NOTES for Gen 2:4-25

What is the human being? And what is the Garden of Eden? At first glance it may appear that the issue is a completely real, earthly geography. Yet every people has such a sacred geography. Every people has its own sacred land, its own mythological ancestral homeland, usually where that people's historical memory awoke, where its own history began for it. The Jews remember themselves from the time of Abraham, and that means Harran, Northern Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden is located. There was something else as well: the memory of the times the Greeks called the "golden age," when the human being lived in full harmony with the world, with other people, with the gods, and with himself as well. The Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis combines features of the mythological ancestral homeland of the Jewish people with a description of the world in the times of the "golden age"; in this way the sacred writer wants to tell us that those times are not merely myth, that at one time the human being really did live in full harmony with God, with the world, with himself, and with other people.

What, then, was the perfect human being like? In the Poem of Creation it is said of him that he, alone of all the living beings created by God in our world, was created in the image and likeness of God. All the animals are created, each according to its "kind," or, as we would say today, according to its prototype. Only the human being has no prototype: every human being is created according to the image of God, and God Himself becomes the human being's "prototype." How is such a thing possible? From the point of view of his nature, the human being does not differ from other living beings; he is created by God from the "dust of the earth," and the whole universe, as people thought in the times when the account of the creation of the human being was written, consists of the tiniest specks of dust. There is nothing unique in human nature as such. The human being's uniqueness lies elsewhere: in that "breath of life" through which he becomes a "living soul." In the Bible, "soul" is not a static structure, but a process, the stream of life in which both the spiritual and the natural component are present: here are lofty spiritual movements, and simple physiology too, such as breathing or blood circulation.

A modern philosopher would probably call this stream existence. Such is the human soul in the biblical sense of the word. And the stream of human life exists in the quality in which it exists thanks to that very "breath of life," God's breath, God's presence at the very center of our own personhood, which makes that personhood's very existence possible. If there were no divine "breath of life," there would be no human being as the image of God; there would simply be another species of primates. That is why there is no human being without continuous communion with God: after all, breathing is not a one-time act, but a process that must continue without interruption. The human being was conceived and created by God for continuous communion with God, outside of which, spiritually speaking, he simply cannot remain himself. And yet God leaves the human being freedom: he can live as God proposes to him, or choose his own version of existence, under his full responsibility for all the consequences of his choice.