Scholars like Walton[1] and Beale[2] have successfully made the correlations between the language of the Genesis creation account(s) in Gen 1-2 with ANE parameters of cosmic temple imagery. One specific connection is made with the terms ʿbd and šmr in Gen 2:15 of Adam in Eden with later depictions of the priests in the sanctuary (e.g., Exod 3:12; Num 3:7-10; 8:25-26; 18:5-7; 28:2; 1 Chr 23:32; Isa 56:6; Ezek 44:14; cf. Gen. Rab. 16.5).[3] I argue along these lines in my dissertation where I summate (utilizing what I proffer therein as the Adamic Principle):
The priests do so on behalf of humanity/ʾāḏām in the temple what Adam’s role is in Eden. As YHWH sanctifies the Levites in the service/ʿbd of the portable tabernacle that carries YHWH’s Presence in the setting up and ordering the tabernacle (Num 8:5-22), Adam is to serve YHWH in Eden to carry such order outside Eden’s confines. When God casts Adam out of Eden, removing his image, it is as the temple’s destruction as Eden ceases to exist. No longer is there mention of Eden’s present existence as in the first temple’s demise. A second Eden is yet to come. Both terms appear in the context of authentic worship against possible apostasy to other ʾĕlōhîm (Deut 11:16; 12:30; 13:4; Josh 22:5; 1 Kgs 9:6; Jer 16:11; Hos 12:12; Mal 3:14). The HB uses them also in the context of the king (2 Sam 22:44).[4]
“West into Eden: Rhythms of Privation and Participation within the Parameters of the Pentateuch,” 115-16; cf. ch. 5’s discussions.
How does the language of cultivation get so readily tied to priestly duties?
Common in the ANE literature are descriptions where a temple or palace (the same term, hêḵāl, is used in the HB for both) exude life coming from the deity or the divine representative in the human chosen along the lines of the later theory of the divine right of kings in the Middle Ages (stemming from Roman conceptions) in the form of an attached garden. Politically, the king tamed chaos bringing orderly rule, and exuded divine life and authority as God’s (chosen/anointed) [hu]man and agent of peace, popularized in the conception of Pax Romana. As YHWH is the divine warrior, so his king fills that armor (and throne) in the flesh as God on earth in and among his people.[5] Where such “life” is present, one would understand it was sustained in some sense by the divine’s presence as its truest sourcing. In a state of bliss, peace brings bountiful blessings.
Often, the patriarchs meet God in the wilderness by a sacred tree (indicative of Eden) where water is present in the desert and flora and fauna flourish in waste places now often referred to as oases.[6] The connection of where life began (from God) and where life currently is sustained in the ANE arid climates reflects the link of life here on the earth as it is in heaven. With the continued blessing from above, life below is nourished and can thrive to survive chaos’s unending onslaught as it spills over its containment into the present borders of civilization. Through ritual (see chapter 2 of my dissertation) and faithfulness to the divine can peace resume and chaos be tamed for life to succeed where the elements stand ever opposed in humanity’s fallen state of existence apart from the Edenic confines from which it sprung. Incidentally, Cain and his line are seen as the outside world’s emergence separate from the Lord eventually made manifest at Babel and the dispersion of all peoples to other gods in their own domains private from YHWH (cf. Deut 32:8-9). The Pentateuch’s theme of the balance of the parameters of life and death and blessing and curse are juxtaposed onto the cosmic geography depicted in Gen 1-11 underlining the significance of YHWH and his people from Abram onward from which the biblical narrative ensues.[7]
Furthermore, etymologically this occurs even in the evolution of the English language. Pieper asserts “[t]he German word kult is taken from the Latin colere, the origin of English ‘cultivation’ and ‘culture.’ The repetitive, persistent, and loving care of the farmer (cf. agriculture) is not clearly enough indicated in the English ‘worship.’”[8] Scholars use “cult” and “cultus” more generally for any activity related to worship as opposed to its more common usage of the extremities of worship outside of orthodox views in fringe groups based on heretical views. The Bible is full of agricultural metaphors to portray this paradigm even well into the NT with Jesus’s parables and John’s concluding remarks in Rev 22. In Isa 5, Israel is represented as the wild vineyard that is more chaotic than tamed showing its rebellion to YHWH and “being” in God’s kingdom under his care to “be” as always intended from the beginning as “blessed” and to “[b]e fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over” all “the earth” (Gen 1:28, ESV) in all of God’s “very good[ness] (Gen 1:31). As explained in ch. 2 of my dissertation, these activities exude life and maintain order against chaos through participation with the divine rule as a partnership in koinonia which implements chaoskampf by keeping chaos at bay out on the outer fringes of reality.
