MaryAnn:

I'm looking forward to what you suggest, Rabbit (so far, all I've got is the Song of Songs), but here's another question I have -- about reading the Bible literally --

When I was doing some work with a Bible concordance, I noticed that in Genesis God creates the seasons. But later when he creates Adam and Eve, he lets them run around naked, eating off the fat of the land. Paradise sounds like an eternal summer. But suppose they A + E hadn't eaten that pesky apple. Would winter eventually have come to Paradise?

Also the birth - death - regeneration cycle of the seasons that God created seems to be antithetical to the concept of paradise -- to me, at least. What say you?

MA

Hi MaryAnn,

You must be referring in the first place to Genesis 1:14ff:

(Genesis 1:14 ESV) And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,
(Genesis 1:15 ESV) and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so.
(Genesis 1:16 ESV) And God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars.
(Genesis 1:17 ESV) And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,
(Genesis 1:18 ESV) to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
(Genesis 1:19 ESV) And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

Genesis 1:14 makes use of wholly astronomical references. "Seasons" is misleading; the Hebrew is mo`adim, "appointed times". These are set by the relationship to the moon to the sun (that is, to the solar seasons). The great Festivals are called mo`adim ("feasts") and are to be proclaimed in their mo`adim ("seasons") -- the word being taken as the lunisolar times in which they are observed and also as the observances themselves.

(Psalms 104:19 ESV) He made the moon to mark the seasons [for appointed times -- literal Hebrew]; the sun knows its time for setting.

(Leviticus 23:2 ESV) "Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, These are the appointed feasts of the LORD that you shall proclaim as holy convocations; they are my appointed feasts.

(Leviticus 23:4 ESV) "These are the appointed feasts of the LORD, the holy convocations, which you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them.

Climactic conditions in Eden and elsewhere are a little dicier to discuss. The heavenly cycles would guarantee some kind of seasonal progression founded in a lunisolar cycle of 19 years. (We're divorced from that consciousness, most of us, because we're not farmers and we keep a rather arbitrary solar calendar.) Even in a very temperate to tropical climate, trees and plants have seeds that ripen at different times.

The economy changed, though, when Adam sinned. This seems consistent with the establishment of a much more variable temperature regime and of agriculture based on it (including the cultivation of grains for bread), which regime was broken only by the advent of the Flood and that temporarily:

(Genesis 3:17 ESV) And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
(Genesis 3:18 ESV) thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.
(Genesis 3:19 ESV) By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

(Genesis 8:21 ESV) And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
(Genesis 8:22 ESV) While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

In the descriptions of the Millennial Temple in Ezekiel and of New Jerusalem in Revelation, the Tree of Life bears twelve different fruits, a different fruit per month (following a solar regime, it would seem). The ultimate fulfillment of Paradise indeed sets aside the former cycles of birth, death, and regeneration, "for the former things have passed away". But this will be a greater Paradise than Adam and Eve would have known in the flesh -- or their eventual children either -- even had they not sinned, for they were created mortal and yet able to reproduce. Those in the future Paradise will have neither quality true of them.

wr ()()