Untangled Branches: The Edenic Tree(s) and the Multivocal WAW

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Makowiecki
Keyword(s):  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
As If

Abstract This narratological study of Genesis 2–3 examines whether the principal trees in the Garden of Eden—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—are two in number or one and the same. While the answer to this question seems self-evident, namely, that the Edenic trees are two, the woman’s description of the forbidden tree as if it were an amalgam of both makes this conclusion uncertain. This ambiguity creates a certain tension in the text; a tension which commentators have been trying perennially to resolve. Yet rather than join the long list of attempts to eliminate this tension, this article explores its role as a narrative feature and is thus able to show how conflicting details function cooperatively within the text. This leads to the conclusion that the principal tree(s) in the Garden of Eden should not be understood as one or two in number but as one and two in number.

The Arbores of Joachim of Fiore

1956 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 124-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Young Shoot ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Joachim Of Fiore

The image of the tree has been powerful in the human imagination and therefore fruitful as a source of metaphor. In ancient mythologies it appears as a cosmic symbol and it is entwined, root and branch, in Christian thought. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil overshadows Man's fall; the ‘Tree’ of the Cross dominates his salvation; the Tree of Life, which sheltered him in the Garden of Eden, heals him in the New Jerusalem. In the great prophetic image of Isaiah, the turning-point of history becomes the young shoot of an ancient tree:And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots.In course of time, too, the great crisis of wickedness also appears in Jewish thought under the same figure:And there came forth out of them a sinful root, Antiochus Epiphanes. Again, in Jewish thought good men are trees that flourish:And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season, his leaf also shall not wither.

Sacred Trees in the Garden of Eden and Their Ancient Near Eastern Precursors

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-301
Author(s):  
Michaela Bauks
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
1 Enoch

Interpretations of the trees in the Garden of Eden misunderstand their significance by focusing on sin or a theological “fall.” A tradition-historical approach to the motif of trees in ancient Near Eastern literature and imagery reveals their multivalent quality. Trees are connected with fertility and goddess devotion but also with the power and divine sanction given to kings and dynasties, and with the potency of sacred space, on which humans and the divine come together and meet. As cross-temporal motifs, trees are regularly associated with life-giving and blessing (a plant of rejuvenation; a tree of life); a connection of trees to knowledge and meaning appears as well, in wisdom literature, and in the book of 1 Enoch. Language of a world tree or cosmic tree, though useful conceptually, is a modern imposition on the ancient evidence. More evident from the ancient setting is the image of felling trees, which indicates the downfall of human leaders, especially kings, because of their hubris. Ultimately, sacred trees have an ambivalent value, as a source of both contestation and progress.

Von der Fähigkeit des Menschen, das Gute zu tun

2021 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-207
Author(s):  
Jakob Wöhrle
Keyword(s):  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Cain And Abel ◽  
Good And Evil

Abstract The Cain and Abel narrative is often read as a story of how sin spread among humans after the fall in the Garden of Eden. However, this common interpretation does not hold up. In the context of the non-priestly primeval history, the Cain and Abel narrative rather reflects on the person of Cain the consequences of the previously acquired knowledge of good and evil. According to the Cain and Abel narrative, the person endowed with knowledge of good and evil is undoubtedly capable of doing good. But he must also want to do the good. He must orient his actions towards the good. If he does this, he can live with a clear conscience. If he does not, then - and only then - he risks falling into the realm of sin and succumbing to sin.

V. On Palm-tree Crosses

Archaeologia ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
W. L. Hildburgh
Keyword(s):  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Palm Tree ◽  
Material Substance ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
As If

In the Crucifixion scene on the remarkable bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral, cast for Bishop Bernward in 1015, appears a cross with a series of curious protuberances regularly disposed all round its edge. Dibelius, writing of this cross, has suggested that it represents a cross constructed of unhewn palm-trunks, conventionalized in form, and has cited, as early examples of similar crosses, the representations of crosses on some of the Monza ampullae, attributing these representations to a presumed tendency, on the part of a Palestinian craftsman, to show the Saviour's cross as if made of a wood common in Palestine. I am dealing elsewhere with the suggestion that the cross on the Hildesheim door represents palm-wood, concluding that logs of palm-trunk are not represented in that cross and that the latter is no more than one of a class fairly common, formed of conventionalized living vegetation; and I am there discussing, in considerable detail, Dibelius's further suggestion that the crosses, common in medieval times and during the early Renaissance, represented as if made of rough wood, have been derived from crosses intended to represent pieces of palm-trunk set crosswise. Although since preparing that study I have seen no reason to ascribe the origin of roughwood crosses to prototypes representing palm-trunks, either dead and as the material substance of which our Lord's cross was constructed or as living, and representing symbolically the Tree of Life, the iconographical questions–first, as to actual representations of palm-tree crosses; and, second, as to the symbolical meanings underlying such representations–suggested by Dibelius's conjectures have seemed to me to be worthy of the investigation of which I present the results below.

