Where does our world end and the otherworld begin? Can one cross the boundaries between them, whether in life or after death? Is it possible to describe, with any certainty, the spaces above and beyond the visible cosmos? Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the traditional Western answers to such questions as among the ideas bequeathed to us by Judaism and Christianity. Striking, however, is how few of these answers can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Biblical references to creation, the cosmos, and Eden (especially Genesis 2–3) have garnered a disproportionate amount of attention in the history of Christian biblical interpretation and in modern scholarship. Yet such references are surprisingly few and often quite elusive.
In the surviving literature of ancient Israel one finds little systematic concern for primeval time, cosmic spaces, or eschatological horizons. If this reticence reflects an era in which Israel’s literary elite may have eschewed speculation into the unknown for a focus on familiar spaces, human life, and historical time,then it also challenges us to grapple with the dramatic shift in the centuries thereafter. As with otherworldly spirits, the afterlife, and eschatology, so too with the structure of the cosmos and the place of paradise therein: topics treated only in passing, terse, or allusive fashion in biblical materials became the focus for intensive, explicit discussion in the Jewish literature of the Second Temple period (especially Hellenistic and Roman eras; 333 BCE–CE 70).The reasons for this shift remain puzzling, and perhaps all the more so now, with the maturation of scholarship on Second Temple Judaism in the wake of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In past research this period was largely relegated to the status of transitional age (e.g., ‘inter-testamental’), and its literary products were interpreted as a preface to the origins of Christianity, rather than as part of the history of Judaism. Accordingly, the rise of interest in topics such as angels, the afterlife, and the end of time was often explained in apologetic terms – whether as a result of corrupting, foreign ‘influence’ upon Judaism (e.g., Persian, Hellenistic) or as a sign of the supposed distancing of the divine in the centuries preceding Jesus.As Second Temple Judaism has been increasingly studied for its own sake and on its own terms, however, it has become clear that the continuities with ancient Israelite, early Christian, and rabbinic Jewish traditions are many and profound, and the patterns of discontinuity far more complex than any simple trajectory permits.We may be now in a position to attend to this complexity and to see what it might disclose about the pre-histories of many ideas now common in Western cultures. In the case of paradise, the gap between the early biblical and Second Temple evidence cautions us against assuming that it was always and everywhere a topic of pressing concern; interest in the topic may be frequent and widespread, but it is hardly universal or constant.Hence, to tell the pre-history of paradise in the West is not merely to pinpoint moments of ‘origin’ or ‘invention’ for ideas and motifs that later became significant. Rather, it is also to ask why interest in particular questions arose when and where it did, and why and how it was given literary expression.
Towards this aim, the present essay considers the place of paradise in our earliest surviving examples of systematic Jewish cosmography, namely, the Enochic Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers(c. third century BCE). Through a focus on paradise I explore some of the epistemological ramifications of the practice of cosmography, particularly in relation to evolving ideas about revelation and writing in Second Temple Judaism. In the process I hope to shed light on the transformation of ancient Israelite traditions about the cosmos and protology, as forged in the Judaean scribal cultures of the early Hellenistic age and as informing enduring beliefs in Judaism and Christianity alike.
1. Writing the Cosmos before Cosmography
Some information about the structure of the cosmos, of course, can be found already in the Pentateuch, conveyed in the course of Genesis’s account of how God formed ‘the heavens and the earth’. In the first chapter of Genesis the reader/hearer learns that the world as we know it was formed through the separation of ‘waters from waters’ (1:6), and in the second, that the first dwelling-place of humankind was a garden, gan Eden (2:15, cf. 2:8; Septuagint Genesis 2:8: παράδεισος ἐν Εδεμ) planted at the source of four rivers.When combined within the redacted Pentateuch, the result is an image of the inhabited world as situated in a space of water that is controlled – albeit by acts of divine order that can readily be un-done, as when ‘gates in heaven’ were opened and ‘fountains of the Great Deep’ gushed forth to flood the earth (7:11; 8:2).Nevertheless, the narrative thrust of the redacted Pentateuch is marked by a progressive shift away from cosmological concerns. That heaven – and knowledge of heaven – belongs solely to God and His angels is asserted when pre-history passes into history and when the limited parameters of human space and historical time become drawn and set. The reader/hearer is told, in Genesis, that the boundaries between heaven and earth were crossed by the ‘sons of God’, right before the Flood (6:1–5), and challenged by the builders of the Tower of Babel, right after (11:4). Both had disastrous results. Thereafter, a sharp epistemological divide marks off human from divine. God and His messengers are said still to roam the earth – sometimes surprising unwary humans through appearances that momentarily blur the line between supernatural and natural.Yet humankind is described as knowing the realm of the divine only from the voices that resound from above, and from blessings and punishments sent down from the skies.God’s heavenly abode is depicted as a place so distant from earth that it is only in dreams that a man like Jacob might see the ladder that connects them, only angels who can climb this ladder, and only from the most sacred of mountains at the most sacred of times that a man like Moses might catch a fleeting glimpse of God’s feet, resting on the sapphire floor of the firmament (Genesis 28:12–17; Exodus 24:9–10).
Eventually, Jewish and Christian exegetes would delight in re-reading the protology of the redacted Pentateuch through the lens of the belief that Endzeit gleicht Urzeit– with a divine judgment upon all of the earth, as in the Flood (cf. Genesis 6–9), the granting of paradisiacal bliss to the righteous in reversal of the expulsion from Eden (cf. 3:8–24), and/or a re-creation akin to God’s first cosmogonic acts (cf. 1:1–31), whereby the purity of primeval space and time might be restored.Significantly, for our purposes, such reading practices seem to have spread in the Second Temple period, together with the rise of literary interest in a range of other topics raised only tersely or tacitly, if at all, in earlier writings: the names and functions of angels, the origins and purpose of demons, the postmortem fates of the human wicked and righteous, the timetables of world-history, the topographies of heaven and the ends of the earth.
