Fr. Stephen De Young: So verse eight: "Then the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man he formed." This is easy to gloss over, but first of all God creates Eden, and it is in a particular place in relation to the rest of the world. Eden is not the whole world. Eden is a particular garden in a particular place. God creates a garden in that particular place. Now, the other name for it is— And I don't think… That's a shame. It doesn't look like in the Orthodox Study Bible they actually use the Greek word paradise, which is literally the Greek word that's here. And I use the term "Greek word" kind of loosely, because it's actually a loan-word from Persian. What a paradise was was it was a particular type of walled garden that was very popular in Persia, both the old Persian and the later Persian Empires.

If you want to see an example of a paradise that is still standing today, it is the Taj Mahal—not the hotel casino, the original one—which was built in the Persian style. As we'll see in a minute here, if you actually look at an aerial photo of the Taj Mahal… Everybody just thinks of the building, not the garden, the walled garden that's behind it, but that's the actual paradise, the walled garden that's behind it. You have the building that sort of represents the mountain of God, and then behind that you have the walled garden. In it, it's transected by four waterways that radiate out from a center point. We're going to see Eden is described exactly the same way.

But again, the description of it as a walled garden again means this is a particular locale that is separated from the rest of the world. Yes, sir.

Q1: What does the word "Eden," which I assume is Hebrew—what does it literally mean?

Fr. Stephen: It's unclear. So there are people who theorize it's a place; it's a literal place-name. I do not. [Laughter] Because it literally in the Hebrew says— Well, they translate it here, too: a garden eastward in Eden. So Eden is not the name of the garden; it's the garden of Eden, because it's a garden and Eden is the place where it is.

I promise I will not belabor this a bunch more, because I've already done it enough, but you will see countless documentaries on the History Channel and Discovery Channel and other places if you're like me and feel compelled to watch horrible Bible documentaries, where they try to pinpoint the exact place where this is based on this, that, and the other. It's a waste of time. We'll see more of why as we go on, but this is literally being described as not a literal place in this world at the present time, our present. Eden, later on— I mentioned the mountain of God in terms of the Taj Mahal. Eden is going to be mentioned as being on the mountain of God in Ezekiel. And paradise, or this garden, is the place where God dwells. This is common imagery in terms of Moses' vision; this is common imagery for the Ancient Near East. In the Ancient Near East, gods lived on mountains, Mount Olympus being the latest example of that. They lived on mountains and they lived in gardens. You can imagine why that was in the Ancient Near East. You go and look at Iraq. If you live in Iraq, a garden on a mountain… [Laughter] A garden where it's cool sounds pretty good, right, if you're living in Mesopotamia. That's where gods lived, and even in tents, but we'll talk about that more when we get to the tabernacle in Exodus.

That same imagery is being used here. This is the place where— This garden is the place where God dwells, where he's going to dwell with man, but, again, because this is a garden that is not the whole world, that is a walled garden and therefore separated from the world, and is already a garden, what did— Three verses ago, what did it say one of the reasons why humanity was created?

Q1: To work the ground.

Fr. Stephen: To work the ground. Well, you don't need to work the ground inside a garden that's already a cultivated garden. You have to do that outside. So remember when we talked about the "fill the earth and subdue it" language in Genesis 1: to continue to go out and put the world in order and to fill it with life, with a garden being the perfect example of those two things together. As we said last time, swamp is full of life, no order, just chaos, that makes it dangerous; parking lot, a brand-new parking lot is in good order, but there's no life. And so the garden is the place where those two things meet. It's the place where those two things meet.

So humanity is not being created to stay in the garden forever and just enjoy the nice garden. We've already been tipped off in these verses we just read. Humanity's being created to eventually—eventually—at some certain point, leave the garden and take the garden with them, to cultivate the world into a garden by cooperating with God. Spoilers, that's not what's going to happen. [Laughter] But that's the sort of stated intent here.

Notice also, Adam is not created in the garden.

Q1: Yeah, I noticed that, but I never noticed it before.

