Adam Took Thirty Trees from Eden When He Left

Most people remember what Adam lost when he left the Garden. Almost no one remembers what he took with him.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a midrashic text composed somewhere between 700 and 1000 CE, preserves a remarkable accounting. God asked someone to count the trees in His garden. The answer came back: thirty types. And the text then names each one and explains its category, the kind of inventory that only makes sense if someone cared deeply about preserving what Eden had contained.

Ten of the trees were eaten as-is, whole and unprocessed: apples, figs, sycamore figs, citrons, grapes, quinces, pears, pistachios, peppers, and limonia, the Ishmaelite salt-fruit. Ten more required the opposite treatment, their inside edible and their outside discarded: pomegranates, walnuts, almonds, pine nuts, and several others whose Arabic names the text preserves alongside the Hebrew. Ten were eaten by their outer part only, the flesh but not the core: dates, olives, carobs, persimmons, crabapples, plums, and four more whose names survive in the lists of ancient botanists.

Thirty trees. And then the crucial question: who planted them?

The text answers without hesitation. The first Adam took them from the Garden of Eden. Not after the expulsion, in some miraculous retrieval, but before he left, with the permission of the Holy Blessed One. He gathered seed or cutting or root from each of the thirty types. He also took all kinds of fragrances with him, the text adds, and all kinds of medicines. He brought the garden's healing capacity out into the world that would need healing. The Alphabet of Ben Sira frames the expulsion not only as a loss but as a deliberate transfer. Adam left carrying Eden's practical content in his hands.

The apocryphal tradition returns to this moment repeatedly. The text about who entered the Garden of Eden alive, also preserved in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, lists the handful of human beings who went back in, including Enoch, and Eliezer the servant of Abraham, and Serach bat Asher who told Jacob his son Joseph was still alive. That text and this one bracket the Garden with two different kinds of contact: the thirty trees that came out with Adam, and the righteous few who went in through the gate of merit. Between those two moments lies all of human history.

What the thirty-tree catalogue is doing theologically is harder to name but not difficult to feel. It is insisting that creation's gifts were not withdrawn when humanity fell short. The expulsion from Eden removed access to the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3:22-24). But the other trees, the ones the text enumerates with their categories and their Arabic names and their manner of eating, those came with Adam into the world. The medical tradition, the botanical knowledge, the fruit that sustained human life across the centuries, all of it traced back to a man packing carefully on the morning he was told to leave.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is not a solemn text. It was composed somewhere in the geonic period, between 700 and 1000 CE, and it has a quality of delight in the specificity of things, in counting, in naming, in preserving the names of fruits in Arabic as well as Hebrew as if the knowledge itself were precious regardless of the language it was held in. The thirty-tree list is of a piece with the rest of the book's sensibility: the world is full of particular things, and particulars matter. Adam did not take some trees from Eden. He took thirty types, and here they are, in three groups of ten, with their names and their manner of eating specified. The catalog is an act of gratitude made concrete.

The Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah first circulated in 13th-century Castile, Spain, speaks of the Garden of Eden as a place that still exists in the spiritual world, where righteous souls study Torah in the fragrance of the trees. What the Alphabet of Ben Sira adds to that picture is the material counterpart: the trees themselves, their seeds and cuttings, made the journey out of Eden in human hands, and their descendants grow in the world. Every orchard is, in this tradition, a fragment of the original garden. Every fruit is permission given by God to a man who was leaving and asked if he could take something with him, and was told yes.

The thirty names in the Ben Sira text are a catalog of mercy. Adam was expelled but not abandoned. He left the presence of God but he brought God's garden with him, thirty trees at a time, in the form of seeds and roots and the memory of where each one grew and how each one was eaten and what each one could heal.