The exegetical derivation of eschatology from pentateuchal protology is now largely naturalized, particularly due to the prominence of this approach in Christian inter - pretations of Genesis.Its development in Second Temple times, however, arguably necessitated reading against the grain of the very texts that were then coming to be elevated as ‘Scripture’.In the Pentateuch one finds no such nostalgia for Eden, nor any sustained concern for postmortem, otherworldly, or eschatological realities.Rather, through its narratives, its authors/redactors situate the aim of life in our own space and time: the proper re-connection of human and divine is decisively located within the Promised Land of Israel and its Temple, on the one hand, and within genealogical and historical time, on the other.Lest one imagine otherwise, it is stressed that one need not look beyond our own known world to gain the knowledge needed for life. This point is made explicit, for instance, in words attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy:
It is not in the heavens (אוה םימשב אל) that you should say, ‘Who will go up to the heavens for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and do it?’ And it is not beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us, so that we may hear it and do it?’ (30:12–13)
Although heaven is deemed the primary dwelling-place of Israel’s God, Israelites are thus dissuaded from contemplating heaven, the sun, the moon, and stars, lest they be tempted to ‘be led astray, and bow down to them, and serve them’ (Deuteronomy 4:19).So, too, with Sheol: even as allusions to the realm attest the belief that it lies below the earth, as a destination for the dead (e.g. Genesis 37:35; 42:38; 44:29, 31), the redacted Pentateuch discourages further inquiry through the association of the dead and their places with practices condemned as ‘foreign’ and abhorrent (e.g. Deuteronomy 14:1; 18:10–11; cf. Numbers 16:20–33).A similar reticence can be glimpsed in other early materials now preserved in the Hebrew Bible. Even though one finds a number of references to God’s heavenly abode, for instance, their function is rarely cosmographical per se. To reconstruct a cohesive cosmology, in fact, the modern scholar must mine and gather myriad scattered references, which – in their own contexts – serve aims other than the mapping of the structures of the seen and unseen world.Just as many references to the cosmos are oriented towards praise and petition of God as Creator, so references to the contents and inhabitants of heaven most often function as means to telegraph His power and majesty; likewise, references to Sheol are often geared towards lamenting the limitations of the human condition and/or proclaiming the power of God to rescue and redeem.Furthermore, much to the frustration of the modern scholar, many such references simply resist certainty, floating at the level of prophetic metaphor, sapiential rhetoric, or poetic allusion.
It may not be coincidental that the most extensive and detailed of these references occur precisely in the context of asserting what the human mind simply cannot know. This tendency is perhaps most pronounced in the sapiential tradition – as most famously in the book of Job, where cosmogony and geography are marshalled towards the aim of evoking the enormity of the divine knowledge that lies completely beyond human comprehension.Likewise is Eden placed beyond the bounds of access to humans in historical time, not just in the Pentateuch, but also in prophetic traditions (especially Ezekiel 28). Biblical references to Eden are surprisingly few, and they serve, as Edward Noort has shown, primarily ‘to describe the transformation from the Golden Age into the real world or to announce the fall of a mighty ruler’, articulating what has been lost that cannot be re-gained again (cf. Isaiah 51:3).Whether in a garden, as in Genesis, or on a mountain, as in Ezekiel, Eden is a place from which to be expelled, in a moment of transition definitive of the nature and limits of life thereafter. The precise location of the place is secondary.To be sure, some impulse towards cosmography can be glimpsed already in the celebration of God as Creator in late biblical prophecy (esp. Deutero-Isaiah; e.g. Isaiah 40:25–8).Furthermore, metaphorical, poetic, and liturgical uses of cosmological motifs would not have been possible, nor resistance to further speculation even meaningful, unless some traditions of this sort were already circulating in ancient Israel – whether orally or in writing, whether as self-consciously ‘Israelite’ traditions or as part of an understanding of the world shared with other Near Eastern cultures. And, of course, the Hebrew Bible preserves only a small fragment of ancient Israelite religiosity, selected and shaped to promote certain practices as ‘traditional’ and normative (e.g. centralized worship at Jerusalem, Israelite devotion to a single deity) and to dismiss others as ‘foreign’ and deviant (e.g. worship at local shrines, commerce with the dead, Israelite devotion to multiple deities).Of the notions of creation, the cosmos, and paradise in the latter, we can only speculate.Accordingly, any conclusions about broader trajectories in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism must come with the caveat that we speak specifically of shifts within their literary cultures; for, indeed, what we know of both eras reflects what scribes – and their patrons and pedagogies – have deemed apt for preservation in writing.
Nevertheless, it remains that there is nothing in the surviving literary heritage of ancient Israel that prepares us for the extensive cosmographical writings that emerge within Judaism in the early Hellenistic age.Perhaps oldest among them is the Astronomical Book, which describes Enoch’s tours of heaven, guided by the angel Uriel, and outlines the names, paths, number, times, gates, laws, and angelic leaders of the sun, moon, wind, stars, and seasons.What the Astronomical Book does for heaven, the Book of the Watchers does for earth. This work claims to report what Enoch saw during and after his ascent to heaven, when he traveled with angels to and beyond the edges of the inhabited world. In effect, Enoch is here described as achieving precisely what Deuteronomy had deemed it improper even to desire: he brings back the knowledge that ‘is in heaven’ and from ‘beyond the sea’. In the process, the works attributed to him claim to preserve eyewitness accounts of many of the phenomena cited in Job (especially 28; 37–8) as exemplary of what humankind cannot know.What proves interesting, for our purposes, is that these works seem to have been penned by scribes who deliberately transgressed the epistemological divides outlined in the pentateuchal and sapiential traditions from which they drew and to which they were otherwise deeply indebted.In what follows, then, I would like to reflect upon this moment of transgression, asking what it might tell us about the beginnings of Jewish cosmography, the transformation of ancient Israelite traditions in the Second Temple period, and the pre-history of Western ideas about paradise.
2. The Cosmos in the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers
Written in Aramaic and attributed to the antediluvian sage Enoch, the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchersare among the earliest extant Jewish works outside the Hebrew Bible (third or early second century BCE), predating and likely even influencing the latest book therein (i.e. the book of Daniel, mid-second century BCE).These works are also our oldest examples of the literary genre of the apocalypse.Furthermore, as we shall see, they preserve the first known attestations of a number of traditions pivotal for the development of Western ideas about paradise.