Fr. Stephen: He's not created in paradise. He's created in the world that he's going to be sent back into, and then taken and put in paradise, put in the garden. So he's brought into the presence of God. God takes him to dwell with him, which tells us that what's going on in the garden is supposed to be preparatory. Preparatory: there's something else coming already. So this is not: "God intended for humanity to live in the garden with him forever, but we blew it and so now, Plan B: Christ and everything else." [Laughter] And this also means humanity isn't created perfect. It means humanity's created innocent. Humanity is created with a destiny beyond the point where he's created. So salvation is not getting back to where Adam was. It's accomplishing what Adam was created to accomplish.

Let's keep going. Number nine:

Besides this, God caused every tree beautiful to the sight and good for food to grow from the ground. Also in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of learning the knowledge of good and evil.

So it's full of trees. I think we mentioned this last time, but what's great about a tree? A tree feeds you and you don't have to kill it. Even with plants that grow out of the ground, you've got to rip up the rutabaga if you're going to eat it: rutabaga has to die. But with a tree, nothing has to die for you to eat fruit from a tree. So fruit trees represent nature in the world offering itself to humanity for food to sustain him in this kind of cooperation.

And there were these two special trees that we're going to hear more about later. One is the tree of life and one is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Verse ten:

Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it separated into four heads. The name of the first is Pishon; it circles the land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good.

You don't want bad gold! [Laughter]

The carbuncle and the emerald are there as well. The name of the second river is Gihon. It circles all the land of Ethiopia. The name of the third river is Tigris. It flows over against the Assyrians. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

These, by the way, are less obvious than this in the Hebrew. When they translated it into Greek, from which this is translated, they nailed down a couple of them as the Tigris and Euphrates. It's pretty clear in the Hebrew that that's what they are, it's just those names don't appear in the way that they do here. But so even just based on what's here, I know that first one we're going to have to come back to, because—where, what? Havilah? Huh? [Laughter] But we've got the Tigris and the Euphrates. They're the two rivers that frame Mesopotamia. That's why it's called Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. They flow into the Persian Gulf. Then we have this river that flows from Ethiopia, meaning what river would that be?

Q1: The Nile?

Fr. Stephen: The Nile. It starts in Ethiopia and flows north to the Nile delta. So before we even get into the fourth one, does anybody see an issue with trying to identify where, on present-day earth, the garden of Eden is that the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates all flow out of it?

Q1: Can't see that…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, it's geographically impossible, even with just those three. Now, in terms of the first one that's listed, this gets identified in a bunch of different ways, and even different Church Fathers identify it different ways. This is because Church Fathers, like everyone else, were reading the text and doing their best to figure it out. Sometimes some Orthodox folks talk about the Church Fathers like they were all magic oracles who could just, like, look at the biblical text and somehow understand mystically exactly what it meant in a way that we mere mortals cannot. [Laughter] But they were doing their best, so that's why they disagree about this, because it's kind of unclear. Personally, I go with what at least a couple of Church Fathers say. I think it's supposed to be the Danube.

Q1: The Danube!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which likewise— And, see, most of the people who don't want it to be the Danube are trying to make it fit to get you an actual geographical location, but I'm like: You can't get one from the other three, so forget it! [Laughter]

Q2: The geography has changed so much, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q2: And I'm thinking, you know, the Ethiopian Church, don't they say Ethiopia is somewhere in that area, Eden…?

Fr. Stephen: I don't know for sure. I know that Ethiopian Jews inherited the tradition, the general tradition of Judaism that it was where Jerusalem is, which is actually the overriding tradition, and the tradition we find when we get to the New Testament, and in our own Orthodox tradition. And obviously that can't be literal, because none of these rivers flow out of Jerusalem! There aren't four rivers flowing out of Jerusalem, period. But that's what it was taken to be, and that's the whole tradition of Jerusalem as the navel of the world, as the center of the world. That's why the place where the place where Jesus was crucified was called the hill of the skull, is because they believed Adam was buried there. It was outside of Jerusalem at the time, and so if Jerusalem was Eden, he's buried outside of Eden. If you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and you go down below, there is a shrine of Adam at that traditional burial place. So that becomes really well-documented Jewish tradition. But if you're trying to take this literally to find a geographic point, you're not going to get that from these four rivers.

