Before the first man was settled in the Garden of Eden something extraordinary happened to him.
Here’s how it’s recorded in Genesis: The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it (2:15).
God took man and put him the garden. At first, it sounds pretty straightforward. But pause for a moment on the first clause: The Lord God then took the man. Think about that for a second. What does it mean to be taken by God? Does it mean anything more than the literal act of God picking up the first man and placing him in the garden?
This being the creation account, where the entire primeval history of mankind is condensed into about 43 verses (Genesis 2:7 to 3:24) every word must by mined for clues as to what happened. And here the text does not disappoint. Taken means more than simply ‘taken.’
In Hebrew the word is laqach. In Genesis, it has three common meanings. It can refer to a man taking a woman for marriage, as in Genesis 4:19 where ‘Lamech took two wives’ and Genesis 11:29 where ‘Abram and Nahor took wives.’
Thing about that for a moment: Was God’s ‘taking of man’ comparable to the conjugal intimacy of a man taking a wife?
Over the long arc of the Bible, this comparison is undoubtedly made: In the prophets, Israel is compared to an unfaithful bride being courted back by her husband, God. It intensifies in the New Testament where the Church is depicted as both the Body and the Bride of Christ, a union made possible through the sacrifice on the cross and actualized in the eating of the Eucharist.
Communion with God
Returning to Genesis, the connection really clicks once one notices the two other common uses for the word: taking a creature for sacrifice or taking something for food. For example, Noah ‘takes’ clean beasts and fowl to offer sacrifices to God in Genesis 8:20 and the word also recurs throughout the account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. In the context of eating, the word appears in Genesis 6:21 and four times in Genesis 18, where Abraham hosts the angels.
Marriage, sacrifice, feasting—in the Catholic mind, these things are all intimately interrelated. Marriage involves the total gift of the self. In the sacrificial meal of the Eucharist, Jesus offers us Himself to us and we are called to reciprocate in giving ourselves to God. And it’s all hinted at in the very beginning.
But is this reading too much into one word? What does the immediate context of the story indicate?
Recall that in the garden, Adam and Eve were naked (Genesis 2:25). In marriage, this is a condition normally reserved for what we would call the conjugal act. In Eden, however, this was intended to be a permanent condition for Adam and Eve. Their intimacy was not a special moment among the otherwise ordinary but instead was the condition of their being. And here’s the critical aspect to this: such intimacy was shared—in ways we still do not fully comprehend—with God.
Genesis has very little to say about their communion with God. It must be inferred from the negative in Genesis 3:18, where, after the Fall has already occurred, Adam and Eve hide from God who is heard walking in the garden. Today, so far removed from this primeval moment, we worry and wonder why God hides from us. But Genesis suggests that it was man who first hid from God. This was the evil of the Fall.
Sober drunkenness
The Greek translation of this account available in the Septuagint further unlocks its meaning. The Hellenic Jews who translated Genesis 2:15 use the Greek λαμβάνω (lambano) for took. This word itself has a range of intriguing meanings and uses in the ancient world.
This word has a basic meaning of take hold of, grasp, seize, according to the Greek-English Lexicon by H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott. But when applied to a deity it had the specific meaning of seize or possess.
An example of this is in the Histories by the father of all history, Herodotus, who wrote in the 400s B.C. In his fourth book, Herodotus describes a certain Scyles, a king of Scythia who was a secret admirer of the Greeks and longed to be initiated into the rites of their gods, Dionysus. (The rites were referred to as the ‘sacred mysteries.’) Dionysus was the god of wine and when his followers became inebriated it was said they were ‘possessed’ by the god.
Scyles, according to Herodotus, was able to achieve such a state, causing the once-skeptical Scythians to become an object of ridicule among followers of the god. “You laugh at us, Scythians, because we play the Bacchant and the god possesses us,” they said. “But now this deity has possessed your own king, so that he plays the Bacchant and is maddened by the god.” (Bacchus, the Latin name for Dionysus, is used in the translation here.)
Similar language has been used by some of the Church Fathers to explain the encounter with the triune God.
Here’s how St. Cyril of Alexandria describes the apostles at Pentecost: “They are indeed drunk, but with the sober intoxication which kills sin and gives life to the heart and which is the opposite of physical drunkenness.” Although Pentecost was in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Cyril’s statement is found in his commentary on John 15:5 where Jesus has called Himself the ‘true vine’ in clear contrast with the mythic god of the Greeks.
This is a recurrent theme among the Fathers. St. Ambrose declared, “Let us drink with joy the sober intoxication of the Spirit!” “May he truly intoxicate you!” St. Augustine told candidates for baptism, referring to the Holy Spirit. And St. Gregory of Nyssa spoke of ‘sober drunkenness.’
Both the Greek and the Hebrew words for taken in Genesis 2:15 convey a sense of profound intimacy between man and God, in ways distinctive to the traditions behind each word. For the Hebrews, such intimacy partook of the self-giving ecstasy of marriage. For the Greek translators, it was akin to divine inebriation. Through the mist of these metaphors we glimpse how the first man was overtaken by a surge of God, like a divine lightning bolt through his whole being.
