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Chapter One: Eden and Utopia: Background and Boundaries
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9 CHAPTER ONE Eden and Utopia: Background and Boundaries Y Y Y When Oregonians are asked what ideas come to mind when they think of Eden, words like paradise, perfection, ideal, innocence, beauty, and immortality come to mind. For some, the initial association is with apples, nudity, sin, and snakes. And for still others, words like expulsion and unachievable are mentioned.1 All of these ideas in one way or another relate to the Western concept of Eden. Although there is an extensive literature on Eden and utopias, it is important to present here some background on these concepts and to suggest how these relate to the boundaries, and terminology, of Eden and utopia used in this study. Eden The concept of Eden, of course, is rooted in the first book of the Old Testament in the Bible, Genesis, specifically in Chapters 2 and 3. However, very little detail is provided about this place and there is some uncertainty about the meanings or derivation of the word “Eden.” It is used to designate a region in southern Mesopotamia and the word may come from the Hebrew, by way of Akkadian and Sumerian words meaning “plain” or “steppe.” So the “garden of Eden” may have just been located in this plain in a general sense, as Genesis states “the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (Genesis 2:8). Another Hebrew word from which Eden may derive means “to be fertile, luxuriant” and a third suggests a “garden of fertile luxuriance”; both of these are tied more into the modern concept of Eden.2 Many specifics of the Garden, however, are not provided in Genesis. The text states that “the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” not to mention the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” that would play prominently later in the story and the “tree of life” (Genesis 2:9).3 Later, “the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air” to keep the man in the Garden company (Genesis 2:19). Seeing that this was not enough, the Lord God then created woman as “his partner” and the two “were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:20-25). Beyond this, few specifics of the Garden of Eden are provided. Chapter 3 of Genesis includes the story of the temptation of the woman (who is not named Eve until later—Genesis 3:20), eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (and it was not yet called an apple), and the punishment bestowed by the Lord God upon Eve and Chapter One 10 the man, who has not yet been given a name.4 That punishment included banishment “from the garden of Eden” (Genesis 3:23), and God settled them “east of the garden of Eden,” posting “the cherubim, and a sword flaming” to protect the Garden, particularly the tree of life (Genesis 3:24). Thus very few details about the Garden of Eden come from the original source. The concepts that are associated with it came from later theologians, writers, scholars, poets, artists, and, perhaps more importantly, traditions.5 Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel note that “In the first century of the Christian era the Garden of Eden was subject to a form of interpretation that came to be sanctioned by both Judaism and Christianity.”6 As this symbolic interpretation became accepted, or at least presented, more details were added to the Eden story. Dante Alighieri’s description of the earthly paradise in his Purgatorio from the early fourteenth-century Divine Comedy was important for the development of the idea and visualization of Eden. More interpretation took place up to the seventeeth century, leading to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), from which many modern views of Eden derive.7 Although Milton sought to be true to the text of Genesis, he extrapolated from this to create many other dimensions of the story, not only of the Garden of Eden but of elements such as the fall of the angels and the creation of Hell. In doing so, he brought in facets of many early views of the Eden story, including those of early Christian poets who Joseph Duncan notes “were converting classical rhetoric to the sensuous pictures of paradise and to the sensitive portrayals of Adam and Eve.” Milton also may have incorporated other earlier developments such...