An edition of Remembering Eden (2012)

Remembering Eden

the reception history of Genesis 3: 22-24

Remembering Eden
Peter Thacher Lanfer, Peter Th...
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October 23, 2025 | History
An edition of Remembering Eden (2012)

Remembering Eden

the reception history of Genesis 3: 22-24

There are few texts as central to the mythology of Jewish and Christian literature as the Garden of Eden story of Genesis 2-3 and its attendant motifs. Yet the direct citation of this text within the biblical corpus is surprisingly rare. Even more conspicuous is the infrequent reference to creation, or to the archetypal first human pair. Though Early Jewish and Christian interpretations of Genesis 2-3 are numerous, there have been few analyses of the impact of the Eden account beyond the biblical canon. The few analyses that exist, moreover, often omit any discussion of Gen. 3: 22-24 dismissing this text as a late addition and therefore irrelevant. In Remembering Eden, Peter Thacher Lanfer argues that textual additions, interpretations, and translations are often the products of ideological and historically rooted decisions. In particular, Lanfer analyzes the expulsion narrative as a text inserted into the Garden of Eden story in response to the ascendency of scribal wisdom in the late seventh- and early sixth-centuries bce. According to him, the tensions caused by this insertion are preserved by exegetical readings of the essential dialogues of the redacted Eden story. To this end, he proposes a new method of textual analysis, which embraces the biblical text's multi-vocality, yet imposes reasonable constraints on the range of possible interpretations. Lanfer seeks to recover the significance of the Eden account, examine the prominent place later interpreters give to the motifs contained in the expulsion narrative, and evaluate the impact of the insertion of Gen 3: 22-24 on the Eden story through the examination of texts that expand, translate, and explicitly interpret the expulsion from Eden.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
256

Book Details


Table of Contents

Genesis 3: 22-24: the expulsion narrative
The tree of life
Wisdom and the expulsion from the garden
Access to Eden and the hope for immortality
Eden and the temple.

Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

Published in
New York

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
222/.110609
Library of Congress
BS1237 .L36 2012, BS1237.L36 2012

The Physical Object

Pagination
p. cm.
Number of pages
256

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL25223346M
ISBN 13
9780199926749
LCCN
2012003850
OCLC/WorldCat
777948099

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL16531765W

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