By Sheldon Greaves
This year our vegetable garden has been thriving, a welcome change from last year when a pall of wildfire smoke badly damaged an otherwise healthy crop. That could still change of course. But watching our (well, mostly my spouse’s) garden puts me in mind of an ancient rivalry from the Jewish scriptures between two diametrically opposed worldviews; the palace and the garden.
The Rivals
The garden, of course, is Eden. But the palace requires some background. The opening chapters of Genesis reached the final form during the Babylonian Exile, a 50-year period during which the Jews lived in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. There they strove to retain their spirituality in a place where the Babylonian worldview reigned supreme. Marduk has, for all intents and purposes, displaced Jahweh when the holy city was destroyed. The prevailing Babylonian worldview was spelled out in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Enuma Elish.
Creation stories in antiquity had the function of laying out much more than “how the world came to be”. They were a vehicle by which a people presented the fundamental institutions and ideals that governed their world; cosmos and politics were inseparable. These stories usually had the successful creator god set up these institutions immediately after they had set the cosmos in order–earth below, sky above, the seas roughly between them, and so on. In the Enuma Elish the chief god Marduk had led a successful alliance against Tiamat, a fearsome personification of primeval chaos. After dispatching her in single combat and using her body to create the world, Marduk sets up his institutions. There is a palace, with ministers and bureaucracy, rewards for his faithful allies, and so on. The practical upshot is that Marduk’s rule is a conventional kingship that governs through raw political power and systemic violence.
Jahweh/Elohim of Genesis is a completely different character. There are no rivals, no enemies, no allies, no conventional politics. He just speaks what he wants and it happens. For our purposes, however, the real significance happens in chapter 2, just after the creation of humans. With the creation accomplished, this is where we expect God to set up the fundamental institutions that define his rule:
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Genesis 2:8
Allow me to repeat: where Marduk sets up a palace, God plants a garden. This is, I submit, of great significance.
Eden and the Real World
God as a gardener makes perfect sense given the description of creation in Genesis; put the necessary items in place and the earth brings forth living things. That is the short definition of a gardener. What’s more, even after Adam and Eve leave the garden, it is clear–and supported by much rabbinic interpretation–that they continued to work the land to make it fertile. They are, in effect, continuing the process of creation.
The idea of Eden is an ideal; in a perfect world we’d all be gardeners, augmenting, enriching the world and its creatures to “be fruitful and multiply.” That is, I believe what the “dominion” of humanity entails (but that’s a separate discussion). It’s our job to create living abundance, not to exploit the earth. But the Hebrew Scriptures also understand that the real world and real people rarely rise to ideals, so concessions must be made. For example, in Eden, Adam and Eve are not allowed to take animal life, but later that becomes permissible, but only under specific circumstances.
Endangered Eden
In Genesis, chaos is utterly inimical to life. Where chaos dominates, nothing lives, nothing grows. When habitat is destroyed or animals wantonly or needlessly slaughtered, it literally invokes chaos. It is the diametric opposite the mandated living abundance that Genesis requires. But we have, generally, exploited nature, destroying life and habitat on a planetary scale, and here we are. The palace is winning out over the garden.
The idea of “garden” as a civilization’s founding metaphor would have been astonishing in the late 6th century BCE. It is no less so today. There are a few tentative steps to provide unprecedented protections to the environment. I think this is necessary not merely for the sake of the environment. When the question changes from, “How do we compel obedience and punish delinquency?” to “How to we achieve a greater abundance of life?” the effect on everyone is profound–so much so that I can’t even begin to envision it. But it still sounds good. We as a species are at our best when we nurture and protect life. That, at least, is the beginning of our own salvation.
