Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden? Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Garden of Eden

Abstract

The interpretation of Adam and Eve's sexual life was a matter of some concern for early Jewish and Christian exegetes. As Louis Ginzberg observed, several Jewish pseudepigraphical works as well as the writings of many of the early Church Fathers “presuppose that not only the birth of the children of Adam and Eve took place after the explusion from paradise (Gen 4:1ff), but that the first ‘human pair’ lived in paradise without sexual intercourse.” The reasons for such an exegesis are not difficult to discern. The Garden of Eden was not simply a story about the primeval world; it could also function as a metaphor for the world-to-come. Hence the Garden was a paradigm for the ideal world of the eschaton, a world one should attempt to actualize or bring into existence now. Because Christians believed that the next world was devoid of marriage (Luke 20:27–40), it followed that the Garden was as well. In addition to this reason, Christians were also exhorted to abstain from marriage as a concession to the apocalyptic ferment of the present world (1 Corinthians 7).