The Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life

A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One, U. Cassuto (Hebrew)(English trans. Israel Abrahams) (Jerusalem 1961) at 110, 176  "[T]he Torah makes only brief reference of the tree of life and declares, in the end, that the Lord God set the cherubim to guard the way to the tree of life (3:24), as though to tell us that now there is no connection between the tree and our world, and we need pay no further heed to it.  In its closing words (chapter 3), the section recalls what was stated at the beginning:  the Tree of life also in the midst of the garden; the repetition serves to point to an antithesis, to emphasize the contrast between the original state of Adam and the situation created as a result of his sin.  At first the man dwelt in the midst of the garden, in the vicinity of the tree of life, and he could at any moment approach it and eat of its fruit; now his is far from there, and the cherubim and sword-flame guard the way and prevent him from again drawing near to the garden and to the tree of life. 

What is the Tree of Life?

The Omphalos Myth and Hebrew Religion, Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 20, (Jul., 1970), pp. 315-338, at 317-20.  

In all probability, the myth of the navel of the earth, far from being an incidental aspect of worship at the temple of Jerusalem,constitutes in effect the determining factor which links together a number of its cultic practices and beliefs that otherwise appear unrelated. [T]he sacred space of the Jerusalem temple is set apart from all other spaces of the earth, not only because [Adonai] has chosen Zion as his menuchah, his "resting place", but also because the Juhadites have adopted from the Canaanites of ancient Jebus the belief that the site of Zion was related to the navel of the earth. Solomon's Temple is built on a rock which is the earth-center, the world mountain, the foundation stone of creation, the extremity of the  umbilical cord which provides a link between heaven, earth, and the underworld.  It therefor becomes associated with the cosmic tree, the garden of Eden, and, at a later time, the new Paradise, the heavenly Jerusalem.  These beliefs do not receive an explicit formulation in the early traditions concerning the building of the Temple, but the allusions found in the pre-exilic psalms and prophets, Ezekiel and his post-exilic successors clearly indicate that the acceptance of the omphalos myth, in a modified form, antedates by centuries the testimony of the Chronicler, the post-canonical Jewish literature, the New Testament and Christian folklore. 

The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem (69-70): According to an old Talmudic tradition, the venom of the serpent, which had corrupted Eve and through her all mankind, lost its strength through the Revelation on Mount Sinai, but regained it when Israel began to worship the golden calf.  The Kabbalistic author interprets this in his own way.  The first tablets, which had been given before Israel sinned with the golden calf but which, apart from Moses, no one had read, came from the Tree of Life. The second tablets, which were given after the first had been broken, came from the Tree of Knowledge.  The meaning is clear:  the first tablets contained a revelation of the Torah in keeping with the original state of man, when he was governed by the principle embodied in the Tree of Life.  This was a truly spiritual Torah, bestowed upon a world in which Revelation and Redemption coincided, in which everything was holy and there was no need to hold the powers of uncleanness and death in check by prohibitions and restrictions....On the second tablets the Torah appears in a historical garment and as a historical power. To be sure, it still has its hidden depths, its infinite mystery.  The good is still translucent, while evil must be fenced in and combated by all the prohibitions that are conceived as its counterparts.  This is the hard shell of the Torah, indispensable in a world governed by the powers of evil.  But the shell must not be mistaken for the whole.  In enacting the commandments, a man can break through the outer shell and penetrate to the kernel.

On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, Gershom Scholem  (65-70):  You already know that the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are one [tree] below but two [trees] above: the Tree of Knowledge is from the northern side, but the Tree of Life is from the eastern side, from whence light emanates into the entire world and the potency of Satan is there....Now this is the meaning:  So long as the Tree of Life, which comes from the side of the east and is the Good Urge and the quality of peace [harmony], is connected with the Tree of Knowledge, which comes from the side of the north, from the side of Satan and evil, then Satan can do nothing, for the Tree of Life is the quality of peace [i.e.harmony] shall overwhelm him.  But the moment it [the Tree of Knowledge] is separated [from the Tree of Life], its strength is freed and Satan is able to act....Had Adam not first separated the fruit, Satan would have been unable to separate him from the Tree of Life....The two trees are fundamentally one:  they grow from a common root, in which masculine and feminine, the giving and receiving, the creative and reflective, are one.  Life and knowledge are not to be torn asunder from one another: they must be seen and realized in their unity.  So long as the two trees are connected, the Tree of Life retains control over the power of severity, the harsh critical power within the Godhead....When he [Adam] plucked and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he allowed the power acting in the Tree of Knowledge from the north (i.e., the principle of Severity) to operate upon it in isolation.  This power was thereby removed from its position within the union of the Sefiroth and now gained control over Adam as the satanic principle of evil.

The Messianic Idea in Judaism Gershom Scholem (22-23)  These symbols of the Tree of Life and the Tree of  Knowledge, or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which because its fruit brings about death is also called the Tree of Death.  These trees, respectively, control the state of the world, be it the state of Creation as such or of the Torah, which as the divine law governs and determines it.  Standing in the center of Paradise and representing higher order of things, the trees control a great deal more than just existence in the Garden of Eden.  Since the Fall of Adam, the world is no longer ruled by the Tree of Life as it had been in the beginning, but the Tree of Knowledge.  The Tree of Life represents the pure, unbroken power of the holy, the diffusion of the divine life through all the worlds and the communication of all  living things with their divine source.  There is no admixture of evil in it,no "shells"which dam up and choke life, no death and no restriction.  But since the Fall of Adam, since the time when the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was eaten, the world is ruled by the mystery of this second tree in which both good and evil have their place.  Hence, under the  rule of this Tree, the world contains differentiated spheres:  the holy and the profane, the pure and the impure, the permitted and the forbidden, the living and the dead, the divine and the demonic.

