Tree of Life E1 Final

Humans are... Trees

Podcast Date: January 6, 2020

(67:02)

Speakers in the audio file:

Jon Collins

Tim Mackie

Jon: Have you ever sat by a peaceful river, looked on at a tree planted nearby
blooming with flowers and thought, "You know, that tree is a great image
for what human flourishing looks like?" Well, if you haven't done that
creative exercise, the biblical authors have. In fact, the author of Psalm 1

1
 Humans are... Trees

imagines the abundant life and says, "That person is like a tree planted
by streams of water which yields its fruit and season, and whose a leaf
does not wither. Whatever they do prospects."

In fact, this metaphor that humans are trees, it doesn't just pop up here
in there in the Bible. It's actually a unifying theme throughout the entire
story.

Tim: Trees have a significant animated role in the biblical story. They are not
passive. Trees play an active role.

Jon: In the first creation account in Genesis, God creates trees and tells them
to be fruitful. Then, later, He creates humans and tells them also to be
fruitful.

Tim: This is all on purpose. This is all intentional, and I'm meant to connect all
of these stories as a unified developing theme. It's strategically at the
key hinge points of the whole biblical story. And lo and behold, there's
almost always a tree somewhere in the mix.

Jon: I'm Jon, and this is The Bible Project podcast. In today's episode, Tim and
I begin a new series discussing all the wonderful imagery of trees
throughout the Bible. The tree of knowing good and bad, the Tree of Life,
the burning bush, the cross. But first, to set the table for this
conversation, we begin with an underlying metaphor that the biblical
authors want us to ponder. And that is that humans are like trees. Thanks
for joining us. Here we go.

We're starting a new theme video.

Tim: Yes, we are.

Jon: ...on the trees of Eden.

Tim: The trees of Eden was the title I thought a while ago. But the more I've
worked on it, the more I think it's a cool chance to zero in on the tree of
life.

Jon: Specifically the tree of life. There are two trees in Eden of note. There are
many trees in Eden.

Tim: This was just a big garden full of trees, but two, played an important role
in the plot.

Jon: But we've talked a lot about the tree of knowledge of good and bad, as
we now call it.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Yeah, that's right, good or bad. We've talked less about the tree of life.
But they're related, which we've talked about before. We'll talk about
again. But for the moment, we don't have to decide the title right now.
It's just the beginning of the discovery process. So it's about the trees,
the trees in Eden. and then the theme of Sacred trees where humanity
meets God or fails God or has to own up to their failures at trees on high
places throughout the story of the Bible.

Jon: Trees in high places.

Tim: Trees in high places. It's a thing. It's a major design pattern throughout
the Bible.

Jon: So we need to recall back to How to Read the Bible series, Jewish
meditation literature. The Bible is Jewish meditation literature. And one of
the hallmarks of Jewish meditation literature is that biblical authors will
riff off of symbols, types like images, characters, settings, all these
things. And by repeating them and building on them in new ways, they're
actually communicating important ideas.

Tim: Correct. Repetition. Really it's just that the basic communication strategy
of repetition with variation.

Jon: And so there's a repetition of this idea of trees.

Tim: Correct.

Jon: That's what you mean by design pattern?

Tim: Exactly. Going really big picture here, the Old and New Testaments
Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament is a collection of different
scrolls and letters. But they are unified cinematically and editorially.
They've been composed as a collection in multiple stages. And one of the
main ways that they're unified in terms of theme, and message, and
story is through repetition of ideas of scenes, images, keywords that
repeat through story after story after story.

And when you see, repeated set of images in a story where your mind is
meant to go is to all of the earlier places where those images occur in a
story. And then you're meant to start to think of them as one whole idea
throughout the whole collection. So trees, people meeting God at trees
and either succeeding or failing a test, a major theme throughout the
whole the Bible coming to its climax in the story of the tree on the hill of
Golgotha in the Gospels, and then the tree of life in the New Jerusalem
on the last page of the Bible. So it qualifies as a theme throughout the
whole Bible. Begins on pages one and two, leads throughout the whole
Bible up to the story of Jesus and then on to the last page. There is no
better candidate for a biblical theme than the tree of life.
 Humans are... Trees

Jon: However, it wasn't on the original list.

