Garden of Eden Tattoo Meaning

Innocence, wholeness, paradise, and the state before you knew enough to lose it.

The Garden of Eden is paradise at the beginning — the primordial garden of innocence and wholeness, the home of the first humans before the knowledge of good and evil, the state of harmony with God, nature, and self that was lost and is forever longed for. To carry the Garden of Eden is to carry innocence, wholeness, paradise, and the state before you knew enough to lose it — the garden of the first humans, the paradise from which we came and toward which we yearn, the lost wholeness at the root of every longing for home.

In Jewish tradition, the Garden of Eden is Gan Eden — the primordial garden, the home of the first humans, Adam and Eve, in the time before the knowledge of good and evil. It is the original paradise of the Hebrew scriptures: the lush garden God planted at the beginning, where the first people lived in innocence and harmony, in the presence of God and at peace with creation, before they ate of the Tree of Knowledge and were sent forth. Gan Eden is the world's first home and humanity's original state of blessed wholeness.

But Gan Eden is not only a place of the distant past in Jewish thought. In rabbinic tradition, Gan Eden also became the name and image of the dwelling place of righteous souls after death — the paradise to which the souls of the righteous go, the heavenly Eden as well as the earthly one. Thus the garden stands at both ends of the human story: the paradise from which humanity came, and the paradise to which the righteous return. Gan Eden is the beginning and, for the righteous, the hoped-for end — the garden of origins and the garden of reward, the primordial home and the eternal one. In the Jewish imagination, Eden is the enduring image of paradise itself: the blessed garden of the beginning, and the blessed dwelling of the good beyond death. The Jewish Gan Eden is the primordial garden of the first humans — and the dwelling of righteous souls after death. The Jewish Garden of Eden is Gan Eden, the primordial garden — the home of the first humans before the knowledge of good and evil, the original paradise where Adam and Eve lived in innocence and harmony in God's presence; and in rabbinic tradition also the dwelling place of righteous souls after death — the garden standing at both ends of the human story, the paradise from which humanity came and the paradise to which the righteous return, the blessed garden of the beginning and the blessed dwelling beyond death.

The word Eden derives from the Sumerian edinu, meaning plain or steppe — linguistically, the Garden of Eden is a fertile place in the middle of open wasteland. The four rivers of Eden named in Genesis (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates) have been the subject of geographical speculation for millennia; the two identifiable rivers place Eden somewhere in Mesopotamia, the site of the world's earliest cities. The Islamic tradition reads the expulsion from Eden differently than Christianity: Adam and Hawwa's descent is not primarily the story of sin but the beginning of the human khalifa (stewardship) on earth — they were sent down to build, not condemned to suffer. Silhouette anchor: the fig tree with broad leaves (the tree whose leaves Adam and Eve used after the Fall), or the two trees together — Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge — framing a garden gate.

Garden of Eden across cultures

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