Eden a Temple, Adam a Priest

John Walton, in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, argues that the Garden of Eden should be seen as a sacred space (a kind of "Holy of Holies") set off from the rest of creation, with the seven days of Genesis 1 as a temple inauguration.

Indeed, the association of gardens, as beautifully and carefully landscaped spaces, with temples would have been familiar to the ancient Israelite audience. When God puts Adam in the garden to “work” and “take care of” the garden, these are terms in the Bible that are usually in discussions of “human service to God rather than descriptions of…