Genesis 2:8

Hebrew Bible

7 The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. 8 The Lord God planted an orchard in the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow from the soil, every tree that was pleasing to look at and good for food. (Now the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the middle of the orchard.)

Jubilees 8:19

Pseudepigrapha

18 Noah was very happy that this share had emerged for Shem and his children. He recalled everything that he had said in prophecy with his mouth, for he had said: 'May the Lord, the God of Shem, be blessed, and may the Lord live in the places where Shem resides'. 19 He knew that the Garden of Eden is the holy of holies and is the residence of the Lord; that Mt. Sinai is in the middle of the desert; and that Mt. Zion is in the middle of the navel of the earth. The three of them — the one facing the other — were created as holy places. 20 He blessed the God of gods, who had placed the word of the Lord in his mouth, and he blessed the Lord forever.

 Notes and References

"... As the Nile is the western limit of Shem’s territory, the boundary now turns to the east. The geographical point named in the east is the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:8 situates it there: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east,” and naming the Tigris and Euphrates as two of the rivers flowing from it suggests as much. The writer says nothing further about the location of the garden other than to note that one must venture even farther to the east to return to the Rafa Mountains and the mouth of the Tina River from which the sketch of Shem’s borders began. He also reproduces the distinction made in Genesis between the garden and the land of Eden (Genesis 2:8, 10; see Jubilees 3:9, 12) and includes the latter as well in Shem’s lot ... “He knew that the Garden of Eden is the holy of holies.” The author made clear in 3:8-14 that the garden was a sanctuary, since the times at which the first man and woman entered the garden were the bases of some sort of relationship with one another ..."

VanderKam, James C., and Sidnie White Crawford Jubilees: A Commentary on the Book of Jubilees (p. 374) Fortress Press, 2018

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