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Eden Planted Before Creation and the Tree Five Centuries Tall

Before the first day, God plants a garden older than the world. Inside it stands a tree so vast that climbing from roots to crown would take five hundred years.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Before the Days Were Counted
  2. A Garden Waiting for Its Rightful Tenants
  3. A Tree Whose Crown Was Five Centuries Away
  4. What These Two Glosses Do Together

Before the Days Were Counted

The Torah says the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and placed there the man he had formed. It names a location. It implies a sequence: earth was made, man was shaped, garden was planted, man was placed inside it.

The Targum rewrites the sequence entirely.

The garden was planted, the Aramaic says, by the Word of the Lord God before the creation of the world. The garden is not a feature of the third or sixth day. It precedes the days themselves. Before the light was called into existence, before the firmament was separated from the waters, before the earth was gathered out of the deep, the garden was already there.

The move places Eden in a specific catalogue. The rabbinic tradition identified certain things as preexistent: Torah, the throne of glory, the patriarchs, Israel, the Temple, the name of the Messiah, and repentance were all contemplated before the universe came into being. The targumist slips Eden quietly into that catalogue. The garden becomes a blueprint held in the divine mind, a space of intention that the created world was expanded to contain rather than a location the created world happened to include.

A Garden Waiting for Its Rightful Tenants

Pseudo-Jonathan adds a second detail that the Hebrew also does not contain. The garden is described as belonging to the just. It was planted not as a general environment but as a destination prepared for those who will deserve it. Eden was designed for its eventual inhabitants before its eventual inhabitants existed.

This changes the expulsion at the end of the chapter. Adam and Eve are not being thrown out of a place that belonged to them by default. They are being removed from a place that was built for the righteous, which they temporarily occupied and then forfeited. The garden was not diminished by their departure. It reverted to its intended purpose.

A Tree Whose Crown Was Five Centuries Away

Inside that preexistent garden stood the tree of life. The Torah names both trees and places them in the middle of the garden. The Targum is content to name them as well. But then it measures one of them.

The tree of life stood in the midst of the garden, the targumist writes, whose height was a journey of five hundred years.

Five hundred years is not metaphor. It is the standard Aramaic unit the Targum uses to measure cosmic distances: the span between earth and the first heaven, between one heaven and the next, between the lower world and what lies above it. When the Talmud in tractate Chagigah 13a describes the structure of the heavens, it uses this same measure. The targumist is not saying the tree was very tall. He is saying the tree was as tall as the distance between worlds, that its crown reached into a register of existence that was not simply air and sky but something structurally distinct from the ground where Adam's feet rested.

A tree rooted in a preexistent garden, rising through the atmosphere of the created world and extending into the space between worlds: this is not an orchard planting. This is an axis, a vertical structure connecting the garden below to the realms above it. Whatever the tree of life was giving to the one who ate from it, the scale of the tree suggests the gift was not merely extended mortality but something that ran along the entire vertical axis of creation.

What These Two Glosses Do Together

The garden predates the world. The tree inside it reaches beyond the world. The man placed inside the garden was invited into something that existed outside the normal coordinates of created space and time. He was not living in a region of the earth. He was living in a structure that was older than the earth and taller than the sky.

The loss of the garden, in this reading, is not merely expulsion from a pleasant place. It is removal from a zone of preexistent divine intention, from the shadow of a tree whose scale defied the physics of the ordinary world. What Adam and Eve lost when they ate was not good weather and easy food. They lost residence in the place that was built before building was possible, beside the axis that connected the ground to whatever lay above the highest heaven.

CreationGarden Of EdenTargum Pseudo JonathanEdenTree Of LifePre Existence
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From the tradition

Sources

2 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 2:8Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

The Torah says that God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man He had formed. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:8) goes further than the plain verse. In its expanded rendering the garden "was planted by the Word of the Lord God before the creation of the world." The Targum adds two things at once: that the garden belongs to the just, the Eden of the righteous, and that it predates the universe itself.

On this reading Eden is older than everything else. The garden was not a square of paradise improvised on the sixth day as a home for Adam. It existed before the heavens and the earth were made. The Targumist joins a familiar rabbinic tradition that counts Eden among the things created before the world, alongside the Torah, the Throne of Glory, and the name of the Messiah, the list the Sages assemble of realities that preceded creation (Pesachim 54a).

Once the man was formed, God "made there to dwell the man when He had created him," settling humanity into a place that was already prepared and already holy. The point the Targum presses is that the first human did not arrive in a neutral or accidental space. Adam was set down in a garden that had been waiting since before there was a world to wait in, a primordial dwelling reserved for the righteous from the very beginning. Humanity's first home was sacred ground long before there was any ground at all.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 2:9Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

The Torah names two trees in the garden. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:9) tells us the dimensions of one of them.

The Tree of Life, the Targumist says, stood "in the midst of the garden, whose height was a journey of five hundred years." If you started climbing it, it would take you half a millennium to reach the top. This is mythic scale. A tree so tall it touches another world entirely.

The Talmud (Chagigah 13a) often uses "five hundred years' journey" to describe the distance between cosmic layers, between earth and the first heaven, between one heaven and the next. The Targumist is quietly telling us that the Tree of Life is not just in Eden. It bridges worlds. Its roots are in the garden and its canopy is in the heavens.

Next to it grew the other tree, the Tree of Knowledge, "the tree of whose fruit they who ate would distinguish between good and evil." The verse ends there. What made that second tree dangerous was not its size but its gift: moral awareness. A power the first humans were not quite ready to hold.

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