Texts in Conversation
1 Enoch reshapes the imagery of the trees of Life and Wisdom from the Garden of Eden, incorporating it into later traditions of cosmology that depicts it representing the World Tree, or the very center of the Earth.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 2:9
Hebrew Bible
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.) 10 Now a river flows from Eden to water the orchard, and from there it divides into four headstreams.
1 Enoch 32:4
Pseudepigrapha
3 And from there I went over the summits of all these mountains, far towards the east of the earth, and passed above the Erythraean sea and went far from it, and passed over the angel Zotêl. 4 And I came to the Garden of Righteousness, and beyond those trees, I saw many large trees growing there, fragrant, large, very beautiful, and glorious, including the tree of wisdom, from which they eat and gain great wisdom. 5 And I came to the Garden of Righteousness, and from afar off I saw trees more numerous than these, and among them were two very large, beautiful, glorious, and magnificent trees, including the tree of knowledge, whose holy fruit they eat and gain great wisdom.
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Notes and References
"... In the description of the place at which Enoch has arrived, the verb “I saw” is used in 1 Enoch 32:3 to relate two features about this locale. First, Enoch saw large and beautiful trees in the Garden of God and, among them, the Tree of Wisdom from which some persons or angels are eating. Second, Enoch saw in detail the unique characteristics of the Tree of Wisdom. The motif of a tall and beautiful tree in the Garden of God, which the other trees in the Garden cannot rival, comes from the ancient mythological concept of the world tree. In 1 Enoch 32, the position of the world tree is occupied by the Tree of Wisdom. This tree is later identified by the angel as the tree from which Adam and Eve ate; that is, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2–3) ..."
Argall, Randal A.
1 Enoch and Sirach: A Comparative Literary and Conceptual Analysis of the Themes of Revelation, Creation and Judgment
(p. 32) Scholar's Press, 1995
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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