Forgiveness and Political Community

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 15-16
Author(s):  
Stanley Hauerwas
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way ◽  
Moral Limits

AbstractMr. Dobel is right—as a society we act as if the war in Vietnam was just a nasty little mistake. This not only excuses those who, for a variety of good and evil reasons, unwarrantedly perpetuated that war; but, more important, it dishonors those who conscientiously served there and those who conscientiously refused to serve there. If there is any forgiving to be done, people in those two groups must lead the way; they alone know what such forgiveness might mean.Mr. Dobel is also right in stating that Vietnam continues to lie uneasily on our national conscience. Our inability to explain why we were in Vietnam and why we stayed there indicates the moral limits of our political self-understanding. We simply lack the moral means to recognize and understand what we did there. But then it would be a mistake to single out Vietnam—have we recognized or understood any better what we did to the Indians or that we were a slave nation?

scholarly journals Oeditorial Repression: The Case Histories of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 471-486
Author(s):  
Margaret Vandenburg
Keyword(s):  
Case Histories ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Tender Is The Night ◽  
Crisis Of Masculinity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Individual Talent ◽  
As If

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis-à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity inA Room of One's Ownassumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable.Woolf is not alone in protesting too much. Modernism's swaggering canonicity masks a castration anxiety that debilitated F. Scott Fitzgerald and even bedeviled Papa Hemingway inThe Garden of Eden. One of Hemingway's most famous letters to Fitzgerald, written during the tortured composition ofTender Is the Night, provides a paradigmatic example of the Modernist crisis of masculinity:We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don't cheat with it…. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character.

Thebes Revisited: Theodicy and the Temporality of Evil

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Panteleimon Manoussakis
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
As If

AbstractThis essay gives a close reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in light of Schelling's discussion of theodicy as teleology. The article raises the question of the connection between ethics and time, and it argues that ethical categories are really temporal ones, so much so that it would make little sense to posit a choice between good and evil as if there were two simultaneous options. Instead, the story of Oedipus shows us how Thebes is always to precede if one is to reach Colonus, that evil precedes and enables the good.

scholarly journals HE FALL FROM THE EDENIC STATE OR THE EPOS OF AN UNFILLED LONGING

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (14) ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Adrian D. COVAN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Way

We learn from the texts of the Holy Scriptures and contemplations of the Holy Fathers that man was created in the image and likeness of God adorned with virtues. Resting in the Garden of Eden, the man's mind was set on contemplation of God, abounding in divine images. Dominated by the spirit, man was living in a particular state of joy and happiness. God shared him from His state of goodness, endowing him with all the spiritual and material sweetness. Man's fall into sin was a consequence of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, tempted by the cunning devil disguised in primordial snake. The expel of Adam from heaven identifies with the process of humanity restoration the heavenly Father started at the gates of the biblical garden, promising to the first inhabitants of the earth to help them find the way back to their lost home, by sending in this world the Redeemer.

Erkenntnis und Leben in Gen 2–3 – Zum Wandel eines ursprünglich weisheitlich geprägten Lebensbegriffs

2015 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Bauks
Keyword(s):  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Human Condition

Meine These lautet, dass der Baum der Erkenntnis von Gut und Böse in Gen 2–3 identisch ist mit dem Baum des Lebens, wie er aus Weisheitstexten bekannt ist. Beide Bäume verweisen auf die menschliche Existenz im Diesseits. Der Tod ist in Gen 2–3 nicht als der »Sünde Sold« (Röm 6,23) gedacht, sondern ist Teil derThe motif of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2–3) is similar to the tree of life in Proverbs. Both trees deal with human existence in this world. Death is not yet »the wages of sin« (Rom 6:23), but part of the human condition. The didactic narrative with mythical features in Gen 2–3 does not deal with sin, but is concerned with the tension between human knowledge and behaviour in relation to God.Le motif de l’arbre de la connaissance du bien et du mal (Gn 2–3) correspond à l’arbre de vie des textes sapientiaux. Les deux arbres font référence à l’existence humaine dans le monde. La mort n’y est pas conçue comme »le salaire du péché« (Rm 6,23), mais elle fait partie de la condition humaine. Par conséquent, le récit didactique aux traits mythiques de Gn 2–3 ne traite pas du péché, mais de la tension entre connaissance et comportement humain par rapport à sa relation avec Dieu.

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