Tim: No.

Jon: You had like, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen things? Was it two dozen?

Tim: Yeah, we could go back and look. Tree life got added somewhere in the
last year and a half.

Jon: But now you're very convinced.

Tim: Oh, yeah. It is all about the trees.

Jon: It's all about the tree.

Tim: Let's begin with some surprising facts about trees in the Bible.

Jon: Let's do it.

Tim: Apart from "God" and "humans," "trees" are the most frequently
mentioned living thing in the Bible.

Jon: Interesting.

Tim: Oh, "God" appears thousands of times, especially in sentences like "and
God said" or "and God did." "Humans" are on every page. So God and
humans. So you're like, "What's the next possible living thing that could
be mentioned? Animals is one.

Jon: But animals as a group are mentioned is less than trees?

Tim: Just animals as a whole or any animal in particular.

Jon: There's more presence than animals as a whole.

Tim: There's a lot of animals in the Bible. But trees appear way more often.

Jon: Than animals?

Tim: Correct.

Jon: Wow.

Tim: Trees. For example - this is really nerdy - I just searched one of the more
well-known modern English translations, the New International Version.
The word "tree" appears in that translation 293 times. The word "fruit"
appears 212 times. The word "branch," 107. "Root," "57. "Forest," 51.
"Vine," 72. "Leaf," 19. Just that right there, tree, fruit, branch, root,
forest, vine, leaf gives you over 800 appearances. And that doesn't
 Humans are... Trees

include the hundreds of times that specific species of trees are

mentioned: palms, acacia trees, oak trees, terebinth, willow, sycamore,
fig, olives, pomegranates. And you could name about 10 more.

I mean, we're up to over a thousand different texts where trees and tree-
related things are mentioned. That's a lot. It was surprising to me.

Jon: Is it a lot? I mean, I don't have a baseline to compare that to.

Tim: Well, you know, if you pick up like a modern novel like...who's the...I see
all his books in airports.

Jon: Grisham.

Tim: John Grisham?

Jon: Yeah.

Tim: You know, like exciting thrillers mysteries popular. Yeah, John Grisham. If
you were to do a word search on trees in his any given novel, my hunch
is you wouldn't get anywhere near this number.

Jon: How many words in the Bible?

Tim: Oh, how many words? Let's just go with pages. Average English
translation of the Bible, it depends on font size. It really varies. 1,000
pages, 1,500 pages.

Jon: 783,137.

Tim: So, if you have two pages open in front of you, odds are there's some
kind of tree on one of those two pages. If you have two facing pages,
odds are, you've got a tree on one of them.

Jon: That's a lot of trees.

Tim: A lot of them come in density.

Jon: Sure.

Tim: Much of this has to do also with the cultural context of the Bible. The
Hebrew Bible was written by a community of Jewish scribes and prophets,
who for the most part were living in the hill country of Judea and Israel.
And it was a tribal network of farming communities.

Jon: Trees are on their brain.

Tim: Trees are their life.

 Humans are... Trees

Jon: And vegetation in general.

Tim: Yeah, totally. A lot of it is culturally specific. I'm not trying to over press
the significance. I'm just saying it is interesting. Trees play a major role
throughout the Bible. Some famous Bible stories or verses with trees.
Obviously Genesis 1 and 2, the most famous trees in the Bible. Two of
the most recognizable things from the Garden of Eden story are trees.

Jon: Oh, yeah, are the two trees.

Tim: The story of Moses and the burning bush, which there is an affinity and a
connection. In English, when I think of bush, I think of basically like a
little miniature tree. But there's more spreading. And it seems like in the
biblical imagination, they're way more connected in the vocabulary and
imagery. A tree is just a big bush and a bush is a small tree for how the
vocabulary...

