Eden

Eden, a name Hebrew hearers would likely have heard as ‘eden, meaning “delight,” is the land in which “the Lord God planted a garden eastward” and placed the man he had formed (Genesis 2:8), though some scholars trace the name to an older word for an open plain. The place is often remembered as a paradise of ease that humanity forfeited and can only mourn. The prophets and Restoration scripture remember it in other terms, as a holy place where our first parents walked with God and as a pattern the faithful are to build again.

The Garden as Sanctuary

Hedcut illustration of Moses 3:15 portrays Adam’s work—“to dress it, and to keep it”—as an entrusted task in the garden. — Moses 3:15 portrays Adam’s work⁠—“to dress it, and to keep it”⁠—as an entrusted task in the garden.

Students of the ancient Near East have catalogued the features Eden shares with Israel’s sanctuaries. God walks in the garden, with the verb later used for his presence moving through Israel’s camp. The garden is entered from the east, as the tabernacle and the temple were, and after the expulsion God “placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24), much as cherubim were woven into the veil before the holy of holies. Ezekiel calls Eden “the garden of God” and sets it on “the holy mountain of God” (Ezekiel 28:13-14).

The language of Adam’s charge fits the pattern, though English hides it. The Lord put him in the garden “to dress it, and to keep it” (Moses 3:15). The two Hebrew verbs, ‘abad, “to work” or “to serve,” and shamar, “to keep” or “to guard,” appear together elsewhere in the Pentateuch only for the Levites who served in the tabernacle and guarded it. With that echo in view, tending the garden was itself a form of worship, and Adam’s tilling of the soil was perceived as priestly service. Nor did the expulsion end the commission: Adam was sent out to till the ground from which he was taken, and the Hebrew verb is again ‘abad.

Eden in Restoration Teaching

Hedcut illustration of Latter-day Saint teaching ties the garden story to the planned gathering of Zion, including Joseph Smith’s reported location of Eden in Jackson County, Missouri. — Latter-day Saint teaching ties the garden story to the planned gathering of Zion, including Joseph Smith’s reported location of Eden in Jackson County, Missouri.

Early Church leaders reported that Joseph Smith located the garden in Jackson County, Missouri, the region a revelation of 1831 had named the center place of Zion, and a revelation of 1838 named a valley to the north Adam-ondi-Ahman, “the place where Adam shall come to visit his people” (D&C 116:1). The first garden and the promised city thus share one landscape. Latter-day Saint temples present the garden narrative as the first stage of a journey back to God, and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw has observed that the temple runs Eden’s pattern in reverse. Adam and Eve went out eastward past the cherubim, away from the tree of life; temple worship leads its participants inward, through a veil, toward the presence their first parents left.

A Wilderness Like Eden

The prophets foresee Eden restored as a place cultivated and built, and Mormon transhumanists count human work as part of that restoration. Isaiah promises that the Lord “will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein” (Isaiah 51:3). The Bible opens in a garden and closes in a city, and in the city’s street grows “the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). The restored Eden has a street, a tree that yields a harvest every month, and leaves that heal entire nations. The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation hopes to help realize prophetic visions of the renewal of this world, and its adherents see early forms of that renewal in irrigated deserts, restored wetlands, crops bred to survive drought, and medicine that reaches the poor.