The earlier of the two, the Astronomical Book, includes only one chapter that focuses on earth (i.e. I Enoch 77). Here, one finds a four-fold division of the earth into west, south, east, and north, which corresponds to the four-fold division of the heavens. This is followed by another, three-fold division,described as follows:
The Astronomical Book then goes on to list what appear to be places at the edge of the earth: seven great mountains, higher than all the mountains of the earth, from which snow comes (77.4), seven great rivers, larger than any earthly rivers, which flow into the Red Sea, the Great Ocean, and the Wilderness (77.5–7), and seven great islands (77.8).Although the fragmentary character of the extant Aramaic and the divergences in the Ge‘ez make it difficult to know for certain,this mapping of earthly spaces seems to move from known centre to unknown periphery – from worldly to other-worldly. If so, the ‘pardes of righteousness’ is poignantly set at the very crossing-point between them.The Astronomical Book also proves significant, for our purposes, due to its rhetorical and epistemological stance. Its presentation of information about these and other features of the cosmos is couched in claims of certainty and totality (e.g. 74.2; 76.14; 81.1; 82.1). Enoch is here said to have learned ‘everything’ about the celestial cycles by virtue of his travels with angels, his instruction by them, and his access to heavenly books, and he is said to have transmitted ‘all of it’ to his son Methuselah. Indeed, from one perspective, the work can be read as a defence of the very practice of Jewish cosmography: far from exhibiting any reticence about investigating ‘the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven’, it purports that trustworthy knowledge about them has circulated amongst humankind since before the Flood, in written records of revealed wisdom.This stance is enabled by the emphasis on the power of writing to transcend the boundaries of ordinary space and time.Not only is Enoch presented as the antediluvian ‘author’ of the Astronomical Book, but the book itself describes how he stopped to chronicle what he saw in the course of his journeys, so that his son could preserve and transmit the revelations:
All this, Uriel the holy angel... showed me. I [i.e. Enoch] wrote down their positions as he showed me... (I Enoch 74:2)
All their laws ... I have shown you everything, my son Methuselah. (76:14)
Now, my son Methuselah, I am telling you these things and am writing [them] down. I have revealed all of them and have given you the books about these things. My son, keep the book written by the hand of your father so that you may give it to the generations of the world. (82:1)
In addition, Enoch’s scribal acts include the reading of heavenly writings:
The book about the motions of the heavenly luminaries... which Uriel showed me... (72:1)
He [i.e. Uriel] said to me: ‘Enoch, look at the heavenly tablets, read what is written on them...’ I looked at all the heavenly tablets, read everything that was written... (81:1)
The knowledge revealed to the reader/hearer of the book is thus doubly authorized: it is presented as the record of human sight, speech, and memory but also as a written emblem of the transfer – and the very possibility of an exact transfer – of heavenly knowledge down to earth.
Similar ideas about cosmology, knowledge, and writing can be found in the Book of the Watchers, together with even more references relevant to paradise. The present form of the book is composite, and much of the scholarship about it has focused on delineating and investigating its constituent parts.A focus on cosmography, by contrast, draws our attention to the orchestrating logics and anthological structures of its redacted form – the form in which, and by which, the significance of paradise is here expressed.The redacted form of the Book of the Watchers is shaped by an overarching concern for charting the proper scope, source, and purpose of human knowledge. It begins with an exhortation by Enoch, concerning what he knows and how. As in the Astronomical Book, claims of revelation enable a stance of certainty, and the rhetoric is totalizing:
From the words of the Watchers and holy ones, I heard everything,43 and as I heard everything from them, so I also understand what I saw. (I Enoch 1:2)
The ramifications of this angelic knowledge for human life are then proclaimed with reference to divine judgment: Enoch warns of an age in which God will descend from His abode in heaven, treading down upon Mount Sinai with His angels, to judge all the creatures of the earth (1:4–9).With this, the Book of the Watchers turns to explore the twin themes of knowledge and judgment. It does so first from the perspective of the inhabited world, beginning with an appeal to the elements and cycles of Nature, as experienced by humankind in daily life and historical time: the rising and setting of the sun, moon, and stars, the shifts of the seasons and the blossoming of trees, the flow of the seas and rivers (2:1–3:3).Through the voice of Enoch, the text calls for contemplation of them, and it stresses the ethical aims of proper human inquiry into Nature. The created world is here described as providing models for obedience to God’s laws – even convicting, by comparison, people who stray from the paths of righteousness (3:4).From the positive exempla of Nature obedient, the text then turns to negative exempla, namely, the angelic Watchers who descended to earth in the days before the Flood (6– 16). In comparison with the terse description of the deeds of the ‘sons of God’ in Genesis 6:1–4, the account here is lengthy and detailed. Most notable, for our purposes, is the treatment of the transgression of the boundaries between heaven and earth. Not only are these angels accused of abandoning their appointed homes in heaven, seeking immortality through fleshly reproduction, defiling human women, and siring monstrous Giants (e.g. 6:1–7:2; 9:8–9; 12:4; 15:3–16:1), but they are said to have revealed heavenly secrets on earth and to have taught corrupting knowledge to humankind (e.g. 7:1; 8:1–4; 9:6–8; 13:2; 16:3).
The topics of their teachings include the workings of the metals for the sake of weapons and jewellery, the manipulation of plants and chemicals for spells and cosmetics, and divination from the sun, moon, stars, and meteorological phenomena.Within the redacted Book of the Watchers the result is a striking contrast: these practices of extracting gain from the earth and knowledge from the skies are a perversion of what was promoted, at the outset, as proper inquiry into the cosmos. Whereas Enoch’s speech in I Enoch 2– 5 showed how proper contemplation of the earth and the skies can foster righteousness, the account of angelic descent in chapters 6–11 describes how the knowledge revealed by the Watchers resulted in the corruption of humankind and the spread of earthly evils. Their tale thus serves as a warning about the corrupting power of knowledge about the cosmos wrongly gained, as well as providing a paradigm for the improper crossing of the physical and epistemological divide between heaven and earth.
Furthermore, the rectification of the disorder caused by angelic descent occasions the revelation of the mechanisms of divine justice through which Nature, humankind, and angels are rightly connected. According to the Book of the Watchers the antediluvian earth was ravaged by the corruption of humankind and bloodied by the hunger of the Giants, and it cried out to heaven, together with the voices of the souls/spirits of the creatures slain (7:3–6; 8:4). With this, the perspective of the text shifts away from the inhabited world, following these voices upwards to the ‘gates of heaven’, as their pleas reach the archangels who ‘look down upon the earth from the sanctuary of heaven’ (9:1–2). Upon hearing the pleas, the archangels petition God. He, in turn, commissions them to mete out punishment and to purify the earth (9:4–11:2).
