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 […]

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Footnotes

1. See Lawrence E. Stager, “Jerusalem as Eden,” BAR, May/June 2000 for parallels between the Jerusalem Temple and the Garden of Eden.

Endnotes

1.
Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), p. 70.

2.
Homer, Odyssey VII: 114–130, Richmond Lattimore translation.

3.
Hany Farid and Samir Farid, “Unfolding Sennedjem’s Tomb,” KMT (Spring, 2001), pp. 1–8.

4.
Rosalind Janssen, “The Pleated Dress of Nywty,” Palarch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology 17.1 (2020), pp. 1–11, discusses a pleated linen dress from the Old Kingdom discovered in situ in 1982.