היכן גן העדן? השינויים בתפיסת מקומו ותפקידו של גן העדן לאור תהליך החיבור והעריכה של ספר חנוך

The Garden of Eden as described in the Hebrew Bible is an earthly place, where Adam and Eve lived before their sin. Early sources do not express any human desire to return to the Garden. Yet by the first century CE, several Jewish and Christian texts understand the Garden as a heavenly reward for the righteous. The discrepancy between these conceptions of the Garden of Eden must be explained by developments within Second Temple literature, which bridge the gap between the earlier sources and the literature of first-century Christianity and Judaism. The book of 1 Enoch serves as a good example of these developments, as it was composed in several stages during the Second Temple period and contains quite a few descriptions of Eden. In the first section of the paper I analyze the compositional process of the Book of the Watchers, one of the earliest sections of 1 Enoch. I then proceed to demonstrate that the sources of this composition actually speak of two separate gardens. One is the Garden of Eden, here called the ‘Garden of Truth,’ where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (here called the ‘Tree of Wisdom’) stands; this garden is off-limits to humans. The other garden features a tree that will give life to the righteous and is described with only vague allusions to Eden. Following the redaction of the Book of the Watchers, these two gardens were made to parallel one another, and each thus imparts some of its features to the other. In this way, the earthly Garden of Eden receives eschatological meaning in the Book of the Watchers. Chapters 60 and 70 of the Book of Parables, the latest section of 1 Enoch, were composed from several truncated and integrated sources. In some of these
sources, the role of the Garden of Eden as the final resting place of the righteous is presumed, but it is still an earthly garden. However, other sources integrated into these chapters describe heavenly phenomena. Synchronically reading these chapters allows the reader to ‘relocate’ the Garden of Eden in heaven. This textual analysis is based on a new translation by the author from the extant Aramaic, Greek, and Ethiopic versions of 1 Enoch. The translation is partly quoted in the article, together with a commentary on difficult expressions.