The archangelic intervention into worldly affairs is here said to encompass, not just the sending of the Flood and the salvation of Noah (cf. Genesis 6–9), but also the binding of the fallen angels in darkness and desert, the destruction of the bodies of the Giants through sword, and the punishment of angelic and human sinners alike (I Enoch 10:1– 11:2). The account of the divine instructions to the archangels, moreover, includes the promise that the cleansing of the earth from wickedness shall be accompanied by its renewal: the righteous shall be free from wrath ‘for all the generations of eternity’ (10:22), dwelling on a pure earth ‘tilled with righteousness’, filled with ‘all the trees of joy’ (10:18), and nourished by the opening of ‘the storehouses of blessing in heaven’ (11:1). Protology and eschatology are thus brought into correlation, with Flood and final judgment seamlessly joined, as if in the timelessness of divine will.
Up until this point in the text (i.e. 1–11), the Book of the Watchers departs only slightly from the cautious stance towards cosmological inquiry conveyed by Deuteronomy, Job, and other early biblical writings (see above). To celebrate proper human knowledge of the divinely-created world, it ethicizes the act of observing the elements and cycles of Nature, and it condemns the use of such knowledge for improper aims like divination. Indeed, if anything, the boundaries between flesh and spirit are sharply underscored – together with the epistemological divide between heaven and earth – by the Book of the Watchers’s detailed and dramatic descriptions of the disastrous results of angelic descent.
The chapters that follow, however, open up the possibility that human bodies and knowledge can cross these very boundaries. Having told the tale of the fallen angels from the perspective of earth (6–8) and from the perspective of heaven (9–11), the text retells this tale from the perspective of Enoch (12:1ff).The intermediary status of this ‘scribe of righteousness’ is signalled by the accounts of his earthly encounters with angels. Heavenly ones instruct him to rebuke the fallen ones (12:3–13:1), who then plead with him to write a petition on their behalf and to deliver it to God in heaven (13:3–6). The power of writing – even to cross the boundaries between earth and heaven – is then narratively confirmed, as Enoch’s penning of the petition occasions his rapture.The Book of the Watchers subsequently purports to record Enoch’s own memory of his ascent to heaven, as told to the fallen angels after his return. He recounts how clouds, shooting stars, mists, wind, and lightning carried him up to a three-chambered heavenly palace (13:7–14:9). Even as God’s heavenly abode is here described in terms that evoke the Jerusalem Temple,Enoch himself is made to emphasize that the place is incomprehensibly and frighteningly otherworldly. It is presented as a realm of coexisting opposites that could never be joined on earth, such as hailstones and tongues of fire, water and flame, and a divine presence that is flanked by countless hosts of angels yet cannot be seen or approached by any (14:9–23). The sight of all this is said to cause Enoch to collapse, falling down ‘on my face, prostrate, trembling’ (14:24).
This chapter, I Enoch 14, has been much discussed by scholars as the oldest surviving account, in Jewish literature, of a heavenly ascent.Within the Book of the Watchers it also serves an important literary function: the account of Enoch’s heavenly journey marks a pivot in the work, whereby the focus turns from the descent of the fallen angels and their corrupting teachings on earth, to the elevation of Enoch and his access to salvific knowledge from heaven.What immediately follows (i.e. 14:24–16:4) is an account of the scribe’s encounter with God, from whom he receives his commission to rebuke the Watchers. The last nineteen chapters of the Book of the Watchers (i.e. 17–36) are then taken up by a detailed description of Enoch’s travels to the ends of the earth, guided and instructed by angels.Although this ‘tour’ material has garnered far less scholarly attention than the chapters concerning the fallen angels and Enoch’s heavenly ascent (i.e. 6–16), it makes up more than half of the work and significantly shapes the meaning and message. This material also proves central for our understanding of the emergence of Jewish cosmography and the place of paradise therein.
The description of Enoch’s travels in I Enoch 17–36 begins with a brief, ostensibly first-hand account of Enoch’s north-westward journeys around the earth’s edges, from the ‘places of the luminaries and the treasures of the stars’ to the ‘living waters and fires of the west, which provides all sunsets’, to the ‘great sea of the west’ and the ‘place where no flesh walks’, ‘the mouth of all the rivers of the earth and the mouth of the abyss’ (17:2– 8).Significantly, for our purposes, the subsequent summary of what Enoch saw (18:1–5) includes features that recall the Book of the Watchers’s introductory appeal to the obedience of elements and cycles of Nature (see above).Exemplary, in this regard, is his sight of the ‘storehouses of all the winds’with which God ‘arranged all that is created’ (18:1): not only do these winds blow upon the inhabited earth, but they are revealed to be the forces that bear the earth and support the firmament, stretch out the skies, and move the sun, stars, and clouds across the heavens (18:2–5).Enoch is then said to head southwards, past seven great mountains and then beyond (18:6–10). There, he sees the prisons, not just of the fallen angels (19:1–2), but also of seven stars, in a great chasm of heavenly fire at ‘the edge of the great earth, where the heavens come to an end’ (18:10).The reader/hearer thus learns that the commonalities between humans, angels, and Nature go beyond the shared ideal of their obedience: natural phenomena can stray from their appointed tasks, and they too suffer punishment when they do.The thematic oscillation between obedience and disobedience continues with a list of exemplars of angelic faithfulness. To the fallen angels and the seven wayward stars (6–16; 18–19) are contrasted seven angels who watch over the inhabited world (20:1–8). The domains of five of them are connected to the judgment of the wicked and the protection of the righteous. The other two watch over specific places: Uriel is in charge of the inhabited world and Tarsus (20:2 in Gr.), while Gabriel is in charge of paradise, cherubim, and serpents (20:7). With this, the focus of the text shifts back to the spatial concretization of its earlier assertions about the inevitable punishment of all creatures who transgress divine law: it returns to wayward angels and stars – this time, separating the two and using Enoch’s travels to reveal the fearsome places of their final punishment (21:1–10).The significance of these various distinctions becomes clear with the subsequent descriptions of the places that Enoch visits when he journeys back into the parts of the cosmos bounded by earth below and firmament above. From this point in the text the selection and arrangement of sights is shaped by a concern for the judgment of the wicked and righteous among humankind, both directly after death and in the eschatological future. These chapters of the Book of the Watchers are well-known for including what George Nickelsburg has termed ‘the earliest detailed treatment of the fate of the dead’ in Jewish literature (esp. 22; 24:2–27:2), and begin with ‘one of the two earliest extant Jewish testimonies to a belief in a post-resurrection judgment’ (i.e. 22:1– 4).Here, Enoch visits a mountain in the Far West of the world with four ‘hollows’ (Gr.κοιλώματα; 22:1–3), which – he learns – are where the ‘souls of all the sons of men’ (אשנא ינב לכ ת[שפנ) are gathered:
... the pits for the place of their confinement (ןנגע תיבל איתחפ)... until the day on which they will be judged... the time of the day of the end of the Great Judgment (אבר אניד [י]ד אצק םוי ןמז), which will be exacted upon them... (I Enoch 22:3–4; 4Q206 fr. 2 col. ii lines 1–3)
Three of the hollows are dark, and these are said to be reserved for different types of wicked souls. The souls of the righteous, by contrast, dwell in the single bright hollow, which is filled with light and watered by a fountain.Whereas Enoch had responded to the sights of the places of the punishments of stars and angels with pure terror (21:8–9), his response here shifts to blessing (22:14),as if in a moment of recognition that what he has seen attests the justice that pervades even the far edges of the cosmos.
