The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK EIGHT PARADISE AND THE COMMAND GIVEN TO
ADAM
CHAPTER 1
Different ways of interpreting Paradise. The account in Genesis is written in the style of history, not in that of allegory.
1. And God planted a garden in Eden in the East, and there He put the man whom He formed.' | am aware that many authors have written at great length on Paradise, but their theories on the subject in general can be reduced to three. There is, first, the opinion of those who interpret the word "paradise" in an exclusively corporeal sense. Then there are those who prefer to give an exclusively spiritual meaning to the word. Finally, there are those who accept the word "paradise" in both senses, sometimes corporeally and at other times spiritually.?
Briefly, then, I admit that the third interpretation appeals to me. According to it I have now undertaken to treat of Paradise, if God will make this possible. Man was made from the slime of the earth—and that certainly means a human body—and was placed in a corporeal paradise. Adam, of course, signifies something else where St. Paul speaks of him as a type of the One who was to come. But he is understood here as a man constituted in his own proper nature, who lived a certain number of years, was the father of numerous children, and died as other men die, although he was not born of parents as other men are but made from the earth, as was proper for the first man. Consequently, Paradise, in which God placed him,* should be understood as