Annotatio XXXVII

”The Lord had planted a Paradise.” — Genesis 2:8

Jerome, at almost the beginning of the Hebrew Traditions, annotating this,¹ rejects the Seventy interpreters, who, for that which Moses said מקדם Mikedem — and our Vulgate edition [our Vulgate edition] has “from the beginning” (A principio), [the Seventy] translated Κατὰ τὰς ἀνατολάς, that is, “toward the East”; and [Jerome], following the version of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion — of whom the first translated ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, that is, “from the outset”; the second ἐκ πρώτης, that is, “from the beginning”; the third ἐν πρώτοις, that is, “among the first” — infers from their consensus a conclusion of this kind: “From which it is most manifestly proved that, before God made heaven and earth, he had beforehand founded Paradise — as it is also read in the Hebrew: ‘And God had planted a paradise in Eden from the beginning.’” This inference Augustine, Bishop of Kissamos, disapproving in the Annotations on Genesis, says that Jerome falsely deduced, from this word מקדם Mikedem, that Paradise was made before heaven and earth: because Mikedem in this place signifies not time but place, as is proved from another similar sentence below, chapter 3, where it is had [in Hebrew], that is, “And he placed cherubim at the eastern part of the garden of Eden.” I do not think Jerome was so stupid as to have believed that Paradise was founded before all creation of heaven and earth; for human reason cannot hold this — that Paradise, a local and earthly place, indeed an adornment of the earth, existed before the earth. But I think that by his words he wished to signify that, before God perfected heaven and earth by distinguishing and adorning them, he planted Paradise on the third day. Alcuin, however, in the book of Questions on Genesis, judges that Jerome’s opinion is to be understood just as his words sound. Moreover Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, set down the same assertion, in the same words of Jerome, in the first book of the commentaries on Genesis, chapter 2.

Francis George [Francesco Giorgio], in volume 1, Problem 31, supposes that Jerome placed Paradise before the world for this reason: that, according to bare allegory, he believed Paradise to be nothing other than the happy state of the rational creatures, which God created before this visible world. But Jerome himself openly protests, in the tenth chapter of the commentaries on Daniel, saying thus: “Let the ravings of those be silent, who — following shadows and images in the truth — endeavor to overthrow the truth itself, so that they think Paradise, and the rivers, and the trees must be undermined by the laws of allegory.”