To reach the next major destination Enoch travels past a ceaseless fire to the west of the end of the earth (23:1–4). Beyond this are the seven massive mountains at the very edge of the world (24:2–3). Although all are impressive, his sights are said to fix on the largest among them – a throne-like mountain on which stands a glorious tree. When Enoch questions his angelic guide, he is told that the mountain ‘is the seat ... where the Great Holy One ... will sit, when [He] descends to visit the earth in goodness’ (25:3).The tree is described in terms that evoke the Tree of Life in Genesis’s account of Eden.The archangel Michael explains that no flesh can touch this tree until after the final Judgment, when it will be transplanted to the ‘holy place, the house of God’ (25:5). Imagery of the primeval Eden is thus intertwined with imagery of the Temple (cf. Ezekiel 47:7–12) to evoke an eschatological Eden as well.The fruits of the Tree of Life, in fact, are here said to be saved for the eschatological future, when they will be eaten by the righteous, who will thus live long lives, without illness, as in primeval times (25:5–6).
Here too, the scribe responds with blessing (25:7), as he does in response to the next major destination on his tour (26:1–27:5). This is a mountain at the ‘centre of the earth’ (26:1), in a fertile land, with a dry valley stretching beneath it. It is also, as scholars have often noted, the only stop on the tour that bears features that clearly correspond to known geography: what is here described appears to be the topography surrounding what is – in Enoch’s future and the reader’s present – the city of Jerusalem.It is made clear, moreover, that in the valley below it, the human wicked shall suffer their final fate (27:1–4; i.e. Gehinnom).
With Enoch’s final major destination we come at last to the ‘pardes of righteousness’ (4Q206 fr. 3 line 21: [א]טשק סדרפ; Gr.παράδεισος τῆς δικαιοσύνης; Eth. gannata s.edq). According to the Book of the Watchers he encounters this garden when travelling far eastwards,past many ranges of mountains, and past deserts and places of spices (28:1– 32:2).When he sees the place from afar (32:3) he stops, as if transfixed. What attracts his gaze is a tree in its midst, which is ‘very large and beautiful and glorious and magnificent’ and from which ‘the holy ones eat and learn great wisdom’ (32:4; cf. Gr.).When Enoch inquires about this tree, his angelic guide answers as follows:
This is the Tree of Wisdom (Gr.Pan. τὸ δένδρον τῆς φρονήσεως)72 from which your father of old and your mother of old, who were before you, ate and learned wisdom; and their eyes were
opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they were driven from the garden. (I Enoch 32:6)73To this, Enoch is silent. Conspicuously absent are the blessings that punctuate his visits to other locales associated with the judgment of humankind (22:14; 25:7; 27:5). Instead, the text veers quickly to its conclusion (33–6), with a brief list of other sights that Enoch saw,followed by a coda of praise for the God who made all that he was shown. Whether as an afterthought, or as the culmination of the tour, the ‘pardes of righteousness’ is thus distinguished from the rest of the major sights that Enoch is said to have seen.
3. Paradise and Apocalyptic Epistemology
As noted above, the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers are our oldest surviving examples of an extensive literary effort within Judaism to map the structure of the cosmos. In the Book of the Watchers, we also find gathered nearly all of the elements that would eventually constitute Western ideas about paradise. These include a concern for the location of the garden of Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge/Wisdom, and the Tree of Life; a description of the architecture, contents, and inhabitants of God’s heavenly abode as visited by a righteous visionary; an account of the places where the souls of the righteous reside, divided from the wicked after death; and the correlation of protology and eschatology, with the promise of a restored world in the far future, to which shall be returned the purity of primeval space and time.
But what – we might ask – is the function of the ‘pardes of righteousness’ within the texts themselves? Above, we noted how the reference to this locale in the Astronomical Booklikely serves to mark the border between the inhabited world and what lies beyond. More puzzling is the place of paradise within the Book of the Watchers.Among the major destinations on Enoch’s tours, this site is the only one not granted any significance for the future. It has no bearing on the post-mortem fate of humankind or any function in end-time events. It is neither the present nor future location of the Tree of Life. Nor is it associated with the eventual restoration of the righteous. It may not even be imagined as an intended stop on Enoch’s tour; after all, the scribe is said to have glimpsed it from afar during the course of his journeys, rather than having been led to it by the angels. In addition, the explanation of its significance is somewhat laconic, with surprisingly little attention lavished on the Tree of Wisdom,and the structure of the passage about this place deviates from the common pattern in this section of the Book of the Watchers.Furthermore, even though I Enoch 32 contains the earliest unequivocal reference to the story of Adam and Eve outside Genesis,one finds little sense of the later prominence of Genesis 2–3 as a nexus for protological and eschatological speculation or as a focus for the mapping of the topographies of the ends of the earth.
