2:15 - The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
[T - OL ]
The first important verb here is "take," (laqach). Laqach is a very common verb used more than a thousand times in the OT. Like all simple words, laqach is subject to nuances that can only be determined from the form of the verb and the context. When God is the subject and Israel the object of this verb, the idea of election is almost always present.2 That seems to be clearly the case here with the man; the man was "chosen" by Yahweh for the special tasks of the His garden. Apart from this, the usage of the verb in these two chapters is instructive. Laqach appears 8x, half of them before the temptation by the serpent and half after:
A. "Yahweh God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work itand take care of it," 2:15.
B. "So Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh," 2:21.
C. Then Yahweh God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man," 2:22.
D. "The man said, 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man.''" 2:23.
E. The serpent's temptation, 3:1-5.
D'. "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it," 3:6.
C'. "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return," 3:19.
B'. "And Yahweh God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever," 3:22.
A'. "So Yahweh God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken" 3:23.
All but two of laqach in these two chapters have God as the active agent, and they all speak of His largess. The first time it is used with human as the active agent, it was in Eve's act of disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit (3:6). The second time it is so used (3:22), it appears again in the context of divine grace in barring humans from taking the fruit of the tree of life. The pattern is unmistakeable: when God takes He takes to give, humans take to take. With Eve's taking and eating communion with God was broken for ever. Our great privilege as Christians is the offer to us by Jesus to "take and eat" the bread and wine which is his body broken for us and his blood shed for us. With that offer we are sealed once again into communion with Him.
When God takes, He takes to give.
Humans take to take.
We now come to the second important verb. Yahweh God had already "put" (sam) the man in the Garden in v8. Sam is the commonest Hebrew word for locating something in a place or position; "place" is probably the best translation for it. Here the author repeats the fact but uses a different verb, the hiphil form of nuach. The root, says the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, "signifies not only absence of movement but being settled in a particular place (whether concrete or abstract) with overtones of finality, or (when speaking abstractly) of victory, salvation, etc. . . . Basically the root relates to absence of spatial activity and presence of security."3 God never intended man to be a homeless, rootless wandering soul, an alienated person. In "putting" the man in the garden, God intended him to be embraced in the security of his presence. But the next time the root is used in Genesis, it reappears with implications of salvation and a clear backview to this act of God here.
The various forms of the third verb, "work," 'abad, occur nearly 1100 times in the OT. If something needs to be done, 'abad is the word closest to hand, whether it is to till the soil, to do something bad to someone, or to make bricks. Thus, 'ebed is simply the Hebrew word for a worker, servant, slave. At one end of the spectrum, one form of the word, 'abdut points to servitude, bondage, slavery. At the other end of the spectrum, we find the word used in Yahweh's command to Pharaoh, delivered through Moses, to "let my people go, so that they may worship me." Though there are other Hebrew words that are translated 'worship,' to "work" for God, to "serve" Him, is to worship Him. Significantly, not only were great men like Moses, Joshua and David called 'ebed Yhwh "the servant of the Lord (Deut 34:5; Jos 24:29; Psm 36:1), it is "the most prominent personal, technical term to represent the OT teaching on the Messiah," of which so much is found in the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah.4
It is not surprising, therefore, that quite a number of OT scholars see a tantalizing suggestion here that the Garden represented "sacred space," "holy ground," which later developed into the idea of the temple. Though the First Man was said to 'abad the soil, it was holy work. Work, in other words, was never intended to be toil. We live in a village of mostly Chinese farmers (and restaurateurs); when asked what they do for a living they often offer a view of themselves simply as "cattle and horses," i.e., beasts of burden, nothing more. Life is just something to get by. But work, Genesis tells us clearly here that work—when done well, and done abided in God and for His glory—is worship.
The fourth verb is shamar, another common word occurring close to 500 times. It appears most frequently in English versions as "keep" and "observe" with regards to the OT "laws." The basic meaning of the verb is "to exercise great care over." However the word is used, in all its plethora of nuances, it is always bracketed by the gravitas of trusteeship, of ownership and by initiative and deliberation. "Sorry, I only work here" does not work here, for shamar speaks of total devotion to the task at hand, to which the First Man was appointed.
It is highly plausible that these four terms, so loaded with implications of what Israel meant to God—of her election, of being set in a place of security, of worship and observance of all that God had given and instructed—are meant to paint a picture of the First Couple in the garden as just more than a life of luxurious leisure on an inland paradise. Many scholars already recognize and have written extensively on the Garden of Eden as a foreshadowing of the later temple in Israel, with Adam serving as God's high-priest.5 I suggest we rather put things the other way round, i.e., Israel's later experience with the temple was only an imperfect reflection of what life was meant to be as it was in Eden. Ancient Israel ended up only as a "people with priests. Eden, if it had not been corrupted by the First Couple, would have made a "people of priests."6 Like the New Jerusalem that had no temple because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple" (Rev 21:22), Eden would not be a temple.
We shall have more to say about this, but it is best done after we have worked through the text at least until 3:17-18.
Nowadays it is considered the greatest achievement if a person could make his first million by his twenties and retire at thirty never having to work again. Tiger Woods plays (golf) and Leonardo DeCaprio and Paris Hilton get flown around in private jets to obscenely expensive parties and both get paid just as obscene sums of money for the fun they have and for the distraction they provide. Meanwhile thousands of Bangladeshi and Nepali young men sell themselves into lifelong slavery just to make an obscenely meagre living. Work is not fashionable in the modern world; getting paid for doing nothing is.
God has an entirely different view on work. He worked and He continues to work; "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working," says Jesus (Jn 5:17). In putting the man to work and to take care of His garden, God appointed the man to the same high honour as gifting him with the breathe of life. To work is to bear the image of God, to be like God. As for the First Man, so is work for us. How well we excel in what is given us to do—even if it is only washing up the dishes—is the measure of how truly we worship God (This, surely, includes our sermon preparation and its preaching, to be sure.)7
In contrast to Genesis, ancient Israel's more culturally-influential neighbours such as the Babylonians and Assyrians believed—as far as we can tell from their literary texts that archaeology has recovered for us—humans were created to fulfil what John Walton calls the Great Symbiosis, in which:
humanity has been created to serve the gods by meeting their needs for food (sacrifices). housing (temples) and clothing, and generally by giving them worship and privacy so that those gods can do the work of running the cosmos. On the other side of the symbiosis, the gods will safeguard their investment by protecting their worshipers and providing for them.8
The Hebrew Bible makes it clear that Yahweh has no needs that humans could in any way supply, help or augment. There is not even the mere shadow of reciprocity here in Genesis. What Yahweh did—providing the man with the freedom to eat from any tree in the garden, bar one, He did in sheer gracious largess and seeming pleasure.
You may wish to read the following commentaries-expositions:
John Calvin (Calvin skips on this verse).
Matthew Henry
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2016