Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, in the Book of Genesis, is a tree in the "New Jerusalem" whose "fruit" gives everlasting life, i.e. immortality. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the biblical account states, that Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life. The passage actually reads that God set an angel to guard the entrance to the Garden, so that mankind would not eat of the tree and "Be Like Us".

The wisest animal, the serpent, tempts the unwise Eve into partaking of the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil by suggesting that she would become as wise as God. God then fears that they will eat of the Tree of Life and thus banishes them from the Garden. The Genesis narrative of the banishment from the garden of Eden is balanced in the New Testament by the planting of the Tree of Life on mankind's side of the divide. See Book of Revelation chapter 22 "In the midst of the Town square of it, and on either side of the river, there was the Tree of Life, which bore twelve kinds of fruit and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."

The Tree of Life is represented in several examples of sacred geometry, and is central in particular to Kabbalah, the mystic study of the Torah. It is also a recurrent theme in many pagan religions, especially the Assyrian religion and the most ancient form of the Greek Religion, where its worship is associated with Tree Cults. In the earliest precursors of Judaism, the Goddess Asherah is worshiped in the Temple of Solomon in the form of a wooden idol or plank, representing the more usual form of her worship, a tree upon a hilltop.

Analysis

Serpents, trees and fruit are important symbols in the religion of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. These symbols are also found in the Norse saga of the ash tree Yggdrasil where the tree provides a magical springwater of knowledge. In opposition to the serpent immortality, is the eagle and hawk. There is a similar mythology in China, where a carving of a Tree of Life depicts a bird and a dragon. In Chinese mythology, the dragon often represents immortality. There is also, in Chinese mythology, the story of a tree that produces a peach every three thousand years. The one who eats the fruit receives immortality.

James Frazer in his book The Golden Bough (1890) attempts to give a coherent unified account of a number of religious myths and symbols. Ioan P. Couliano provides a semiotic analysis in The Tree of Gnosis (1991). The serpent and Eve have been enjoyed interpreted as either evil or good. It offered immortality, which was then snatched away by a lying selfish god (Yahweh, that was considered a demiurge). For Milton, Eve became a villain. For Byron, she was a hero. To some followers of Kabbala, the tree is a concealed version of the Kabalistic tree, and the apples are the nodes of the Sephiroth.

The most all-encompassing theory is one that suggests that all these myths are an attempt to explain why an all-powerful creator god would fail to give man immortality. The Book of One Thousand and One Nights has a story, 'The Tale of Buluqiya', in which the hero searches for immortality and finds a paradise with jewel-encrusted trees. Nearby is a Fountain of Youth guarded by Al-Khidr. Unable to defeat the guard, Buluqiya has to return empty-handed. The 'Epic of Gilgamesh' is a similar quest for immortality. In Mesopotamian mythology, Etana searches for a 'plant of birth' to provide him with a son. This has the most solid provenance of antiquity, being found in cylinder seals from Akkad (2390 - 2249 BC).

One of the most spectacular archaeological finds of the 1990s was a sacrificial pit at Sanxingdui in Sechuan, China. Dating from about 1,200 BC it contains 3 bronze trees, one of them 4 meters high. At the base was a dragon, and fruit hanging from the lower branches. At the top a strange bird-like creature with claws. Also from Sechuan, from the late Han dynasty (c 25 - 220 AD) is another tree of life. The ceramic base is guarded by a horned beast with wings. The leaves of the tree are coins and people. At the apex is a bird with coins and the sun.

In Eden in The East (1998), Stephen Oppenheimer suggests that a tree-worshiping culture arose in Indonesia and was diffused by the so-called "Younger Dryas" event of c 8,000 BC, when the sea-level rose. This culture reached China (Szechuan), then India and the Middle East. Finally the Finno-Ugaritic strand of this diffusion spread through Russia to Finland where the Norse myth of Yggdrasil took root.

On a much simpler level, the maypole or Christmas tree can be seen as a phallic symbol, worshiped as a way of generating fertility. The Bible condemns the setting up of an "Asherat" (upright pole dedicated to Astarte).

Located on the southern end of the island of Bahrain is a solitary tree. A very nice tree, especially considering the otherwise very barren surroundings. This tree is also known as the tree of life.

In Aztec legend, there is a tree of life, which is the Tule tree. The Tule tree exists in modern times, and is thought to be the single largest biomass on the planet.

Interpretation within the Western Church

Until the Enlightenment, the Christian church generally gave biblical narratives of early Genesis the weight of historical narratives. In the City of God (xiii.20-21), Augustine offers great allowance for "spiritual" interpretations of the events in the garden, so long as such allegories do not rob the narrative of his historical reality. However the allegorical meanings of the early and medieval church were of a different kind than those posed by Kant and the Enlightenment. Precritical theologians allegorized the genesis events in the service of pastoral devotion. Enlightenment theologians (culminating perhaps in Brunner and Niebuhr in the twentieth century) sought for figurative interpretations because they had already dismissed the historical possibility of the story.

Others sought very pragmatic understandings of the tree. In the Summa Theologica (Q97), Thomas Aquinas argued that the tree served to maintain Adam's biological processes for an extended earthly animal life. It did not provide immortality as such, for the tree, being finite, could not grant infinite life. Hence after a period of time, the man and woman would need to eat again from the tree or else be "transported to the spiritual life." The common fruit trees of the garden were given to offset the effects of "loss of moisture" (note the doctrine of the humors at work), while the tree of life was intended to offset the inefficiencies of the body. Following Augustine in the City of God (xiv.26), “man was furnished with food against hunger, with drink against thirst, and with the tree of life against the ravages of old age.”

John Calvin (Commentary on Genesis 2:8), following a different thread in Augustine (City of God, xiii.20), understood the tree in sacramental language. Given that humanity cannot exist except within a covenantal relationship with God, and all covenants use symbols to give us “the attestation of his grace,” he gives the tree, “not because it could confer on man that life with which he had been previously endued, but in order that it might be a symbol and memorial of the life which he had received from God. ”God often uses symbols to He doesn’t transfer his power into these outward signs, but “by them he stretches out his hand to us, because, without assistance, we cannot ascend to him.”Thus he intends man, as often as he eats the fruit, to remember the source of his life, and acknowledge that he lives not by his own power, but by God’s kindness. Calvin denies (contra Aquinas and without mentioning his name)that the tree served as a biological defense again physical aging. This is the standing interpretation in modern Reformed theology as well.

Finally, others think of the tree of life and death as an actual spiritual decision tree, where decisions are made that define the structure of the universe. Eating an apple from the tree is interpreted as making a wrong decision in that tree. A wrong decision made by Adam turned the perfect world God created to the imperfect world we are living today. It is obvious that God, before the fall of Adam, gave to him the permission to decide at all the branches of the tree. Adam's descendants still hold permission to decide in some branches of the tree, but they have no permission to decide at all the branches. For example humans cannot decide at the branch of the tree which defines gravity law or any other painful law of physics (like the second law of thermodynamics). These painfull laws seem to apply everywhere and in every time for every human. Humans, in constrast with other invisible to humans creatures like Angels or Daemons, cannot decide against these laws. So Adam's descendants are damned to live and suffer inside the imperfect world, created due to Adam's wrong decision in the decision tree of life and death, and this is the Original sin.

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Analysis

Interpretation within the Western Church

See also

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