Why, then, is this site included at all? In an influential 1958 article, Pierre Grelot posited an exegetical motive, namely, the desire to reconcile Genesis’s description of Eden as a garden located in the east with Ezekiel’s description of Eden on a mountain, perhaps also with reference to the northern ‘mountain of God’ in Isaiah 14. Grelot speculated about a mythic geography in which God dwelt in the mountain-paradise in the northwest, then planted an earthly replica of its garden in the northeast after forming humankind, to which He temporarily transported the Tree of Life; after the expulsion of Adam and Eden, the Tree was moved back to the mountain-paradise, to remain until the Eschaton, when another earthly replica will be established at the centre of the earth in Jerusalem. Grelot further posits the mountain-paradise as the Eden in which Enoch is said to dwell in Jubilees (see below).In his view the Book of the Watchers thus reflects a cosmology with two paradises: [1] a northeastern garden associated with Adam and Eve, containing the Tree of Knowledge/Wisdom (i.e. in I Enoch 32), and [2] a northwestern site, the mountain-throne of God, containing the Tree of Life that will be transplanted to the centre of the earth at the end of time (i.e. in I Enoch 25).Inasmuch as later traditions commonly double Genesis’s garden into a heavenly paradise and a terrestrial Eden, it is tempting to read such doubling already in the Book of the Watchers. More recently, however, Eibert Tigchelaar has questioned this reading, on the grounds of Grelot’s selective use of traditions from early and late sources to reconstruct his Enochic world map; particularly misleading, in his view, is Grelot’s conflation of the mythic geographies of third- and second-century BCE writings with that of the first-century BCE/CE Parables of Enoch (I Enoch 37–71).When read on its own terms, by contrast, the Book of the Watchers reveals only a single paradise, and the place is granted relatively little significance. In fact, in Tigchelaar’s estimation, the inclusion of this site is best understood in terms of an impulse towards comprehensiveness: the garden was ‘placed at the end of Enoch’s journey to the east in order to complete the description of the East, and not because of some special importance of this location’.Martha Himmelfarb also notes the passing treatment of the garden of Adam and Eve in I Enoch 32 but offers a different explanation.In the Book of the Watchers, as is well known, it is the descent of the Watchers before the Flood that serves as the primary explanation for earthly sin and suffering. Accordingly, it may not be coincidental that Eden is here integrated, even as its significance for salvation history is downplayed. For instance, I Enoch 32:6 includes none of the elements that permit Genesis 2–3 to be read as an account of the origins of evil. In addition, the Book of the Watchers severs any possible connection of the primeval garden with future restoration, by virtue of the association of post-mortem and eschatological reward – as well as the Tree of Life – with other locales. Himmelfarb proposes, therefore, that the authors/redactors of the Book of the Watchers may have been forced to include the story of Adam and Eve, due to its fame from Genesis, but did so in a manner that defused its significance, both for the past genealogy of error and for the promise of future redemption.What these various theories share is the assumption that the treatment of the ‘pardes of righteousness’ in the Book of the Watchers must have been shaped primarily by concerns outside the text, whether rooted in biblical exegesis, common notions of eastern geography, or competing aetiologies of evil. What I would like to propose here, by contrast, is that Enoch’s trip to this locale – the final major destination of the tour in the Book of the Watchers – serves an important literary function within the text and that it may, moreover, help us to grasp something of the poignantly transitional character of this very early cosmographical work. When one situates the passage about the ‘pardes of righteousness’ within the apocalypses as a redacted whole, and in relation to its over - arching concerns, what is striking is the emphasis on wisdom. In I Enoch 32:6, Enoch is said to have been transfixed by precisely those features of the Tree of Wisdom/Knowledge by which Eve is said to be tempted in Genesis 3:6: its beauty and the promise of wisdom. He then notices that this wisdom is accessible only to the ‘holy ones’ (Gr. ἅγιοι, presumably rendering Aramaic ןישידק),the very highest class of the angels in the schema of the Book of the Watchers. Yet, even despite the text’s repeated celebration of Enoch’s angel-like status and his access to knowledge from the angels, he is not permitted entry. He does not cross into the bounds of Eden. Nor is he said to taste of the Tree. This is the one line that is drawn and maintained between Enoch and the angels, and – according to the Book of the Watchers – it shall remain uncrossed by humankind even in the eschatological future.
The Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers would open the way for a flurry of Jewish (and, later, Christian) speculation about the topographies of realms outside the inhabited world – above, beyond, and below – and about the possibility that the righteous can experience those realms, whether in visionary journeys and/or in blessed life in eternal or eschatological spaces after death.Eventually, some Jewish and Christian writers would let Enoch into Eden, and others would grant him all the knowledge and power of the angels. Many would also make a paradisiacal place for the righteous dead in heaven or at the ends of the earth.Later reflection on Enoch’s post-ascent abode, in fact, appears to have developed in tandem with reflection on the location(s) of paradise. In most materials from the second century BCE, for instance, Enoch and Eden are both located on the horizontal plane, and thus situated within a geography similar to that of Book of the Watchers. In a unit about the birth of Noah affixed to the end of the Epistle of Enoch, for instance, Methusaleh is said to visit Enoch at ‘the ends of the earth’ (I Enoch 106–7; cf. the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, 1QapGen 2:23), and in the Book of the Giants, the Giant Mahaway must cross ‘the Great Desert’ to reach him (4Q530 2 ii 5).Similarly, Jubilees describes Enoch as ‘writ[ing] down the judgment and con - demnation and witness of humankind’ in Eden where the Flood did not reach (4.23–6). At the same time, however, Jubilees enhances earlier connections between Eden, Temple, and heaven – not least by describing both Eden and heaven in terms that pointedly recall the Temple.By the first century BCE, these various threads have become interwoven: the Parables of Enoch (I Enoch 37–71) assert that Noah walks to the ‘ends of the earth’ to see Enoch (65:1–5) but also that Enoch, after his ascent, was ‘set ... between two winds, between the north and the west, where the angels took cords to measure for me the place of the chosen and the righteous ... and [where] I saw the first fathers and the righteous, who were dwelling in that place from of old’ (70:3).Likewise, in the following centuries, Enoch is increasingly moved into heaven. In the shorter recension of the Testament of Abraham (11:5), as in II Enoch and Sefer Hekhalot/III Enoch, he sits in heaven writing the deeds of the living.Heaven, moreover, is no longer a locale limited to God and His angels. It begins to bustle with the souls of the dead, whether waiting to be judged or taking up their homes in paradise (e.g., Testament of Abraham B 8–12; II Enoch 7–10, cf. 42; III Enoch 41–48).