Q3: Aren't these four rivers basically the center of all civilizations?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so there are some people, some a little later Fathers, who want to identify that first one as the Indus for that reason.

Q3: I was just thinking about it, yeah. So wouldn't that…? We just think this is saying more about that kind of idea?

Fr. Stephen: Right, exactly. It's not trying to give a physical location for us to go and take a pilgrimage to.

Q1: I would think that the Ancient Near Eastern people would be aware of the Indus. I can't see how they would be aware of the Danube.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on a couple things, but it's possible. [Laughter] But the point is, we don't even need to nail it down that precisely. But let me make another point. If we have four rivers flowing out of somewhere in four different directions, what would that location have to be?

Q1: It would have to be a mountain.

Fr. Stephen: Have to be a mountain, because water flows downhill. So if it's in four different directions, going downhill, you have to be on a mountain. So the idea here is that this water is coming out of paradise, coming out from the mountain of God, and flowing out to water and bring life to the world. All of these rivers where civilization starts are connected to God's sustenance of the world of humanity. That's the core sort of idea here, not for us to get GPS coordinates for the garden of Eden—which could have been given if that was the intent. Could have been very specific.

Q1: So would the head of the river be the fountain that was mentioned?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the fountain that came up out of the ground. Remember, what were the two problems? No water, no people. So if the water is flowing out of Eden into the rest of the world, where is humanity going to go?

Q1: Same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Like the same thing, right. And this imagery of the water, St. John is going to do all kinds of things with this. St. John's gospel is full of Genesis stuff. But when Christ talks about giving people water, water springing up to eternal life, when he says, "Him to whom I give to drink will have rivers of water flowing out of his belly," and you're like: "That sounds like dysentery…" What he's aiming at is that person will become paradise, will have paradise within them. God will come to dwell within them; the place where God dwells is paradise.

Verse 15: "Then the Lord took the man he formed and put him in the garden to tend and keep it." So this is this first stage. "We'll start you out, you're going to tend the garden I planted. Once you learn to do that, you go out."

And the Lord God commanded Adam, saying, "You may eat fruit from every tree in the garden, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat. For on whatever day you eat from it, you shall die by death."

Which is a very literal kind of translation of the Hebrew. The Hebrew is sort of literally: "dying, you will die." It's a construction called an infinitive absolute. Or "you'll die to death." Famously, that's the "you shall surely die" in the King James.

So he says all these trees—doesn't say anything about the tree of life here, notice. That'll come back in chapter three. He says, "But don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you do it, you'll surely die." Now what does he not say here? He does not say, "If you disobey me and eat from that tree, I will kill you." Is death presented here as a penalty—

Q1: It's just a consequence.

Fr. Stephen: —or is it a warning? Don't put the fork in the light socket, because on the day you do that, you will surely be electrocuted. I'm not threatening to electrocute the person if they disobey me; I'm telling them what the consequence will be of that action.

And the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, every other place in Scripture where the phrase, "the knowledge of good and evil," appears—and there are a couple—one of them is when Solomon is asked what he wants as a gift from God, he says he wants the knowledge of good and evil. That's usually recorded as he asked for wisdom. Another one is in Isaiah, in the famous prophecy about the virgin or the young woman giving birth to a child, where it says before that child is old enough to choose the good and reject the evil, this will happen. Every place else where that phrase occurs, it refers to maturity, specifically mental maturity. It refers to what becomes, in sort of Western thought, referred to as the age of accountability. So you're around kids, you realize up until a certain age they really don't understand the consequences of their actions. They really don't understand "if I put the fork in the light socket, I will get electrocuted." And then there's a certain point where they come to maturity and can begin to understand that. That's when they acquire the knowledge of good and evil.

So if that's how that phrase is used in Hebrew, if that's what the Hebrew idiom means, what's going on here? Adam is being presented— He just got created! So he may be physically an adult male human, maybe. I'm not going to get into the whole argument about whether he had a navel; I'm not going there. [Laughter] But he was born yesterday! He is not really mature; he does not know these things. And God is telling him, "You don't need to run ahead and try and grab that maturity for yourself."

