Adam Took Thirty Trees from Eden When He Left

The Inventory Before the Exile

God asked someone to count the trees in the Garden. The answer came back: thirty types. Not a forest without number, not an infinity of growing things, but thirty specific varieties that could be named and categorized and, as it turned out, carried.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira, working through a tradition that stretches back through the early medieval period, preserves an exact accounting of what those trees were and what category each one belonged to. Ten trees whose fruit was eaten whole, skin and flesh together, without preparation. Ten trees whose inner part alone was eaten, the flesh after the skin was removed. Ten trees whose outer part was edible and whose core was not. Thirty trees. Three categories of ten. Eden was not without organization.

The Catalogue of Thirty Trees

The first ten, eaten as found: apples and figs and sycamore figs and citrons and grapes. Quinces and pears. Pistachios and peppers and the limonia, the Ishmaelite salt-fruit whose name survives in the Arabic botanical lists better than in the Hebrew ones. These were the complete fruits, the ones you could take from the branch and eat without any intermediate step, the way the Garden itself seems to have been imagined: food that required nothing between tree and mouth.

The second ten, the ones you peel or crack to reach: pomegranates and walnuts and almonds, pine nuts and several others whose names the text preserves in Aramaic and Arabic alongside the Hebrew. These were the trees that required the human act of opening, the patient extraction of what the shell protected. The third ten, dates and olives and carobs and persimmons and crabapples and plums and four more - the fruits where the flesh is the gift and the pit is discarded. Thirty trees. A complete taxonomy of how growing things give themselves to the people who tend them.

What Adam Carried Out of Eden

The first Adam took them from the Garden when he left. Not after the expulsion, in some later miraculous retrieval, but in the moment of leaving, with the permission of the Holy Blessed One. He gathered seed or cutting or root from each of the thirty types. He also took the kinds of grain that would feed his children and his children's children through all the generations of exile: wheat and barley and the other cereals that make bread possible.

He planted them in the world outside. The trees that had grown in Eden grew in the fields of the earth, producing the same fruit in diminished soil, under a different sky, without the constant presence of the divine. They were not the same. They could not have been the same. But they were descended from the same thirty varieties that God had placed in the Garden at the beginning, and they carried in them the memory of the place they had come from.

What the Counting Means

There is something in the act of counting that the tradition understood as care. God asked for the trees to be counted, and the number came back as thirty, and then those thirty were not lost. They were catalogued and categorized and carried out, the way a person who is leaving a place they love will gather up what can be taken and resist the finality of loss through the act of naming and keeping.

Adam's expulsion from the Garden was not a clean break. He carried Eden with him in thirty sets of seeds and cuttings. Every fig tree planted east of Eden, every vineyard, every olive grove, every almond in flower carries something of what was there before the exile. The Garden was sealed after him and the cherubim guarded the way back. But the thirty trees went with him, and the world he entered was planted from them.