In the Book of the Watchers, by contrast, Enoch may see heaven, but it is still a place so otherworldly that his terror of it matches his terror of the places far beyond the edges of earth and sky. Likewise, he may see the ‘pardes of righteousness’, but he remains outside its bounds, far from the fruits of wisdom by which he is so tempted. It is here – I suggest – that we might glimpse an enduring trace of the older reticence towards cosmological speculation that we noted at the very outset. In the Book of the Watchers the garden of Adam and Eve and Tree of Wisdom are featured as the final major sights of a tour in which Enoch might otherwise seem privy to all the information about the cosmos known to God and His angels. They stand, in effect, as a reminder that there are limits to human knowledge, even for the wisest and most righteous of scribes.
4. Conclusions
Traditionally, the development of ‘mainstream’ Judaism has been reconstructed primarily on the basis of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic literature, while apocalypses and other so-called ‘inter-testamental’ texts have been placed in a trajectory leading to Jesus, the New Testament, and Christianity – and, at times, to ‘mystical’ varieties of Judaism. Among the results has been the enduring assumption that works like the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers must represent a radical departure from the ‘normative’, ‘this-worldly’ Judaism exemplified by the Pentateuch and/or its later rabbinic interpreters.
At first sight, our inquiry might appear to confirm this impression. Inasmuch as the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers transgress the bounds of pentateuchal and sapiential epistemologies, these cosmographical writings do herald the rise of an ‘other- worldly’ perspective within Second Temple Judaism. Some tension with ‘this-worldly’ perspectives, moreover, is suggested by our evidence for their early reception. A number of scholars have proposed that a reaction against Enochic texts and traditions can be glimpsed already in the Wisdom of ben Sira. Writing in Hebrew text in the second-century BCE, ben Sira seems to reassert the values of the Pentateuch and the biblical Wisdom tradition in the face of the apocalyptic innovations of the early Hellenistic age.In contrast to the cosmological concerns of the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers, for instance, he cautions against inquiry into what lies beyond the inhabited world:
Seek not what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power. Reflect upon what has been assigned to you, for you do not need hidden things (Heb. תורתסנ; Gr. τῶν κρυπτῶν). (Wisdom of ben Sira3:21–2)92
Significantly, for our purposes, ben Sira’s critique is coupled with a presentist twist on the promise of paradise: not only does he proclaim that ‘the fear of the Lord is like blessed Eden’ (Heb. הכרב ןדעכ; cf. Gr. ὡς παράδεισος εὐλογίας; 40:27), but he equates first-created Wisdom with the Pentateuch itself (24:23).The result is a pointed confirmation of the capacity of humankind to gain knowledge, life, and blessing here on earth, within the bounds of the inhabited world, in historical time, and without any ancient visionary or otherworldly tourist as revelatory mediator.The contrast with the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers is striking, and it is indeed tempting to imagine the contrast as presaging a later conflict – whether between ‘this-worldly’ Judaism and ‘other-worldly’ Christianity,or between ‘mainstream’ and ‘mystical’ ideologies within Judaism itself.After all, some sectors of Judaism saw a flowering of speculation into the cosmos, otherworldly spirits, the afterlife, the end-times, etc., in the wake of the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers, but their literary products would be preserved and extended primarily by Christians. Late antique rabbis seem to have rejected such works, even as they embraced the words of ben Sira.Are the beginnings of Jewish cosmography, then, marginal to the history of Jewish thought, and meaningful mainly for our understanding of Christianity? To be sure, ben Sira couched his critiques in explicit claims to traditionalism, as did rabbinic sages after him, and their claims pivoted on their elevation of the Pentateuch: these self-claimed Torah-experts granted such scriptures an epistemological monopoly, to which all knowledge from Nature and ‘sciences’ was theoretically subordinated.Much like the Wisdom of ben Sira, moreover, the classical rabbinic literature features pragmatic concerns that we might term ‘this-worldly’ (e.g. ethics, halakhah), alongside sayings critiquing those who dwell on the unknown and otherworldly. Mishnah H. agigah2.1, for instance, attests tannaitic efforts to curtail the exposition of ma‘aseh bereshit (‘work of creation’) and to condemn speculation into ‘what is above and what is below, what is before and what is after’ (i.e. heaven, netherworld, pre-creation, eschatology).And, just as ben Sira’s famous critique (3:21) would be quoted favourably by amoraim commenting on this very mishnah (y. H. agigah2.1/77c; b. H. agigah 13a), so Deuteronomy’s assertion that ‘it is not in heaven’ (30:12a; see above) would be marshalled for the articulation of a rabbinic epistemology that privileges consensus wrought from learned discourse on earth, over claims of revelation or charismatic power from heaven (esp. b. Bava Metzia 59b; cf. Romans 10:6–8).
Closer analysis, however, suggests that these positions may lie in a continuum more variegated than any simple dichotomy suffices to convey. Assumptions about Judaism’s ‘this-worldly’ orientation may have led scholars to highlight those portions of the classical rabbinic literature which focus on legal and ethical concerns and/or those which ignore or curtail cosmological and eschatological speculation.Yet it remains that this rich and massive corpus also includes traditions expressing an interest in cosmic cycles for calendrical and ‘scientific’ aims, in a manner not unlike the Astronomical Book, as well as traditions expressing an interest in mythic geography and the correlation of Urzeit and Endzeit, in a manner not unlike the Book of the Watchers.And, just as the authors/redactors of these early cosmographies enthusiastically broached the limitations of human knowledge asserted in older works such as Deuteronomy and Job, so the constraints on cosmogony and cosmology in the Mishnah were tested and transgressed by the rabbis responsible for works such as Genesis Rabbah (esp. 1–8), the Babylonian Talmud (b. H. agigah 12b–13a), and Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (esp. 3–11).In addition, paradise continues to emblematize the crossing between known and unknown, in all its danger and power: much as this place marked the border of the visible world in the Astronomical Book and the limits of human knowledge in the Book of the Watchers, so it serves as a nexus for exploring the profits and perils of secret knowledge and visionary experience in tales about the ‘four who entered pardes’ in the Tosefta and Talmudim (t. H. agigah 2.3–4; y. H. agigah 2.1/77b; b. H. agigah 14b–15b).As with parallel Christian debates about Nature, Revelation, Science, and Scripture, rabbinic Jewish discussions may thus reflect something of the generative tension between the cosmographical reticence of the Pentateuch and the cosmological curiosity resultant from its own claims that the God of Israel is also the Creator.
