “blood, toil, sweat, and tears” and all those famous athletes who extol the virtues of sweat. Some form of “sweat” turns up 49 times in Shakespeare’s writings. In the Hebrew Bible, though, sweat only comes up here in the Adam and Eve story and in one other place—which I will reveal at the end of this piece.

In Genesis 3, sweat defines the difference between Adam’s bodily experience inside and outside Eden. Furthermore, sweating—or not 067068sweating—characterizes the act of farming. This is because farming in the garden was effortless. As Carol Meyers has pointed out, “The Eden garden is diametrically opposite to Israelite reality.”?¹ We know this because effort is what Adam is condemned to when he farms outside Eden. Thorns and thistles are weeds, not something humans can eat. The logical conclusion is that, in Eden, Adam didn’t sweat.

This isn’t an earthshaking conclusion in itself, but it does help us see what kind of place the narrator imagined Eden to be. The food was easy to grow, harvest, and eat. There’s a wonderful passage in Homer’s Odyssey, which has marked affinities to ancient Near Eastern culture, that has always made me think of Eden:

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Whereas the Odyssey expresses in words the astounding, effortless fertility of the land of the Phaeacians, a stunning wall painting in the Egyptian New Kingdom tomb of Sennedjem and his wife Iineferti gives us a picture.³

This famous illustration of the Field of Reeds from 13th-century Thebes shows us the Egyptian afterworld, based on Spell 110 from the Book of the Dead. To my mind it presents us with an example of how an ancient Israelite might have imagined Eden to appear. The vivid scene takes up almost the entire east (rebirth-themed) wall of the tomb. The very top of the wall shows the sun barque of the Egyptian god Re in the dawn sky (i.e., rebirth imagery). A river flows at the bottom and then around the entire scene (recall the rivers of Eden and the Odyssey’s gushing springs), and at the top are the gods attended by the blessed couple. Between the river and the gods, we see plants and trees growing in orderly rows above the riverbank and then, centrally positioned, the main characters, Sennedjem and Iineferti. And what are they doing? Plowing, planting seeds, and harvesting grain and flax.

Possibly your first reaction is “Huh. They’re farming? That’s a blessed afterlife?” But wait! Look at what they are wearing. Those fine white linen garments were Egyptian party clothes and very expensive.⁴ And note how brilliantly white they are. No dust, no dirt … no sweat! Yes, farming—but effortlessly. As in the Odyssey, the earth in the Field of Reeds seems to require only the slightest effort to bring forth fruit. For those to whom the gods allow entrance, life in the afterworld is an effortless and happy version of life in this world. In the Field of Reeds, Sennedjem and Iineferti are assured a plentiful supply of the two staple Egyptian foods: bread and beer. (Egyptians made beer from grain.)

Now again, if you know your Bible, there’s a pretty obvious difference between the picture of Sennedjem and Iineferti at work in the Field of Reeds and of Adam and Eve in the garden (aside from the presence of multiple gods). Adam and Eve don’t wear linen garments; they are naked and 069unashamed (Genesis 2:25). My point, however, isn’t about Adam and Eve’s wardrobe. It’s that they did not sweat in the garden. In other words, sweat characterizes the everyday human world, even the human condition, but not a world where, like Adam and Eve, like Sennedjem and Iineferti, like the Odyssey’s Phaeacians, humans live in proximity to the divine.

And here is where I reveal the other reference to sweat in the Hebrew Bible. In Ezekiel 44:18, God is laying out the regulations for the restored Jerusalem Temple, and one of the rules states that when the priests come into the Temple, “They shall have linen turbans on their heads, and linen undergarments on their loins; they shall not bind themselves with anything that causes sweat.” Here the priests wear linen (as they do in Exodus 28:39 and Leviticus 16:4), but more important for our purposes is that the reason seems to be to avoid sweating in the Temple. Verse 17 says, “They shall have nothing of wool on them,” wool of course being famous for its warmth. Linen is cool. Apparently, sweat is a no-no in the presence of God.

Just as it is inappropriate in the Jerusalem Temple where the priests minister to God, sweat was also out of place in the Garden of Eden, God’s garden,^a where, like the priests who bring bread to God’s table inside the Temple, Adam and Eve were also expected to serve God by caring for the divine garden. When we look at Sennedjem and Iineferti offering praises to their gods in the afterworld, we should imagine Adam and Eve doing the same thing, effortlessly, with no sweat.

If you know your Bible, you know that when God expels Adam and Eve from Eden, God tells Adam, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). This occurs just after God curses the earth to sprout thorns and thistles to impede Adam’s farming and just before the dreadful final pronouncement, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This all makes sense in the context of Adam’s prior job which was to “till” and “keep” the garden God had planted in Eden. In Eden, Adam was a farmer, and he would still be […]