Jon: We had this tree in our front yard at our previous house that if you didn't
trim off all the extra shoots that came out, it would turn into a bush.

Tim: Oh, sure.

Jon: But if you kept trimming those down, cutting them off, it would be a tree.

Tim: And it makes sense. Actually, it's just normal observation. You look at a
bush, you look at a tree, and even though they have different shapes of
leaves and height, you look at them and go, "Oh, that's the same
category of thing."

Jon: It's a squatty tree.

Tim: Squatty tree. And even a flower, it has a different kind of stem. But it,
you know, comes up out of the ground.

Jon: Small pretty bendy trees.

Tim: Yes, a tiny tree. This is important for everything we're about to do. The
word tree in Hebrew is very flexible. It's the Hebrew word "etz." Etz. It
can refer to a tree, it can refer to a bush, or it can refer to as we're going
to see a symbolic tree, i.e. idle statue, it can refer to what we would call
wood. So when you cut down an etz, you still have etz. When you shape
the etz into firewood, it's etz that you're throwing onto the fire. Whereas
we differentiate between a living tree and wood. Do we use wood for a
living anything? It's biologically not anymore?

Jon: You know, it's interesting I'm reading...

Tim: Think it means dead.

 Humans are... Trees

Jon: No. I guess in Britain, in their English, a wood in the singular is a forest.

Tim: Yes. But we have plural for that in American English. You go into the
woods.

Jon: You go into the woods. Or you go into the wood in Britain.

Tim: Yeah, British English you can go into the wood. That's unique. Wood in
some traditions of English still can refer to a living tree. But in American
English...

Jon: It's generally referring to the material you get from a tree.

Tim: Yeah, from a tree. If you've harvested a tree then you have a wood. In
Hebrew, it's all etz.

Jon: It's etz.

Tim: Just etz. So Abraham puts etz on Isaac's back. It's the etz for the burnt
offering.

Jon: The firewood.

Tim: It's what we would call firewood. Anyhow, that's going to be important.
Because the fact that etz can cover so many different types of a tree, a
bush...

Jon: Does that mean that the etz of life might be a bush or a flower?

Tim: Flowers are not called etz. Flowers aren't called etz. But a bush can be
called etz.

Jon: What about vines?

Tim: Vines. In Ezekiel 15, he has this little parable about a vine tree, and he
calls it the etz hagefen (the wood of the vine).

Jon: The tree of the vine.

Tim: Yeah. Rigid literal English would be the tree of the vine. But it's referring
to the wood substance. We got a great vine in our yard and it's pretty
thick. I think it's like a branch.

Jon: Especially the old one is like a tree thing.

Tim: And it's wood. I mean, it's not, you know, green and pliable. It's wood.
Etz hagefen—the wood of the vine. That's important because all these
different passages that have different species of trees and bushes, but in
 Humans are... Trees

the biblical imagination, they're all etz. Which means that can be
connected in design patterns.

Jon: In Tolkien, aren't trees called ents?

Tim: Ents are a kind of tree creature.

Jon: I just wonder if it's related. It sounds like etz.

Tim: Tree beard.

Jon: Tree beards.

Tim: He's the famous ent. Yeah, totally. And the trees, as we're going to see
right in Genesis 1, they have a significant animated role in the biblical
story. They are not passive. Trees play an active role in the story.
Different than animals and humans but still among the living things.
Sorry, we were just going through famous...

Jon: Moses in the burning tree bush.

Tim: Moses in the burning tree bush. Psalm 1, the righteous one who
meditates on the Torah, he's like a tree planted by streams of water. It
yields its fruit and season.

Jon: That's a common metaphor to talk about people as trees.

Tim: Correct. Which we're going to take a moment to stop and revisit our
metaphor conversation. Jesus talked a lot about trees in his teachings
and parables. "I am the vine. You are the branches." Jesus portrays
himself as a tree. Jesus portrays the kingdom of God as a mustard seed
that becomes a huge tree.

Jon: I love that.

