The Tree of Life Was a Journey of Five Hundred Years Tall

Midrash Aggadah Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 2:9 View source

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 18, 2025

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.

Themes

Eden Creation Adam & Eve Mysticism

Biblical References

Genesis 2:9

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