We have seen how the creative power of this point of tension can be glimpsed already at the beginnings of Jewish cosmography – both within and between early writings. Not only does the Book of the Watchers express ambivalence towards celestial wisdom, but its elevation of Enoch’s expertise is tempered by his exclusion from Eden and the wisdom of the fruits of its famed Tree. Accordingly, if ben Sira does indeed critique those who cultivate Enochic traditions, his concern might be best understood as part of the same conversation about how best to negotiate the proper scope and sources of Jewish knowledge in the early Hellenistic age.It is in this context – I suggest – that we might best situate the beginnings of Jewish cosmography. Whatever their points of contrast, the Astronomical Book, Book of the Watchers, and Wisdom of ben Sira express many of the same priestly, pedagogical, and sapiential concerns, and they bear marks of having emerged from similar scribal settings.Taken together these works may thus bespeak a culturally fertile moment and milieu in pre-Maccabean Palestine, marked by competing scribal pedagogies in conversation concerning the practices of learning and writing about the cosmos.The intensification of such debates may reflect the growing prestige of the scribe and the valorization of writing in the early Hellenistic age, as extending ideas in prophetic works like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and as transforming the understanding of knowledge, revelation, and ‘authorship’ throughout the Second Temple period.Such shifts may also owe some - thing to the emergence of new patterns of patronage, particularly with the further expansion of imperial, administrative, and mercantile demands for literary skills under Ptolemaic and Seleucidic rule. In any case, it remains that works like the Astronomical Book, Book of the Watchers, and Wisdom of ben Sira attest a surprisingly sharp self- consciousness about scribalism and the power of writing. They share, moreover, a concern to re-map the traditional scope of scribal expertise and to extend the authority of Jewish writing into new domains – astral ‘science’ in the case of the Astronomical Book, mythic geography and post-mortem realities in the case of the Book of the Watchers, the training of secular aristocracy in the case of the Wisdom of ben Sira, and in all three, the location of paradise and its Tree(s).
If so, then the catalysts for Jewish cosmography cannot be reduced simply to external ‘influence’. But neither can we extricate ‘inner-scribal’ and ‘inner-Jewish’ developments from their broader, cross-cultural contexts. The elevation of the pre-exilic past and the development of new models of Jewish pedagogy, for instance, may have been spurred by encounters with ‘classical’ Greek wisdom and Hellenistic education, in a manner parallel to (and perhaps connected with) the discourse about the cosmos and the past among Egyptians and Babylonians in the Ptolemaic and Seleucidic Empires.This shared discourse, in turn, seems to have contributed to the emergence of a new, cross-cultural koine among native elite in the Hellenistic Near East. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the geography of the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers interweaves elements from ancient Babylonian and Greek traditions – following no one model but rather appearing to reflect common cosmological ideas.New claims concerning Jewish scribal expertise, however, may have also formed part of a defence of the ancient literary heritage of Israel, answering the challenges posed by the intellectual prestige of ancient Greek culture and the cosmopolitan ‘scientific’ discourse forged by learned elite in the Hellenistic Near East. In this regard it is notable that the astronomy of the Astronomical Book reflects none of the Hellenistic innovations of its time, drawing instead on ancient Babylonian precedents.Like ‘Pseudo- Eupolemus’s soon after them,the authors/redactors of the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers seem to appeal to the antediluvian Enoch to argue that Jewish learning encompassed the same questions that were being asked and answered by the wise men, philosophers, and astronomers among their neighbours – albeit with a claim to extreme antiquity far greater than that of the Greeks; a claim to an unbroken tradition of written transmission rivaling even those of the Babylonians and Egyptians; and a claim to a unique source in angelic revelation, heavenly books, and eye-witness accounts of otherworldly realms.
Our inquiry into cosmography thus points us to the transitional character of the Astronomical Book and Book of the Watchers, as products of the early Hellenistic age that laid the groundwork for later developments in Judaism, Christianity, and Western culture. At the same time, however, our consideration of paradise has served to remind us of the poignant continuities that connect these traditions with the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Israelite roots. The earliest extant examples of Jewish cosmography certainly transgress the bounds of older views about human knowledge and the proper focus of human concern. But they maintain the same ethical aim and eschatological horizon. In the Astronomical Book, as we have seen, cosmography is marshalled towards a task familiar from psalmic, sapiential, and other early biblical traditions – namely, the celebration of Israel’s God as the same deity who created and rules the cosmos. What Enoch here sees and transmits, in fact, could not be further from the types of knowledge about the sun, moon, and the stars that might encourage someone to ‘bow down to them, and serve them’ (cf. Deutoronomy 4:19); the celestial bodies, rather, are revealed to be part of an orderly and systematic heavenly hierarchy, guided by angels, who are overseen by leaders, who in turn are all governed by the God of Israel and by the laws specified for them. Similarly, in the Book of the Watchers, Enoch may bring back knowledge from ‘in heaven’ and ‘from across the sea’ (cf. Deutoronomy 30:12–13), but the ramifications of this knowledge remain surprisingly similar to the ramifications of the narratives and commandments in Deuteronomy and the rest of the Pentateuch. What Enoch learns of the unseen spaces of heaven and earth speaks to the necessity of obedience to God’s law – albeit not just for humankind, but also for winds, stars, and angels. Furthermore, when he visits the edges of the earth, he learns that it is the Land of Israel that is the place that proves most significant for the fate of humankind – albeit not just only for Jews. The Land is lauded as the place at the centre of the entire earth, prepared for the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous alike. It is presented as the only place, moreover, in which the righteous can hope to experience some measure of a return to paradise, eating at the end of time from the Tree of Life that once rested in the primeval garden.