Tim: Another one, and this didn't really stand out to me until I learned Greek,
was that the cross that Jesus is crucified on, the Greek word is "Stauros."

Jon: For a cross?

Tim: For a cross. But the cross is regularly referred to as "the tree," especially
in the book of Acts. In the speeches of the book of Acts, the cross is not
always but regularly enough to notice that throughout the whole book
that it's referred to as the tree upon which Jesus was hanged. "Being
hanged upon a tree."

Jon: That's actually survived the Christian tradition. I've noticed in hymns and
worship songs and stuff, often the cross is called the tree.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Yeah, correct. There you go. I am familiar with that too. Last significant
fact is that trees it's not just that they are all throughout the Bible
occurring in equal density. Tree imagery occurs at strategic moments in
the biblical story. Key, like, hinge narratives or poems. We already talked
about creation in Genesis 1, story of Eden, the fall of humanity, the
rebellion that revolves around two trees. The significant covenant-making
moments in the story happened around trees.

Jon: Really?

Tim: God makes covenant...Yeah.

Jon: There's more mountains.

Tim: Exactly. Trees on top of high places is where God makes covenants
consistently. There was Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. But the way
that trees appear is different. Remember a design pattern in the Bible is
repetition with variation. So the way that the tree looks on each of those
high places in the covenant scenes is different. Sometimes it's in the form
of a boat explicitly made of etz, other times it's an actual etz. Other times
it's an etz that's not mentioned in the immediate story but mentioned at
the first time that Mount Sinai was mentioned. It's the story of the
burning bush. It's where Moses meets God. And that's the mountain
where he makes the covenant.

Jon: Oh, yeah, it's the same mountain.

Tim: Then the temple, which is made out of all kinds of etz. The promised land
is a land full of vines and victories, everybody should get able to sit
under. A lot of tree imagery depicts the promised land. The temple, it's all
about trees, literally in terms of it's made out of but then symbolically
with the pomegranate trees woven into everything with cherubim. In the
prophets, the Messianic deliverer is regularly described metaphorically as
a tree. In fact, in Jeremiah and Zachariah, the name for the Messianic
ruler is a branch. The branch man.

Jesus' parables, Jesus' death, the work of the Spirit is connected to leaf
and fruit imagery—the fruit of the Spirit. Where does fruit grow? It
doesn't just appear in a basket. It grows on trees. And then the Tree of
Life at the end of the story in the New Jerusalem. The point is, is this is
all on purpose. This is all intentional and I'm meant to connect all of
these stories as a unified developing theme. And it's strategically at the
key hinge points of the whole biblical story. Lo and behold, there's almost
always a tree somewhere in the mix. There you go.

Jon: So the Bible wants you to meditate on trees. And by meditating on trees,
you will become like a tree.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: That's right. Totally. That's exactly right.

Let's pause and recognize your cultural, social location in your family of
origins and all that is going to predispose you to a certain view of trees
and plants to either not think about them - they don't play any role in
your life. They do play a role in our lives because they feed us even
though we don't...

Jon: We live inside of their bones. Because of our houses. It took a second?

Tim: It took me five seconds to get that one. My point is, this is a moment
where we have to let the Bible recreate a narrative world for us, let the
biblical authors assign the meaning and significance of things. I can't just
assume that my...

Jon: That you know why trees are significant?

Tim: Yeah. What I think of when I think of a tree, I can't just assume that's
what the biblical authors think. Odds are it's very different. Unless you
grew up in maybe a more rural or agrarian farming context where your
life is connected to bushes and trees. Probably people from those cultures
or settings have a leg up, have an advantage over people who grew up in
more urban contexts. But I grew up in a city and there are lots of trees in
Portland.

Jon: There are lots of trees in Portland.

Tim: But that's Portland. That's not true in many cities.

Jon: Well, if you live in a desert city, there are a lot of trees.

