Adam Was Made Where the Temple Would Stand and Led Into Eden

God did not scoop up the dust for Adam from just anywhere.

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He took it from one specific patch of ground, the clean place, the spot where an altar would stand once there were people to build one and a city to build it in. No walls there yet. No steps, no smoke, no lines of pilgrims coming up the road with animals. Only ground, and a shape being made out of it.

Then He picked the man up off that spot and carried him somewhere else. The garden was the palace, and Adam went into it the way a servant goes into a king's house, still carrying the dust of the courtyard on him.

The King's Garden Was Not a Farm

He was put there to work it and to keep it, and neither word meant what it sounds like.

There was no plowing. Nobody pulled stones out of that soil or fought weeds or waited on rain, because every tree in the place came up on its own and fruited on its own. The work was study and prayer and the keeping of what he had been told, and what he had been told was short. Do not worship what is not God. Do not curse Him. Do not kill. Do not take what is not yours. Do not corrupt a household. Set up courts, and judge. One more came with a date on it: eat only the green things of the field.

So the first job in the world was guard duty, and the thing being guarded was a line.

Angels Brought Him Meat and Wine

He was not allowed to kill an animal for his dinner, which turned out not to limit his dinner at all.

The angels waited on him. They carried in the meat and poured the wine and stood there while he ate, serving a man made of dirt as though he were the household they had been assigned to. The animals came to him the same way. Every one of them took its food out of his hand or out of Eve's, and they knew human speech when they heard it, and they looked at the two of them and were afraid the way you are afraid of something holy rather than something large. A lion put its head down into Eve's palm to eat.

That was the arrangement. The angels served, the animals listened, and the man kept the line.

One Command Was About a Tree

The line ran through the middle of the garden and it had a tree standing on it.

He ate. And everything that had been running one way turned and ran the other way in an afternoon. The angels stopped bringing anything. The animals stopped understanding a word he said, and the fear in them curdled into the thing it has been ever since, which is not reverence and never was again. He went out of the palace with a sword turning behind him, and the ground he had to work now fought him for every seed.

He had been made a guard before there was anything to guard against, and he had been standing at the only post that mattered.

The Ground He Came From Stayed Holy

The garden did not disappear off the map when he did.

Generations later, after the flood, Noah divided the earth among his sons by lot, and the portion that came up for Shem held the three holiest places on it: the Garden of Eden, Mount Sinai, and Mount Zion, made facing one another. Noah heard which lot it was and rejoiced out loud, remembering what he had once said with his own mouth. Blessed be the Lord, God of Shem.

And in the deep vision of that garden, the trees run eighty myriads to a corner, and sixty myriads of angels sing in each corner, and the Tree of Life stands in the middle and shades the whole of it. Seven clouds of glory hang over the tree and the wind carries its smell out to the ends of the earth. Underneath it the scholars sit and take the Torah apart, two canopies over each one, a canopy of stars and a canopy of sun and moon, with a curtain of cloud drawn between them. God sits down in the middle of them and teaches.

Adam was carried out of the place of the altar and into the garden, and then out of the garden entirely. His children have been walking back up the hill toward that first patch of ground ever since.