When you look at Second Temple Jewish literature and you look at the Church Fathers, they present the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as still being in paradise. It is not evil. Nothing God created is evil. That tree is not evil. The problem is Adam and his soon-to-exist wife take from it before the time when they're ready, before they're able to use that knowledge in a responsible way. When the devil shows up—and we'll talk more about him next time when he shows up—why does he want them to do it? He wants to destroy them. And so he wants to give them that knowledge before they're ready and understand how to use it.

This is an ongoing theme in Genesis, that knowledge, technology, the innovations of culture are not good in and of themselves—they can be used for good when a certain type of person who is properly prepared receives them and uses them in that way, or they could be incredibly destructive. You don't hand a five-year-old a firearm, not because guns are evil but because a five-year-old can't use one responsibly and is going to hurt themselves or someone else. And knowledge functions the same way. So this is a warning.

Adam is here being portrayed—as he'll later be listed in one of Christ's genealogies—as it so happens, as the son of God, meaning child. He's being prepared for something.

Verse 18: "And the Lord God said, 'It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.' " Well, I'll continue.

Also God formed out of the ground all the wild animals of the field and all the birds of heaven to see what he would call them. Thus whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all the cattle, to all the birds of heaven, and to all the wild animals of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.

Q2: I wonder what ones he rejected.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, yeah. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about this, because this is sometimes seen in a silly way. And there's a couple problems here with how we read even that first verse. It's interesting that this is the first time God has said something isn't good. Everything else he created, he looked at and he said it was good. But now he says, "Wait. Not good," for man to be alone.

A problem we have here as modern readers, as people past the ideals of romantic love, is that we look at this and say, "Oh! The problem is Adam is lonely! He's there, he's all by himself, he feels sad. He's lonely." Well, what's the problem with that? He's living with God! [Laughter]

Q2: He didn't know what he was missing.

Fr. Stephen: Exactly! He didn't miss having a woman around. There aren't any! And he's got God. He's not alone! He's living with God. So that sort of psychologized, romanticized version of this… What does it mean that it's not good that he's alone? It's not good that he's the only human. There need to be more humans. Well, how are there going to get to be more humans? I hope I'm not breaking news to anybody. [Laughter] In order to get more humans, you need a male human and a female human. I'm canceled now, I know! By a biological male and a biological female, to produce more humans. So that's the problem.

Also, another weird way— There's a lot of— Starting here and going well into chapter three with the snake, there's a lot of Rudyard Kipling that gets read into this, too, as this kind of quaint story, as if Adam's looking at all the animals, trying to figure out which one to mate with. It's like: "Go figure, I checked out all the animals, and none of them I can mate with!" Duh! [Laughter] I mean, I said he was innocent like a child, but he's not an idiot. And God certainly isn't. So that's not what's going on with the naming of the animals. What did we say coming out of chapter one? Setting things in order, filling them with life, and that humanity is going to continue these two tasks. We have this problem. Well, he can't fill the world with life because he can't reproduce, can't just reproduce by budding or something. And now we have this thing with the naming of the animals.

One of the interesting things that we've found, archaeologically, and we've found this in Hittite ruins, are relief images of various Hittite kings sitting on a throne, holding a rod, naming animals that are walking past in front of him. This imagery was common ancient imagery to describe sort of authority. The king's job was to put things in order and to maintain order. Wild animals are the symbol of disorder and chaos, so the king is there putting these wild animals in order by naming them, by putting them into a taxonomy. He's applying order to the sort of wild parts of the world, civilizing it in our modern terms. That's the image.

Adam can't be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth yet, but he's getting started on the subduing it part. Notice, God is involved. God is watching him do this. This is in that cooperative sense. So this is exercise number one about putting the world in order, Adam is carrying out. And after he's done with that, now we're going to see: Okay, now we're going to address that other problem, about making other people.

Verse 21: "Thus God brought a trance upon Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and filled up the flesh in its place." Okay, got a little more Kipling going on here. So this whole rib thing—I'm going to ruin your Sunday school: this is another episode of "Fr. Stephen Ruins Your Sunday School"—there's nothing about a rib anywhere in this whole story. [Laughter] The image here—and what's translated as "trance," it's kind of ambiguous whether Adam is alive or dead. "Trance" here is more like "coma," maybe, or "vegetative state," like he's out. This is so clear in the original and even in the Greek actually, that the Church Fathers often comment on this and make comparisons between Christ and the tomb and Adam and then the woman and the Church, making this kind of— So the idea is that he's out.

