Tree of Life: Encyclopedia - Tree of Life

Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, in the Book of Genesis, is a tree whose fruit gives everlasting life, i.e. immortality. After eating of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, the story goes, Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden. Fearing Adam and Eve will also eat of the tree of life and become immortal, God sets angels to guard the entrance to the Garden.

In the story, the serpent had tempted Eve into partaking of the Fruit of Knowledge by promising they would become as wise and powerful as God. The unstated but implied moral is variously interpreted as God's anger at their decision, God's fear that they will harm the Tree of Life, God's fear that the Tree of Life will harm them, or God's fear of the serpent's influence. These are of course not contradictory.

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.

Tree of Life - Analysis

The serpent and tree theme, especially as it relates to the development of the earliest man, occurs in the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, a sacred text to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is also found in the Norse sagas as the ash tree Yggdrasil. Instead of having fruit that gives knowledge, it has magic springwater of knowledge. Although one should note that many times throughout the Bible, 'fruit' is used in a metaphorical sense, i.e. to bear fruit. In opposition to the serpent at the base, offering immortality, was an eagle and hawk at the top. Similarly, in China, a carving of a tree of life of some sort, recently discovered, has a bird at the top and a dragon at the bottom. The dragon, in Chinese mythology, often represents immortality. This theme of a reptile offering temptation is common to many religions. However, Chinese mythology does have a tree that offers immortality, and this myth is more definite: a tree which yields a peach every three thousand years that can give the one who eats it immortality. Like the tempting reptile, the round, golden fruit is common to many religions, and may be related to the idea of trees covered in riches. For instance, in Arabian mythology, a man finds jewel-encrusted trees near the fountain of life.

The first man and first woman are called Adam and Eve in the bible (Parents of man/Tree of life/The Davidic line), but in Norse mythology we have Ask and Embla. In Egyptian mythology, in the Ennead system of Heliopolis, the first couple, apart from Shu & Tefnut (moisture & dryness) and Geb & Nuit (earth & sky), are Isis & Osiris. They were said to have emerged from the acacia tree of Saosis, which the Egyptians considered the tree of life, referring to it as the tree in which life and death are enclosed. A much later myth relates how Set killed Osiris, putting him in a coffin, and throwing it into the Nile, the coffin becoming embedded in the base of a tamarisk tree. The first person to give an overview of world myths and to attempt to provide a unified theory of religions was James Frazer in "The Golden Bough" (1890). By then many people were prepared to accept the book of Genesis as mythology, not history.

Since then feminists have re-analyzed the stories and interpreted the temptation of Eve as a symbolic way of describing a change in society: A stone age matriarchal religion being replaced by a patriarchal one in the bronze age. Robert Graves suggests this in "The White Goddess" (1947) by literary analysis, and Baring and Cashford use extensive archaeological evidence to present the same case in "The Myth of the Goddess" (1991). A professional modern theologian, Elaine Pagels, says much the same in "Adam, Eve and the Serpent" (1988).

Ioan P. Couliano gave a semiotic analysis in "The Tree of Gnosis" (1991). To him the serpent was in turn, bad, then good as each phase in the history of religion re-examined its past. To the ancient Gnostics the serpent was offering immortality, which was snatched away by a lying selfish god (Yahweh, whom they considered a demiurge). To Milton, Eve was once again a villain. To Byron, she was a hero once more. 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 Arabian 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 (Sechuan), 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 a Tule tree. The Tule tree exists in modern times, and is thought to be the single largest and oldest biomass on the planet.

Tree of Life - Interpretation within the Western Church

Until the Enlightenment the Christian church generally gave the biblical narratives of early Genesis the weight of being in some way 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 then those possed 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 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.

See also

• Adam and Eve
• Genesis
• Garden of Eden
• System
• Tree (mythology)
• Tree of Knowledge
• The Book of Light
• The Fountain (movie)

Categories: Torah events | Kabbalah | Jewish mysticism

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Tree of Life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki