East after Eden: The qedem motif in the primeval and patriarchal narrative(s) of Genesis

Qedem

Throughout the first twenty-nine chapters of Genesis, the word קדם‎ appears in various forms and constructions when someone is banished or is stepping off the main stage of the narrative. The first person explicitly said to go eastward is Cain, after he murders his brother, Abel: ‘And Cain went out from before the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden (קדמת־עדן‎)’ (Gen. 4.16). The narrative immediately turns to the genealogy of Cain’s descendants (Gen. 4.17–22), culminating with the song of Lemekh, who boasts of yet another murder (Gen. 4.23). At this point, the narrative shifts its focus to tell of the birth of a third child to Adam and Eve, Seth, and it goes on to detail the genealogy of Adam through Seth, down to Noah, in the tenth generation, and to Noah’s sons (Gen. 4.25–5.32). ³

This pattern—a pair of parallel genealogies, with the appearance of קדם‎ in relation to the first of the pair, ⁴ and the narrative continuing with a focus on the second of the pair—will recur in the book. ⁵ Before moving on to these other occurrences of this pattern, it should be noted that קדם‎ has already appeared more than once in this book prior to the banishment of Cain. ⁶ When God banished the human being from the Garden of Eden, God put the cherubs and the flaming sword מקדם לגן עדן‎—east of the Garden of Eden—to guard the way to the Tree of Life. While the narrative does not state explicitly that Adam and Eve were banished eastward, the guarding of the Garden from re-entry on the east certainly suggests that this is the case. If so, we now have two stories in which an individual who is banished is sent or goes eastward.

Perhaps the narrative does not say explicitly that the human being was sent קדמה‎ because east is the place of no return; the person who is sent or goes eastward departs from the center of the narrative’s concern. The first human being, of course, cannot do so, because the biblical narrative will continue to spell out the emergence of humanity from Adam and Eve. Instead, while Adam will be the progenitor of all of humanity, the narrative will continually prune the emerging human family, choosing one line to follow while the other line (or lines) will be relegated to the margins of the narrative—and the line that will not be followed will be marked by the word קדם‎.

קדם‎ also appears even earlier in the book: ‘The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east (מקדם‎)’ (Gen. 2.8). ⁷ The location of the garden of Eden ⁸ in the east gives rise to one of the puzzling elements of the motif of קדם‎ in the book of Genesis, and I will return to that after reviewing the other instances in which קדם‎ appears and signals a focusing of the narrative away from one individual’s line in favor of another’s.

The Descendants of Noah

The story of the Tower of Babel appears between two genealogies of Noah. The first of these, in chapter 10, is a branched genealogy: It includes all three of Noah’s sons, and it lists a number of descendants in each generation. The second genealogy, which immediately follows the Babel story, is a linear genealogy: It includes only one son of Noah, Shem, and it mentions only one descendant in each generation. Notably, the story that intervenes between the two genealogies, the story of the building of the Tower of Babel, takes place when humanity is in the east: ויהי בנסעם מקדם‎ (Gen. 11.2).

The preposition -מ has generated different translations from ancient to contemporary times; some understand it to mean that the people are traveling from the east, while others understand it to mean that the people are traveling in or to the east. ⁹ The latter understanding, I would argue, is clearly pointed to by the evidence of usage in Genesis. As we have seen, God plants the garden of Eden מקדם‎, in the east, and as we will see shortly Lot travels (ויסע‎—the same verb as in 11.2) מקדם‎ (Gen. 13.11), clearly going to the east when he departs from Abram. And going to the east fits the pattern that we have established with Cain and that we will continue to see generation after generation.

In this story, the people who travel to the east settle in the land of Shinar (Gen. 11.2). Shinar, as well as Babel, the name that the place in which they settle will be given (Gen. 11.9), is associated in the genealogy of chapter 10 with the kingdom of Nimrod, ¹⁰ a grandson of Ham (Gen. 10.10), the son of Noah who violates his father and whose own son is cursed and made subordinate to Shem and Yaphet (Gen. 9.22–27). That now all of the people go eastward to the place of a descendant of Ham suggests that the narrative will need to focus in once more, that the people in this story will not remain at the center of the narrative’s concern. Instead, the narrative will shift focus to a different lineage, as indeed it does right after the story of the Tower of Babel, as it details the line of Shem, focusing in on a single individual in each generation, generation after generation, until it arrives at Terah, the father of Abram, and begins a new story (Gen. 11.10–32). ¹¹

In fact, the word קדם‎ also appears immediately before the story of the Tower of Babel. The final part of the genealogy of Noah’s sons traces the line of Shem. When it gets to Eber, Shem’s great-grandson, it introduces his two sons: Peleg and Yoktan. It goes on to list Yoktan’s many children and says nothing about Peleg other than that his name reflects the division of the earth that took place during his lifetime. ¹² A reader’s immediate assumption might be that the narrative will continue to focus on the line of Yoktan. But sensitivity to the pattern of genealogies and narrative in Genesis would point toward the opposite conclusion: As we will see when we consider the children of Abraham and Isaac, the line that is introduced first, the son whose family branches out immediately, is the line that will disappear from the narrative. ¹³ So it is Yoktan who will not remain in the center of the narrative, and once again this is signaled by an appearance of the word קדם‎. As the genealogy of Noah draws to a conclusion, the reader is told that Yoktan’s sons settle ‘Mesha as far as Sephar, the mountain of קדם‎’ (Gen. 10.30).

After the story of the Tower of Babel, it is the other son of Eber, Peleg, through whom Shem’s lineage will be traced (Gen. 11.16–19). Yoktan’s line is part of the mass of humanity that the narrative will largely ignore after the Tower of Babel story. ¹⁴ His family settles in קדם‎, the place of people from whom the narrative shifts its focus, and by implication his family is included in those who travel to the east and build the Tower of Babel in the land of Shinar. ¹⁵ The genealogy that appears after the Tower episode will trace Shem’s line through Eber’s son Peleg and down to Terah, and then the narrative will focus on Terah’s son Abram, who will receive God’s blessing and whose name—shem—God will make great (Gen 12.2). ¹⁶

The Family of Abraham

The next person to travel to the east ¹⁷ is Abram’s orphaned nephew, Lot, whom Abram has taken with him on his journey to the land of Canaan (Gen. 12.5). The shepherds of Abram and Lot quarrel because ‘the land could not bear them dwelling together, for their possessions were great and they could not dwell together’ (Gen. 13.6–7). Abram suggests to Lot that they separate from each other, offering Lot to choose to travel either to the left or right—that is, northward or southward—and he, Abram, would go the opposite way (Gen. 13.9). Lot makes neither of these choices. Instead, he sees the well-watered Jordan plain, ‘like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt’ (Gen. 13.10). He chooses this location and travels to the east—מקדם‎.

The narrative makes it clear that this choice is problematic. In between describing the area as well-watered and comparing it to the Lord’s garden, the verse notes that this was ‘before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah’ (Gen. 13.10). And after describing Lot’s travels eastward and specifying that he ‘pitched his tents as far as Sodom’, the narrator notes: ‘And the people of Sodom were very evil and sinful against the Lord’ (Gen. 13.12–13).

Here once again we have an individual who travels to the east and, in so doing, removes himself from the center of the narrative’s concern. It is shortly after this that Abram expresses the desire for a child who can be his heir (Gen. 15.2–3). ¹⁸ Lot, after all, has separated from Abram, and he will become the progenitor of the nations of Ammon and Moab, nations that are on the margins of the biblical narrative. Again, then, the departure to קדם‎ signals a refocusing of the narrative on a different line—in this case a line through which the blessing of Abram can be fulfilled.

This episode also highlights one part of the conundrum to which I referred earlier. Comparing the place to which Lot travels to ‘the garden of the Lord’ clearly evokes the garden of Eden, ¹⁹ as does the description of the plain as ‘well-watered’ (see Gen. 2.6, 10). ²⁰ And, as noted earlier, the garden of Eden itself is said to be in the east. One of the puzzling features of the קדם‎ motif which will be addressed below is this: Why is it that a place that is associated with Eden is the place to which those who are outside of the focus of the biblical narrative go? ²¹ And why is it that the clearest association of going eastward with Eden itself is juxtaposed with the notice that those who live in that place are exceedingly evil?

Lot is not the only member of Abram’s family to travel eastward. Right after Isaac marries Rebecca (Gen. 24.67), and before the narrative turns to the תולדות‎ of Isaac (Gen. 25.19), the narrative tells of Abraham taking a wife named Ketura. The children and some of the grandchildren of Abraham through Ketura are listed, and then the reader is told that Abraham gave all of his possessions to Isaac but gave gifts to the children of his concubines. ‘And he sent them away from his son Isaac while he was still living, eastward, to the land of the east’—קדמה אל־ארץ קדם‎ (Gen. 25.2–6).

Immediately afterward, the narrative tells of Abraham’s death and of his burial by his sons Isaac and Ishmael and states that God blessed Isaac after Abraham’s death. This is followed by the תולדות‎ of Ishmael. Twelve sons are listed, suggesting that Ishmael becomes a nation right away, unlike Isaac, who will struggle to have a child and whose children will not be able to form a single nation, and like Jacob, who will become the father of the nation of Israel, though Jacob’s twelve sons will struggle throughout the rest of the narrative of Genesis to live together and become a nation. ²² Ishmael, unlike Lot and the children of the concubines, does not go eastward; indeed, that is not possible, as he and his descendants settle near Egypt, where his mother and wife are from (Gen. 21.21; 25.12, 18). Nevertheless, the narrative associates Ishmael with קדם‎ in a different way—the twelfth of Ishmael’s sons is named קדמה‎.

It turns out, then, that each of Abraham’s potential heirs—Lot, the sons of the concubines, and Ishmael—is associated with קדם‎, and each of them moves to the margins of the narrative, leaving Isaac alone at the center of the narrative’s focus. Again and again, קדם‎ signals that the person in question departs from the biblical stage, never to return to the center of concern. The line through which the blessing of Shem and Abraham will be transmitted will be through the person who is not associated with קדם‎.

Jacob

It is in the next generation that the final departure eastward occurs within the book of Genesis. Once again, there is a story of conflict between brothers, ²³ as Jacob has taken Esau’s blessing through deceit, and Esau wants to kill Jacob (Gen. 27.41). Jacob needs to leave home, and he does so both on his mother’s urging—in order to protect himself from his brother’s wrath—and on his father’s command—in order to take a wife from his mother’s kin and ultimately come into the blessing of Abraham (Gen. 27.42–28.5). Jacob’s journey, then, is paradoxical: It is at one and the same time banishment from his home and homeland, for he has violated his brother, and a quest to find a wife through whom he can achieve the blessing of land and nationhood. ²⁴ The question that emerges at this point in the narrative is whether Jacob will be able to return. Is he going to leave the narrative stage forever, like all brothers in the book, beginning with Cain, who have been exiled from the narrative stage? Or will he find a way to come back, achieving the goal of his quest and returning to his homeland and his family and living out the blessing of Abraham?

The story of Jacob’s dream answers this question for the reader, as God appears to Jacob and assures him that he will return to the land (Gen. 28.15). But this should in no way diminish our appreciation of the complex nature of Jacob’s journey and the challenges that he will have to meet in order finally to return. And, in case we may have missed this point, the narrative makes sure that we take note. Astonishingly, when Jacob resumes his journey the morning after his dream, he ‘goes to the land of the sons of קדם‎’ (29.1).

Jacob, it will turn out, is the first and only individual in Genesis who goes to קדם‎ and manages to return. Now, perhaps the narrative has chosen to refer to the place to which he travels as ‘the land of the sons of קדם‎’, rather than as simply קדמה‎ or ארץ קדם‎, in order to moderate the suggestion that Jacob has gone to the land of no return. Nevertheless, the narrative has chosen to use the word קדם‎ in relation to Jacob’s destination. There is something about Jacob that requires him to go to a place associated with קדם‎ but that also allows him to return.

Equally surprising is the fact that, when the next and final pair of תולדות‎ are introduced later in the narrative, the תולדות‎ of Esau and of Jacob, the brother who does indeed leave the land never to return is not said to go to קדם‎. This pair of תולדות‎ is similar to the pairs of תולדות‎ that appear earlier in Genesis: the תולדות‎ of the sons of Noah and of Shem, and the תולדות‎ of Ishmael and Isaac. In each of these, the first genealogy of the pair ends with a reference to קדם‎, as the first line moves to the margins of the biblical narrative and the second takes center stage. In chapter 36, the תולדות‎ of Esau (Gen. 36.1) are described in great detail, and chapter 37 introduces the story of Jacob’s sons with the words ‘these are the תולדות‎ of Jacob’ (Gen. 37.2). ²⁵ And yet nowhere in the genealogy of Esau does the word קדם or קדמה‎ appear.

But the narrative seems to go out of its way to bolster the reader’s expectation that a form of קדם‎ will appear. Although it has already been made clear that Esau has settled in Se’ir (Gen. 32.4; 16), the spelling out of Esau’s תולדות‎ in chapter 36 is interrupted by a notice that Esau settled in Se’ir. The two verses that precede this notice assimilate Esau’s departure to Se’ir to the story of Lot’s separation from Abram and his settling in the plain of Jordan, in the east. Like in that earlier story, the narrative explains here that ‘their possessions were too great for them to dwell together, and the land of their sojourning was not able to bear them because of their livestock’ (Gen. 36.7; cf. Gen. 13.6–7). Lot, in that earlier story, travels to the east—מקדם‎ (Gen. 13.11)—and we would expect Esau to do the same, like all brothers who leave and move to the narrative’s margins.

What the narrative tells us, though, is that Esau ‘went to ארץ’ (Gen. 36.6). But ‘וילך אל ארץ‎’ is an impossible construction, and the verse has been the subject of suggested emendations and explanations since ancient times. ²⁶ It seems to me, though, that the narrative is crafted in such a way as to make us anticipate that Esau will go east, and the odd formulation ‘he went to (the) land (of)’ is designed to make us expect the word קדם‎: ‘he went to the land of the east’ – וילך אל ארץ קדם‎ (cf. Gen. 25.6). But, in fact, while we anticipate the word קדם‎, that word is omitted, and the verse is formulated in a way that not only avoids the word קדם‎ but also calls attention to its absence. That is, by using a construction that is impossible—the word ארץ‎ requiring something to follow that specifies which land—the verse calls to mind the anticipated word קדם‎ and prompts us to notice that the word, in fact, is not there. ²⁷

The story of Jacob and Esau, then, poses the second part of the conundrum to which I referred at the beginning of this article. Jacob, the brother who will remain at the center of the narrative’s concern, who inherits the blessing of Abraham and who becomes the father of the nation, goes to the land of the sons of קדם‎—and returns to the land of Canaan. Esau, the son who moves to the margins of the narrative, who does not inherit the blessing of Abraham, and who leaves the land of Canaan never to return, does not go to קדם‎—and the narrative calls attention to that fact by creating every expectation that that is exactly what he will do.

In fact, no one else in Genesis will ever go eastward or be associated with the word קדם‎. It is as if, once Jacob goes to קדם‎ and returns, קדם‎ is no longer the place of no return, the place of banished brothers. ²⁸

The Qedem Conundrum

The motif of קדם‎ in Genesis, then, underscores a core structural and thematic element of the primeval and patriarchal narratives. At the same time, the motif itself, as well as details of its final occurrence and surprising absence, poses a set of challenging puzzles for the biblical interpreter. Let me sum up the findings reviewed above and set out the elements of the conundrum that they pose.

References to קדם‎ appear in Genesis to signal banishment or self-imposed exile from the main stage of the biblical narrative. When appearing in the context of paired lineages, the word appears in relation to the first of the pair, the lineage that will be spelled out only to disappear from the center of the narrative’s concern. Thus, Cain’s line is replaced by Seth’s; the narrative shifts its focus from the lineage of all of the sons of Noah to the line of Shem and traces the lineage of Shem’s great grandson Eber through Peleg down to Terah and Abram; and Lot as well as Abraham’s sons through his concubines and his son Ishmael become nations peripheral to the biblical narrative, in which the line of Isaac takes center stage. Cain, Peleg’s brother Yoktan, the mass of humanity in the story of the Tower of Babel, Lot, the sons of Abraham’s concubines, and Ishmael—all of the people through whom the narrative will not trace the future of humanity or the blessing of Shem and Abraham—are associated with קדם‎.

The first part of the conundrum is generated by the fact that קדם‎ is the place of the Garden of Eden. Not only that, but the story of Lot’s separation from Abram evokes this association, while also noting the evil and sinfulness of the people who dwell in the place to which Lot is traveling when he goes eastward. Why is the direction or location associated with Eden linked to sinfulness and to exile from the focus of the narrative’s concern?

The second part of the conundrum emerges in the final generation in which there is a split between the line that will live out the blessing and inherit the land and the line that will become a successful nation but that will leave the land and move to the margins of the narrative. Jacob, the brother who is given the blessing of Abraham and whose family will remain at the center of the narrative, departs to ‘the land of the sons of קדם‎’, yet he returns to the land. And, when the extensive תולדות‎ of Esau are spelled out, contrasting with the תולדות‎ of Jacob and the struggle of the patriarch to build a family who can become the nation of Israel, the word קדם‎ does not appear. Moreover, in a passage that echoes the departure of Lot to קדם‎, the narrative describes Esau’s departure using a construction that seems designed to evoke קדם‎ while omitting the very word that the reader has been primed to anticipate.

First Solution: Eden is Misappropriated and Reclaimed

In my earlier work on Genesis (see n. 2 above), I offered a possible solution to this conundrum, one that accounts for each of its elements, though perhaps for some more effectively than for others. I suggested that the biblical narrative may be suggesting that Eden—representing the promise of creation—has been misappropriated and that it is the task of Jacob to redeem it.

Such an idea, I noted, is expressed in a midrash that appears in a number of rabbinic texts, with some variation, concerning Esau’s special garments. The midrash picks up on specific words in the Jacob/Esau narrative that suggest a link with the primeval narrative in the early chapters of Genesis. Based on these verbal echoes, the midrash crafts a story that connects Esau with primeval figures and, in doing so, calls attention to key themes in the Genesis narrative. I will briefly recount the story that the midrash tells and point out the verbal links that the midrash is working with. I will then present the broader issue within the biblical narrative which I believe that the midrash is highlighting through the story that it tells.

According to this midrashic tradition, the special garments that Esau owns, in which Rebecca dresses Jacob so that he will be able to get the blessing that Isaac intends for Esau (Gen. 27.15), once belonged to Nimrod. ²⁹ Originally, though, the garments belonged to Adam; they were the garments that God made for Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their sin, when they realized that they were naked. ³⁰ Pirqe DeRabbi Eliezer explains that Noah had these garments in the ark; Ham took them with him when the family left the ark, and he bequeathed them to Nimrod. Some other midrashic texts are silent as to how the garments of Adam came into the hands of Nimrod. But, in either case, the implication is clear: The garments that were God’s gift to humanity, the one item that the first human beings were able to bring with them from Eden, have fallen into the hands of Ham. And Esau has come into possession of these garments.

These midrashim are working with verbal links between the Jacob/Esau story and the primeval narrative. The garments in which Rebecca dresses Jacob are described as חמדות‎ (Gen. 27.15). This word, from a root meaning to desire or covet, recalls the way in which Eve perceived the forbidden tree after the snake enticed her to eat of its fruit: נחמד‎ (Gen. 3.6). The adjective חמדות‎, then, suggests a link between Esau’s garments and Eden. It additionally suggests to the midrash that, like the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the garments were coveted and were taken illegitimately—according to several midrashic texts, Esau coveted the garments that he saw on Nimrod and killed Nimrod in order to take the garments for himself. ³¹

Another link that the midrash picks up on is the description of both Esau and Nimrod as hunters (Gen. 10.9; 25.27). Esau, while a son of Isaac and from the blessed line of Shem through Abraham, shares a key characteristic with the famous scion of Ham, and the midrash connects these two figures by imagining Esau as a hunter of men who slips into the garments of the primeval hunter.

The midrash builds on these verbal links to craft a story about Esau, Nimrod, and the garments of Adam, but it is important to see that the story told by the midrash embeds a core insight about the narrative of the patriarchal family in general and of the conflict between Jacob and Esau in particular. ³² Abraham, the progenitor of the patriarchal family, is the pivot point between the primeval and patriarchal narratives. He steps onto the stage at the end of the genealogy of Noah through Shem, as the narrative of the entire human family that was reconstructed after the Flood is narrowed, in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel, to a single family, the line of Shem through Eber and Peleg. This lineage culminates in Terah and in Abram, whom God promises to bless and to make a source of blessing to ‘all of the families of the earth’ (Gen. 12.2–3). ³³

Abraham’s story and the story of his descendants will intersect with key antagonists from the family of Ham: Canaan and Mizraim (Gen. 10.6). ³⁴ And Abraham’s family itself will continue to be narrowed, in the generation of his sons and of his grandsons, until it will be Jacob’s task to build the foundation of the nation of Israel from all of his twelve sons. The question of who will succeed Isaac, then, and of who will receive Isaac’s blessing ³⁵ is a question about the future of the family and nation—but it is also a question of significance for creation itself. ³⁶ It will be the task of Isaac’s successor to carry forth God’s special blessing to Abraham and to bring blessing to the entire world. ³⁷

The midrashic story about Esau’s garment, crafted by God for Adam as he was about to be banished from Eden, misappropriated by the line of Ham, worn by Nimrod and coveted by Esau, who killed the ancient hunter and took the garment for himself, and now used by Rebecca to dress her son Jacob so that he can get Isaac’s blessing—this story reminds us, as we read about the intrigue between Jacob and Esau, that at stake in the patriarchal narrative and in this fraught moment is something about creation itself. Who will be able to carry forth the blessing that God originally gave to all of humanity and now has been concentrated into the line of Shem through Abraham and his descendants? ³⁸

As we have seen, the biblical text itself links our story to the primeval narrative. The Edenic language of ח-מ-ד‎, used to describe Esau’s garments, and the notice that Esau is a hunter, recalling Nimrod, the primeval hunter from the line of Ham, help the reader notice that this contest between brothers is a critical moment in an ongoing struggle to realize God’s blessing in the world. My suggestion is that the motif of קדם‎, too, is a constant reminder, generation after generation, that something about the world itself—something about creation—is at stake in the ongoing primeval and patriarchal narratives. And indeed, it is a reminder that the patriarchal narrative is a continuation of the primeval narrative—or rather, it is the next stage in unfolding the primeval narrative’s struggle for a humanity that can carry forth God’s blessing.

But why is it, then, that it is the individuals not chosen who go קדמה‎, to the place that evokes Eden? My suggestion was that Eden itself—like the garments of Adam and Eve in the midrash—has been misappropriated and needs to be reclaimed (see n.2 above). Or, to put it differently, that the promise of creation has fallen into the hands of those who disobey God’s will, and that the pruning of the mass of humanity and then of the patriarchal family is an attempt to find the individuals who can realize God’s blessing for the world. קדם‎, then, is the place occupied by the lines of the human and patriarchal families that are not heirs to the blessing. But ultimately it is the task of the chosen line to re-appropriate קדם‎—to reclaim and redeem creation. And, since Jacob is the final member of the patriarchal family who will be chosen to the exclusion of his brother—since all of Jacob’s sons will become the progenitors of the nation of Israel—it is Jacob to whom this task falls.

Jacob, then, must himself go to קדם‎, and Jacob must also figure out how to return from קדם‎ and realize the blessing of Abraham that Isaac transmits to him. Jacob, according to this understanding, must reclaim קדם‎ as a place of blessing, must bring Abraham’s blessing into the world—and, once קדם‎ is reclaimed, it will no longer be the destination of the brother who moves to the margins of the narrative.

Second Solution: Eden as a Pre-Moral World

This first solution has significant explanatory power. It explains why Jacob has to go eastward, and it explains why no one in Genesis after Jacob goes eastward. What it does less well, perhaps, is explain why east—קדם‎, the place of Eden—is the place to which banished brothers go and the place that is associated, in the story of Lot, with Egypt and with sinfulness.

If we look at the typological narrative of the book of Genesis, along the lines that I have suggested in the previous section, then this association of Eden with the non-blessed line does make sense. In this typological narrative, creation is pulled between the line of Ham, represented by Nimrod, and the line of Shem, represented by Abraham and his chosen descendants. The contest between Jacob and Esau enacts this ancient contest, ³⁹ and so what is at stake in the story of Jacob and Esau is nothing less than whether the world can be reclaimed by the forces of blessing.

Midrashim about Esau’s garment being Nimrod’s garment, I suggested, point toward this typological reading. This garment was illicitly co-opted by the line of Ham from the first human being, who received it from God while still in Eden. And so Jacob, as he is about to receive his father’s blessing, slips into these garments and then goes eastward to reclaim the blessing for the chosen line of Shem. And these midrashim, as I pointed out, take their cues from words in the biblical narrative that link Esau to Nimrod and Esau’s garments to the primal sin of desiring and taking that which is off-limits.

Nevertheless, on the non-typological narrative level, it is harder to see why קדם‎ should have negative connotations. Why is the direction associated with Eden the place of banished brothers and those who step off the main stage of the biblical narrative? Why is east, with its Edenic connotation, associated with people who are ‘very evil and sinful against the Lord’?

In recently published work, I suggested that Eden is a pre-moral universe, and thus a place that represents an amoral—or immoral—choice in a post-Edenic world. ⁴⁰ This suggestion builds on an insight by Cassuto, who offered a compelling explanation of Gen. 2.5, the verse that introduces the story of the Garden of Eden:

And no shrub of the field was yet on the earth

and no grass of the field had yet grown,

because the Lord God had not brought rain on the earth

and there was no human being to work the land.

This verse introduces the account of creation in the second chapter of Genesis by describing things that are not yet in existence. The first half of the verse mentions kinds of vegetation that do not yet exist, and the second half offers two reasons for the lack of this vegetation, in the form of two other things that are not yet to be found: rain and a human being. Since just two verses later (Gen. 2.7), the narrative tells of God’s forming of the human being and the following verses describe God’s planting of the garden and its trees (Gen. 2.8–9), it is tempting to read verse 5 as anticipating those things that are about to come into being in the Garden of Eden.

A challenge arises, though, when accounting for the mention of rain in verse 5. On the one hand, the ensuing narrative does talk about a source of water, and this appears exactly where one would expect it, in the verse preceding the creation of the human being. The order of these verses, then, maps perfectly onto the clauses in verse 5: a water source (v. 6), a human being (v. 7), and then the vegetation which, according to verse 5, depends on these two things (vv. 8–9).

But, on the other hand, the water source mentioned in verse 6 is not rain, as verse 5 causes the reader to anticipate; it is an אד‎. What exactly this word refers to is not fully clear, ⁴¹ but the narrative pointedly does not use מ-ט-ר‎ to describe it (as in v. 5), and it is said to come up from the earth, not down as one would expect if it were rain. In addition, while verses 7, 8, and 9 each begin with a verb with God as the subject—God formed, God planted, God caused to grow—verse 5 described the water source as something that was continually rising from the earth, not something that God created at that point in time. Contrary to the expectation set up by verse 5, then, it seems that verse 6 is not telling us about the introduction of rain; rather, it seems to say that in Eden something other than rain waters the land. ואד‎, then, would best be rendered ‘But an אד‎’—‘the Lord God had not yet brought rain on the earth’ (v. 5), ‘but an אד‎ would go up from the earth and water all the surface of the land’ (v. 6). But then why does verse 5 mention rain at all?

Cassuto suggests that verse 5 should not be read as describing the world as it is about to take shape in Eden. Rather, the verse is anticipating the post-Edenic world. In that world, human beings will be sustained by means of agriculture (Gen. 3.18)—the very ‘grass of the field’ that is mentioned in verse 5 and that, as suggested there, will be cultivated by a human being who works the land. ⁴² In that world, too, human being will be vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall, mentioned in verse 5. In Eden, in contrast, the earth was watered by an ever-present stream (2.10), and the human being needed simply to pick the fruits of the abundant trees that God has planted.

Rain, Cassuto points out, has no place in Eden, because rain in the Bible is a response to human choice. ⁴³ Rain comes into the world as an instrument of God’s judgment only after the human being eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becomes a moral agent. ⁴⁴

Building on Cassuto’s insight, I suggested that Eden is a pre-moral world, a world in which the human being does not yet have the capacity of moral discernment, the ability to choose between good and evil. The post-Edenic world, in contrast, is a world of moral choice, and a world in which God sends or withholds rain as a vehicle of judgment in response to human behavior. ⁴⁵

Notably, a passage in Deuteronomy contrasts these two kinds of existence by offering a contrast between the promised land and the land of Egypt:

For the land to which you are coming to take possession of it –

it is not like the land of Egypt which you left,

where you sow your seed and water it with your foot like a vegetable garden.

But the land into which you are crossing over to take possession of it—

it is a land of mountains and valleys;

it drinks water from the rain of the heavens.

It is a land that the Lord your God seeks out;

always the eyes of the Lord your God are upon it

from the beginning of the year until the end of the year. (Deut. 11.10–12)

The comparison of Egypt to a garden and the characterization of these as places that have readily-available water recall the description of the Jordan plain, as Lot chooses that land and separates from Abram, traveling to קדם‎: The area in which Sodom is located is like the land of Egypt, like the garden of the Lord, and well-watered (Gen. 13.10).

The promised land, in contrast, is dependent on rain. Deuteronomy goes on to make the implications of this fact explicit: If the people obey God’s commands, God will grant rain; if they disobey, God will shut up the heavens and rain will be withheld (Deut. 11.13–17). Rain, then, is a response to the choices that people make, and the promised land, being dependent on rain, is a place in which people are held accountable for their actions.

Egypt, though, with its readily-available water, is not ‘a land that the Lord seeks out’, as the promised land is (Deut. 11.12); it will have water whether or not the people are good and make good choices. Sodom, explicitly compared to Egypt and, like Egypt, a well-watered, garden-like place, is not dependent for its sustenance on God; the people are evil and sinful, and Sodom is well-watered nonetheless. ⁴⁶

Egypt and Sodom, then, are Eden-like; like Eden, they are well-watered (Gen. 2.6, 10) ⁴⁷ and not dependent on rain. As Cassuto suggests, rain had no place in Eden, because rain or the withholding of rain is the response to human obedience or sin. Human beings become moral agents at the moment they are condemned to leave Eden—having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, they are now responsible to choose between good and evil.

Once human beings have left Eden, once they have been propelled into a condition of knowledge and of choice, to choose to go back to Eden means choosing a pre-moral existence—an existence in which one is not responsible for one’s actions. Egypt and Sodom are Eden-like because in these places one can be ‘very sinful and evil’ and the land will still be well-watered. While Eden at the beginning of the biblical narrative is a pre-moral place, once human beings have become capable of moral choices and responsibility for those choices, to return to a pre-moral existence is an immoral choice. ⁴⁸ Going to קדם‎, according to this understanding, means rejecting responsibility to live as a moral agent, capable of making choices and subject to the consequences of those choices. ⁴⁹

This understanding of Eden accounts for the gap in the first solution to the conundrum of קדם‎. According to this understanding, קדם‎ is the place of banished brothers, of those through whom the narrative of Genesis will not trace the blessing, because it is a place, like Egypt and Sodom, ⁵⁰ that is not a place of moral discernment, moral choice, and moral accountability.

Integrating the Two Solutions

Each of the proposed solutions, then, accounts more effectively for different elements of the קדם‎ conundrum. The first solution explains why Jacob goes eastward and comes back and why no one after Jacob goes eastward. The second solution explains why קדם‎, associated with Eden, should be the place of the line that does not carry the blessing forward. In what follows, I will make a preliminary attempt to integrate the two solutions and offer a suggestion as to what it might mean for Jacob to reclaim and transform Eden. It goes without saying that each of the solutions that I have proposed and the integration of the two solutions that I will go on to sketch are interpretive options among others that readers of the biblical text might find compelling.

If the pattern of genealogies marked by the word קדם‎ in the first half of Genesis tells a story of continued narrowing of the line through which the promise of creation can be realized, Jacob’s family ends this process. All of Jacob’s sons will be included in the family that will become the nation. While Jacob receives from his father the blessing of Abraham (Gen. 28.4), and God affirms elements of this blessing when Jacob sets out from his homeland (Gen. 28.13–14), Jacob’s task is different from Abraham’s in a critical way.

Like Abraham (Gen. 12.3), Jacob is told that he will be the source of blessing for ‘all the families of the earth’ (Gen. 28.14). This notice to Abraham, when God originally called him, echoed the list of the ‘families’ of Ham, Yafet, and Shem in chapter 10. That genealogy, I pointed out above, is replaced after the Tower of Babel story by the genealogy of Shem in chapter 11. This latter genealogy leads, through a single individual in each generation, to Terah, and it is followed by God’s call to Terah’s son Abram. This chosen person, then, will be the individual who holds the blessing and through whom the promise of blessing can reach all of humanity.

But Abraham’s family will also be continually pruned, as will the family of his son, Isaac. It is only in Jacob’s family that all of the children will be included in the blessing—thus, perhaps, God’s promise that blessing will come through Jacob to all of the families of the earth includes an element that does not appear in the identical promise to Abraham. God tells Jacob ‘through you all of the families of the earth will be blessed and through your descendants’ (Gen. 28.14). Jacob’s task, then, is to create a family in which every member is included in the promise of blessing and through which blessing can come to the whole world.

Additionally, Jacob takes upon himself to anchor God’s presence. Stunned by the recognition of God’s presence after he dreams of the ladder and angels and God speaks to him in his sleep, Jacob asserts that the place is ‘the house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’ (Gen. 28.16–17). Jacob calls the place Bethel (בית־אל‎, ‘house of God’: Gen. 28.19), and vows, should God bring him back home, that the stone on which he has slept and which he has set up as a pillar and anointed will be ‘the house of God’ (Gen. 28.18, 22). And indeed, on Jacob’s way back to the land, many years later, God appears to Jacob, reiterating that Jacob will be granted the promise to Abraham, and Jacob again sets up and anoints a stone pillar and calls the place Bethel. It is shortly after this that the narrative asserts that Jacob has twelve sons (Gen. 35.22)—that is, that Jacob has become a nation, and that all of his sons are included in that nation. ⁵¹

If the story of the first half of Genesis, then, is a story of narrowing, the story of Jacob begins a story of expansion. Jacob will build the beginnings of a nation, and he will lay the foundation for a house of God.

In fact, the story of Jacob’s dream in Bethel is linked in multiple ways with the Tower of Babel story. ⁵² These paired narratives mark opposite moments in the larger narrative of Genesis: The Tower of Babel story, as discussed, marks the need for a narrowing of the line that will fulfill the promise of creation, while the Jacob story marks the moment at which that narrowing will cease and in which an entire nation will be created that will anchor God’s presence in this world. The first of these stories takes place when all of the people of the world travel to (or in) קדם‎; the second takes place when Jacob is on his way to ‘the land of the sons of קדם‎’, marking the last time that anyone in Genesis will go eastward.

These insights enable an integration of the two solutions to the קדם‎ conundrum. Jacob’s task is to ensure that there is no further narrowing of the family and to build a nation that can bring God’s blessing to a world that has failed to achieve that blessing. As the first solution suggests, he is to reverse the appropriation of creation/Eden by the non-blessed segments of humanity, struggling to create a people that can live out God’s blessing and bring blessing to the entire world. The narrowing described throughout the first half of Genesis will cease, as Jacob’s mission will be to expand God’s blessing to his entire family and, through this family/nation, to ‘all the families of the earth’. No one else will leave to go to קדם‎.

But that Esau himself does leave the family but does not go to קדם‎ suggests, I proposed, that something has happened to קדם‎ itself, that—through Jacob’s leaving to the land of the sons of קדם‎ and returning from there—קדם‎ itself has been reclaimed and transformed and will no longer be the place of those who leave the chosen line. The second solution offers a way to think about this reclamation and transformation. The Garden of Eden is a place where God can be present among human beings (Gen. 3.8), but it is also a place where human beings can reside only before they have eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Working with Cassuto’s insight about the Garden not being dependent on rain, I suggested that Eden is a pre-moral universe which, once humanity has achieved the conditions of moral autonomy and responsibility, is no longer a moral choice. To go back to Eden—to go קדמה‎—is to choose to abdicate responsibility for one’s actions.

Jacob, though, as he leaves home, finds himself in God’s presence and commits to building God’s house. In a sense, his task will be to create a post-Edenic Eden, a place where human beings can live in the presence of God and also be fully responsible. The destination of the nation that Jacob will found will be a place that is Eden-like but that, as emphasized in Deuteronomy’s contrast between Egypt and the promised land, is subject to rain—that is, a place where human beings will live in God’s presence and will be held accountable for their actions.

A passage in Leviticus describes just such a state of being in the promised land:

If you follow my laws and observe my commandments and do them,

I will grant your rains in their season,

and the earth shall yield its produce,

and the trees of the field shall give their fruit …

And I will turn toward you,

and I will make you fruitful (והפריתי‎) and I will multiply (והרביתי‎) you …

And I will establish my abode in your midst …

And I will walk about (והתהלכתי‎) in your midst … (Lev. 26.3–12)

The passage describes an existence that is Eden-like: it echoes the creation blessing ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1.28); it portrays fruit-giving trees, as in the Garden; and it promises that God will abide and walk in the people’s midst, echoing God’s walking about (מתהלך‎) in the midst of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3.8). ⁵³ But all of this is dependent on following God’s laws, and observing God’s laws will result in God’s gift of rain. That is, this is a moral Eden, an Eden-like existence in which, unlike the original Eden, people are responsible for their choices—an Eden with rain. ⁵⁴

Jacob’s task, in short, is both to reclaim Eden and to transform Eden—to build a family/nation that can expand God’s blessing to the whole world, and to establish a dwelling place for God on this earth, a post-Edenic Eden in which human beings can live in God’s presence and can achieve blessing through right choice and right action. ⁵⁵

Conclusion

The motif of going eastward in Genesis highlights a key theme of the book, the repeated focusing in of the narrative on the line that can bring God’s blessing to the world. Variations of the word קדם‎ appear so regularly in the narratives and genealogies of Genesis that the attuned reader can anticipate where it will appear, as it marks the person and lineage that moves to the margins of the narrative’s concern.

All this changes in the story of Jacob and Esau, as Jacob goes to ‘the land of the sons of קדם‎’. On the one hand, this fits the established pattern, since Jacob is the person who has violated his brother and must leave home in the aftermath of that deed. On the other hand, Jacob is the brother who has received the blessing of Abraham, and his departure from home is also in the service of finding a wife with whom he can build a family and, ultimately, a nation in fulfillment of that blessing. And, indeed, Jacob does come back home, the first person in the book who goes eastward and returns.

The narrative and genealogy of Esau, too, confounds our expectations, as Esau does leave the land and move to the margins of the narrative, yet the word קדם‎ does not appear in relation to Esau. In fact, the reason for Esau’s departure is described in words that unmistakably evoke the departure of Lot to קדם‎, and his destination is formulated in a way that prompts the attentive reader to anticipate the word קדם‎ and to note its absence.

Noticing the pattern of the קדם‎ motif raises a number of puzzling questions: Why is it that Jacob goes eastward and returns and that Esau, markedly, is not associated with קדם‎? And why is it that no one in Genesis goes eastward after Jacob’s return? In addition, the word קדם‎ is associated with Eden, yet it becomes the place to which the people who will not be included in the covenantal family/nation depart. In particular, Sodom, the place to which Lot moves when he travels to קדם‎, is described as a place of evil and sinful people. Why is it that the place of those who are not heirs to the blessing is a place that evokes Eden?

I have proposed two ways of thinking about these questions. The first suggests that Eden—that is, the promise of creation—has fallen into the hands of those who cannot carry forth God’s blessing, and that it is the task of Jacob to reclaim the promise of creation and bring God’s blessing into the world. The second suggests that Eden, the place of human beings before they came into a condition of knowing, is a pre-moral universe, and that to choose to go back to Eden, once having attained the capacity for moral discernment and responsibility, is an immoral choice. The two suggestions complement each other, as the first accounts for the anomalies associated with the Jacob and Esau narrative and the second accounts for the association of קדם‎ with the non-chosen line.

In the final section, I offered a preliminary attempt to integrate the two solutions, suggesting that Jacob’s task is both to reclaim and transform Eden. Jacob lays the foundation of the nation whose mission it is to bring blessing to the world. And that nation is called to create a society that is Eden-like, in that it is a place of blessing in which God is present, but that is post-Edenic, in that in it people must take responsibility for the moral burden of knowledge and choice.