Pieper further contends:
Worship is to time as the temple is to space. “Temple” has a certain meaning reflected also in its etymology, cf. Greek temenos, from temnein, to cut; Latin emplum): a definite physical space has been “cut off” by enclosure or fencing from the rest of the land, whose surface was divided up for farming or other uses. These sectioned-off spaces were handed over to the possession of the gods and were not inhabited or planted but were removed from all practical use. Just so, through religious festival, and for the sake of religious festival, or “cult,” from day-to-day time a definite period was separated off, and this period of time, no otherwise than the ground-surfaces of the temple and places of sacrifice, would not be used, and would likewise be kept from use. Every seventh day was such a time period. It is the “festival-time” that came to be in precisely this way. Now there can be no unused space in the total world of work, neither an unused area of ground nor an unused time; nor can there be a space for worship or festival: for this is the principle of rational utility, on which the world of the “worker” exclusively demands.[9]
Josef Piper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary, (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 71-2.
In summation, in my dissertation I contend for the bounds from which the HB especially in the Pentateuch defines human existence in relationship to all of creation with attention focused on the divine human chasm along these very lines. As the ancients would cordon off a section of the wilderness and cultivate it until later civilizations emerge, so too its religion encapsulated such imaginings to peel back the mythos behind the supernatural and mapped over their present reality in life on the earth as it was in the heavens.
Sacred spaces develop akin to sacral festivals where both time and space are the borders or liminalities to afford ascent to higher realities amid a world often marked by chaos. Such divine activity, Pieper juxtaposes against what the desert fathers termed as acedia (which the fathers often deemed as “the day [noon] time demon” [10] and labels the former, leisure (which he sets clearly against any notion of “killing time” or boredom in modern parlance but is more related to the rediscovery of its ties to the biblical notion of Sabbatical rest tied to the festivals and worship). He associates this to the word from which English gets its work for “school” in Greek and outlines it not so much the opposite of work in the sense of idleness or laziness but of worship and the pursuit of God to provide life as opposed to merely human activities in which to merely subsist. It is participation in God’s providence set apart from mere human activity to provide for oneself.
“The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) [scholē] is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The name for the institutions of education and learning means ‘leisure.’”[11] Such a model comports nicely with Walton’s cosmological “control room” analogy12] and the NT concept of discipleship. I had desired to pursue along his discussions of “ the shape and operation of the cosmos (Sumerian ME, imperfectly translated by Akkadian parṣu),”[13] but ran out of space and must save it for another project.
Thus, it is not related to just the mundane “work” as in those enslaved to modern ideas like capitalism. For some, it means simply clocking in only for the paycheck to then do what one truly desires. Sadly, such distinctions separate the secular from the sacred which Pieper wishes to redeem back to the creation mandate (Gen 1:28ff). Such a false dichotomy Milbank rightly assails in his radical orthodoxy going back to refute the errors of William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus which the Church (and the West) inherited from the Protestant Reformers. Instead, the two are inexplicably conjoined.
As such, this is God’s work which while routine at times remains beyond ordinary banality. We, too often, lose its wonder! The pertinent model is humanity reflecting the Maker in “making” as an act of adulation. It is a partnership in allowing the Creator’s intendment of (his) continual creativity to flow throughout all creation for a more perfected world. In Pieper’s sense, I would maintain additionally, it is ordered by such goodness against the chaos in this synergy of both YHWH’s human and divine families.
Later, the concept gets typified in Christ’s Body (the third temple) as God’s ever-present, transcendent heavenly kingdom manifest on earth now as all awaits the not yet (cf. Rom 8:18ff). The Spirit’s fruit in the branches of Christ’s vines (John 15) ripens until the final harvest in the Parousia at the final consummation of all things for a taste of the life that comes. This promise is illustrated to Noah when YHWH states after the Flood of the seasons (and the associated festivals), “[w]hile the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen 8:22), Such patterning points back to God’s activities on Creation’s fourth day (mirroring day one’s light) fully substantiated in its seventh which resonates across the rest of Scripture in the rhythms that form the basis of life wherever chaos (cf. Gen 1:2) continues to intrude and needs to be ordered to restore harmony as it was in the beginning.
[1] John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011).
[2] G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 29ff and op. cit.
[3] E.g., Exod 3:12; Num 3:7-10; 8:26; 18:7. John H. Walton, Genesis, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 172–174.
[4] “West into Eden: Rhythms of Privation and Participation within the Parameters of the Pentateuch,” 115-16; cf. ch. 5’s discussions.
[5] Ibid., ch. 6’s discussions, sadly truncated due to the university’s restrictions.
[6] E.g., the discussion in Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, First Edition. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 235, passim.
[7] See this theme highlighted in the latter portions of Deut showing the importance of this thread throughout the Torah.
[8] Josef Piper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary, (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 70n1, emphasis original.
[9] Ibid., 71-2.
[10] Ibid., 47ff; idem, Über die Hoffnung, 5th ed. (Munich, 1955), 58 ff; Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life, (New York: Penguin, 2008). See also Mark S. Gignilliat, “Teaching as Leisure: Acedia’s Antidote for the Mid-Career Academic” 1st June 2021.
[11] Ibid., 25-6.
[12] Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, 115ff.