The New Yorker, The Intelligent Plant, Michael Pollen (December 23 & 30 2013) "The most bracing part of Mancuso’s talk on bioinspiration came when he discussed underground plant networks. Citing the research of Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues, Mancuso showed a slide depicting how trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks, using the underground web of mycorrhizal fungi which connects their roots to exchange information and even goods. This “wood-wide web,” as the title of one paper put it, allows scores of trees in a forest to convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.  When I reached Simard by phone, she described how she and her colleagues track the flow of nutrients and chemical signals through this invisible underground network. They injected fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes, then followed the spread of the isotopes through the forest community using a variety of sensing methods, including a Geiger counter. Within a few days, stores of radioactive carbon had been routed from tree to tree. Every tree in a plot thirty metres square was connected to the network; the oldest trees functioned as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections. The diagram of the forest network resembled an airline route map.  The pattern of nutrient traffic showed how “mother trees” were using the network to nourish shaded seedlings, including their offspring—which the trees can apparently recognize as kin—until they’re tall enough to reach the light. And, in a striking example of interspecies coöperation, Simard found that fir trees were using the fungal web to trade nutrients with paper-bark birch trees over the course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the season. For the forest community, the value of this coöperative underground economy appears to be better over-all health, more total photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance. In his talk, Mancuso juxtaposed a slide of the nodes and links in one of these subterranean forest networks with a diagram of the Internet, and suggested that in some respects the former was superior. “Plants are able to create scalable networks of self-maintaining, self-operating, and self-repairing units,” he said. “Plants.”

A New View of the Tree of Life, Nature Microbiology  (various authors)16048 (2016) doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.48

Other Stories of the Tree of Life

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11:  "Then Gilgamesh and Urshanabi launched the boat on to the water and boarded it, and they made ready to sail away; but the wife of Utnapishtim the Faraway said to him, `Gilgamesh came here wearied out, he is worn out; what will you give him to carry him back to his own country? So Utnapishtim spoke, and Gilgamesh took a pole and brought the boat in to the bank. `Gilgamesh, you came here a man wearied out, you have worn yourself out; what shall I give you to carry you back to your own country? Gilgamesh, I shall reveal a secret thing, it is a mystery of the gods that I am telling you. There is a plant that grows under the water, it has a prickle like a thorn, like a rose; it will wound your hands, but if you succeed in taking it, then your hands will hold that which restores his lost youth to a man: When Gilgamesh heard this he opened the sluices so that a sweet water current might carry him out to the deepest channel; he tied heavy stones to his feet and they dragged him down to the water-bed. There he saw the plant growing;; although it pricked him he took it in his hands; then he cut the heavy stones from his feet, and the sea carried him and threw him on to the shore. Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi the ferryman, `Come here, and see this marvellous plant. By its virtue a man may win back all his former strength. I will take it to Uruk of the strong walls; there I will give it to the old men to eat. Its name shall be "The Old Men Are Young Again"; and at last I shall eat it myself and have back all my lost youth.' So Gilgamesh returned by the gate through which he had come, Gilgamesh and Urshanabi went together. They travelled their twenty leagues and then they broke their fast; after thirty leagues they stopped for the night. Gilgamesh saw a well of cool water and he went down and bathed; but deep in the pool there was lying a serpent, and the serpent sensed the sweetness of the flower. It rose out of the water and snatched it away, and immediately it sloughed its skin and returned to the well. Then Gilgamesh sat down and wept, the tears ran down his face, and he took the hand of Urshanabi; ‘O Urshanabi, was it for this that I toiled with my hands, is it for this I have wrung out my heart's blood? For myself I have gained nothing; not I, but the beast of the earth has joy of it now."

The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy, Simo Parpola, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 161-208 (The University of Chicago Press (http://www.jstor.org/stable/545436A)

A stylized tree with obvious religious significance already occurs as an art motif in fourth-millennium Mesopotamia, and, by the second millennium B.C., it is found everywhere within the orbit of the ancient Near Eastern oikumene, including Egypt, Greece, and the Indus civilization. The meaning of the motif is not clear^, but its overall composition strikingly recalls the Tree of Life of later Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist art. The question of whether the concept of the Tree of Life actually existed in ancient Mesopotamia has been debated, however, and thus many scholars today prefer the more neutral term "sacred tree" when referring to the Mesopotamian Tree.  About the middle of the second millennium, a new development in the iconography of the Tree becomes noticeable leading to the emergence of the so-called Late Assyrian Tree under Tukulti-Ninurta I. With the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, this form of the Tree spreads throughout the entire Near East and continues to be seen down to the end of the first millennium. Its importance for imperial ideology is borne out by its appearance on royal garments and jewelry, official seals, and the wall paintings and sculptures of royal palaces, as in the throneroom of Ashurnasirpal II in Calah, where it is the central motif.  The hundreds of available specimens of the Late Assyrian Tree exhibit a great deal of individual variation reflecting the fact that the motif and most of its iconography were inherited from earlier periods. Nevertheless, its characteristic features stand out even in the crudest examples and make it generally easy to distinguish it from its predecessors. Essentially, it consists of a trunk with a palmette crown standing on the stone base and surrounded by a network of horizontal or intersecting lines  fringed with palmettes, pinecones, or pomegranates. In more elaborate renditions, the trunk regularly has joints or nodes at its top, middle, and base22 and a corresponding number of small circles to the right and left of the trunk.Antithetically posed animal, human, or supernatural figures usually flank the tree, while a winged disk hovers over the whole.  Even the most schematic representations are executed with meticulous attention to overall symmetry and axial balance. (footnotes and citations omitted)