The word that's used here that's translated "open up the side" and is translated as "rib" is actually "side" as in dorsal/ventral or "sides" as in halves of a building. Those are the other uses it's put to in Scripture. So you have one side of the building, the other side of the building, that are symmetrical with the opposite halves. So this idea here is that Adam gets pulled in two, ripped in half, pulled apart. And then once ripped apart, God sort of fills in the other half.

Verse 22: "Then the God built the rib he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to him." So he takes the half and builds that out, too. So both halves get built out, and now you have man and woman, which in Hebrew are issh and isshah, because isshah means "from man." But the idea here is he gets pulled in two, man and woman, and now the idea here that we're going to see is that the two come back together in marriage, and when they come back together they produce new life in the world.

Verse 23: "So Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.' " Like, literally. [Laughter] That part's kind of literal based on the description of what happened. " 'She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.' For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." That's why this is a physical reunion. This idea of one flesh is that in some sense the two have been pulled apart and now come back together, become one flesh, become one together.

This is what Christ is going to appeal to when he gets asked about divorce, because they're going to come to him and say, "Hey, uh, Moses said it was okay for us to divorce our wives as long as we give them a writ of divorce." And that was as opposed to abandoning them. That was Moses' point: you can't just abandon them and leave them in this limbo where they can't get married again or they can't do anything because they're still married to you. And since polygamy was allowed, the man could go and do whatever but the woman would be stuck in this limbo place, so Moses said, "No, if you're going to divorce [her], you have to give her a writ of divorce so she can move on with her life."

And Christ says, "Yeah, Moses let you do that because of the hardness of your hearts." "That was not," he says, "how it was meant to be from the beginning." It says, "The two will become one flesh." And he says, "What God has joined together let no man put asunder." So Christ compares divorce to that connection, these two people who have come together and become one, being ripped apart again. That it is an un— obviously an unpleasant, a horrible experience.

Just as a side note, how does that present divorce? It doesn't present divorce as: "You broke a rule! Now you're going to get punished." That presents divorce as this horrible, wracking experience of being pulled apart.

Q1: Which it often is.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which God would like to spare us that experience, that there are consequences to that. And that's why, in the Orthodox Church, unlike some other churches that I won't mention by name, when people are divorced, there is a period of "penance," but that's a period of healing and of working through the damage that's been done, and assimilating and bringing those people back into the community, at which point they can then take the Eucharist again for the rest of their life, unlike certain church which I won't directly name. [Laughter] Because it's a question of healing an injury, not of enforcing a rule or punishing an infraction.

And the same is true, frankly, although difficult to heal, with people who are widowed. That that often—I've not had this experience, by the grace of God; I hope I won't. The way I eat, it's very unlikely that I will outlive my wife. [Laughter] But that that experience is very much like being torn apart, that the idea of two people becoming one flesh, it's not just a nice image, but it reflects a reality in how humans are built, and that's a reality that's being described here in this imagery of the creation of humanity.

Verse 25: "Now the two were naked, both Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed." So there is no concept of shame. This is again an image of that innocence. Little kids, babies and stuff, will run around naked. Reach a certain age: no longer appropriate. Get you thrown out of a Circle K. [Laughter] No, I'm kidding. But it becomes no longer appropriate. That's not because there's something evil about reaching a certain age or something about nudity that's gross or whatever, but there is a period of innocence, again, and then you come to the knowledge of good and evil. You come to maturity. There is thing that is crossed, and it's not sort of this firm line that we can pin down with a certain age, but it's a reality that we all see. So this is again an image of innocence for both of them, that they are both at sort of the beginning of this sort of journey.

Unfortunately, this ends up being the set up for what happens next chapter, which probably most people know, although when we talk about it next week, I think we're going to find it's a little different maybe, when we read the actual text, than how it's commonly presented. It is not the "Just-So Story" about "How the Snake Lost Its Legs," we'll put it that way. But we will pick up with that next week, Lord willing. Thank you, everybody.