Reading Saving Paradise, Chapter 1

Chapter 1 explores the ancient wellsprings 
of the Biblical idea of paradise:

 

Map of Mesopotamia, c. 2100 BC 

We can trace the idea of paradise to the Sumerians, who began to live in Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers) around  4,000 BC.

Built to represent paradise?  

Ziggurats were mountains built of mud brick, 

with temples at their summits. 

The Sumerians believed that paradise was a real place. They also used the symbol of paradise to describe the joys of a perfect life on earth.

The symbol of paradise also provided an ethical guide for human behavior: in paradise, people would treat one another with compassion and justice.  

The Hebrew language borrowed the word ‘paradise’ (pardes, meaning walled garden) from Sumerian.

By the time the book of Genesis was written, the Sumerian myths had been adapted and edited through more than a millennium of history in Canaan.  Yet we can still see the traces of Sumerian stories in Genesis: for instance, the Sumerian creation myths also begin with breath, wind, spirit. 

The book of Genesis reflects the long history of Israel’s contact with Sumer and Persia.  Like the Sumerian stories, Genesis sets the stage with the beginning of creation, and then tells of how things went  wrong.  (But in the Hebrew stories in Genesis, God’s care for humanity contrasts with the cavalier attitude of the Sumerian gods.)

The Jews had long contact with the Persians, who established their kingdom in Mesopotamia around the 6th century BC.  

The Persians adorned their buildings with art.  

A lion on the wall of a Persian palace, c. 510 BC

 

Cyrus, the Persians’ greatest emperor (c. 576 BC), who allowed the Jews to return to Zion after their captivity in Babylon, was most likely a Zoroastrian.

Zoroastrian ideas probably entered Jewish thinking after the Babylonian exile.  Zoroastrians believed that paradise existed in the afterlife; at death, humans would be judged for their deeds – and only the good would enter paradise.  Zoroastrians also looked forward to a new age to come, when people would be purified by holy fire.

 Zoroastrianism also influenced later Christian thought.  (However, dividing the afterlife into heaven and hell is absent from Christianity’s visual world until the medieval period.)  

The Hebrew prophets evoked images of paradise in times of crisis (see Amos 5:8; Isaiah 40:28f, 51:13, 58:6f, 61:1f).

 

Ezekiel’s vision of God's coming would be so powerful that centuries later the early Christians would turn to them for symbols of God’s presence:

As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber.  In the middle of it was something like four living creatures.  This was their appearance: they were of human form.  Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings.... (See the first chapter of Ezekiel for his whole vision.)

Ezekiel also contrasted the blessed garden of God with the political ambitions, environmental devastations, and carnage of kings, and he promised a renewal of paradise for the nation that repents. (see Ezekiel 36:33f)  

 

A scale model of the Second Temple

After climbing Mt. Zion, 

pilgrims finally came to the Temple's outer court.  

Priests climbed still more steps

to enter the Holy of Holies at the summit.

For Ezekiel, the temple on Mt. Zion was the earthly place where God drew near to human beings, and from which waters of life cascaded down to bring life to all the earth.  When the Second Temple was completed in 516 BC, some began to identify it as the actual location of paradise.  

Many of the Psalms date from the second temple period; using images of paradise, they praise God’s creativity, justice, and healing:

They feast on the abundance of your house,

and you give them drink from the river of your delights. 

For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. (Psalm 36) 

In Galilee, the legacy of the idea of paradise would feed a movement of resistance led by Jesus of Nazareth. ‘In the long genealogy of paradise and its call to humanity to live justly and ethically, Jesus was yet another branch of this great, sheltering tree.’  (See Saving Paradise, p. 27)

Hebrew word pictures

Because of the prohibition against making pictures or statues of any living thing – lest  they be used as idols – visual depictions of paradise are not part of the Hebrews’  historical record. Instead of visual pictures, the Hebrew scriptures contain “word pictures” that describe paradise so convincingly that we still turn to them thousands of years later:

Let justice roll down like waters 

and righteousness like an overflowing stream.

Amos 5:24

For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places,

and will make her wilderness like Eden, 

her desert like the garden of the Lord.

Isaiah 51:3

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, 

because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, 

to bind up the brokenhearted…

For as the earth brings forth its shoots, 

and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise 

to spring up before all the nations.

Isaiah 61:1f, cited by Jesus in Luke 4:18