The Garden Was Created Before the World Began

Before the First Day

The Torah makes the Garden of Eden sound like a creation-week detail, planted somewhere between the dry land and the animals, a feature of the finished world. But an older tradition, preserved in the early medieval midrash, said the Torah had the sequence wrong. Or rather: the Torah described only what was made during the six days, and there were things that existed before the six days began.

Seven things, the tradition counted. The Torah. The throne of glory. Repentance. The heavenly Temple. The Garden of Eden. Gehinnom. The name of the Messiah. Each one preceded creation. Each one was part of the divine plan before there was anything yet to execute the plan on. The world was not the beginning of God's work. It was the moment God's prior work became visible.

Eden as the Holy of Holies

The Book of Jubilees went further than most traditions in specifying exactly what kind of place the Garden was. It was not merely a pleasant garden in the east. It was the holiest place on earth, holier than the land of Canaan, holier than Mount Sinai, holier than Jerusalem. The Garden was the prototype of the sanctuary, and the rules that governed entry into it were the rules that governed entry into sacred precincts everywhere.

Adam had not been placed in the Garden on the day he was created. He entered forty days later, after a period that corresponded to the purification laws that would later govern the sanctuary. Eve entered eighty days after her creation. The laws of sacred entry that Moses would receive at Sinai were already written into the original human story. Eden was not a garden God happened to make before getting around to the rest of creation. It was a holy of holies that had been waiting before the first day for someone prepared enough to enter it.

What the Cherubim Were Guarding

When Adam and Eve were expelled, God placed cherubim at the eastern gate with a flaming sword that turned in every direction. The rabbis who examined this detail noticed that the expulsion was not final in the way that finalities usually work. The cherubim were guards, not walls. A guard implies the possibility of entry. You do not post a guard at a place that will never again be entered by anyone.

Bereshit Rabbah, the great Palestinian midrash on Genesis, explored what the exile from Eden really meant. Adam had not been expelled into nothing. He had been expelled into a world that was still connected to the Garden, still able to be transformed back toward it, still oriented toward return if human beings would orient themselves correctly toward return. The flaming sword turned in all directions not to strike down those who approached but to light the possibility of approach from every angle. The expulsion was not the end of the Garden's relevance. It was the beginning of history's project of recovering it.

The Messiah's Name in the Garden

The Messiah's name was one of the seven pre-creation things. The tradition meant this not as a prediction about a future person but as a statement about the structure of time. Before the world existed, God had already prepared the mechanism for its completion. The name was the mechanism. The Garden was the destination. Everything in between, the creation, the expulsion, the history of Israel, the exile, the return, was the path between a name written before time and a garden that existed before creation.

The Messiah's arrival would be the moment when the pre-creation plan and the post-creation world finally aligned. The seven original things would be returned to accessibility. The gates of Eden would open not because the flaming sword had been overcome but because the world would have finally become a place that the Garden could contain again.