Tim: There's going to be a lot of low lying bushes. Just as a way to close this
kind of opening, getting trees on the brain movement, I came across, as
I was working on this, a really creative, fun book by a guy named
Matthew Sleeth called "Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the
Nature of God." It's a really accessible. It's not nerdy academic. But he's
really sharp and he's done a lot of work on trees in the Bible. It's kind of
an overview of trees throughout the storyline of the Bible.

There's some overlap with what we're doing. Just really creative. But has
a background in sciences. And so there's all these biblical meditations,
but then scientific meditations on trees and the nature of human and tree
interdependence. It's fascinating. In the course of conversation, I'll bring
up a couple of things that he brought to my attention that were kind of
cool. But that's a fun, easy to read meditation on trees in general from a
theological perspective.

Jon: What's is it called again?

 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God. Thank
you, Matthew Sleeth. You probably don't listen to the podcast but maybe
someone will tell you. As with all biblical themes...

Jon: ...start at the beginning.

[00:22:06]

Tim: Genesis 1, many things we could talk about. What I want to talk about is
the symbolism and meaning of trees on page one of the Bible. Within the
six days of God's work, there's the two pairing panels. Days one through
three, days four through six. They're triads. They're match.

Jon: We've talked about this a lot, but if you're listening to this, and that
doesn't register, maybe in the notes, I don't know.

Tim: Yeah, that's right. Actually, it matters for understanding the symbolism of
trees—the triads and the pairing.

Jon: Let's get in it.

Tim: Okay. The design of Genesis 1, first creation narrative, begins with the
prologue vs. 1 and 2. It concludes with an epilogue, which is actually
what is in modern Bibles Chpt. 2 vs. 1-3. That's the epilogue. What's in
between, vs. 3-31 is these six days of God's working. Those six days are
designed into pairing triads of days. Days one through three make a set,
and then days four through six go back and map onto what happened on
days one, two, three. So days one and four, days two and five, days three
and six all match in terms of content and vocabulary and so on. The
prologue began was saying with everything was wild and waste,
unordered, disordered, and uninhabited. The first triad, days one through
three...

Jon: Which in most translations you'll find "formless and void" is a typical
translation.

Tim: Those are English words to get you for disorder. Formless: it has no form,
it has no order. Then void means empty. Days one, God's light emanates
into the darkness. Day two, waters below are separated from the waters
above. This important. Day one, one thing happens. God light. Day two,
one thing happens. Water is separated from the waters. Day three, two
things happen. Did you catch that?

Jon: Day one, one. Day two, one thing. Day three, two things.

Tim: The dry land emerges out of the water. That's the first thing of day three.
The second thing of day three is plants emerge out of the ground. And
specifically fruit trees. Trees of fruit. That's days one through three. Days
 Humans are... Trees

four through six, backup and go back to the lights on day one. So God's
light permeated darkness on day one. Now day four, God gives
inhabitants, three to the realms. He just ordered three realms, the
heavens, the waters, and then day three of the dry land. Days four
through three go back. The lights on day four, sun, moon, and stars. Day
five, the sky flyers and the water swarmers and the water above and
below. That matches day two. Day six, we're back to the dry land. And lo
and behold, there are two acts on day six, that match the two acts of day
three. That's important.

Days one and two, God does one thing. Days four and five, God does one
thing. Days three and six, God does two things on each of those days.
Think of it as the bonus thing on day three. On day three, there's a
bonus.

Jon: There are fruit trees.

Tim: Yeah, fruit trees are the bonus. Day six, the bonus is humans who are to
be fruitful.

Jon: Interesting.

Tim: So the bonus on day three is trees of fruit that bear fruit with seed in
them. The bonus of day six is humans who bear fruit and seed.

Jon: Now, in English, that's the same word, "fruit trees" and "fruiting
humans."

Tim: And it's the same root in Hebrew. The verb is parah. On day three, God
says, "Let the land bring forth vegetation." Big general category. Then the
next category, plants that produce seed. Next category, fruit trees on the
land that produce fruit that have seed in it. Corresponding the bonus act
on day six matching the fruit trees is fruitful humans who bear fruit and
give birth to seed.

Jon: And in Hebrew, those are connected to wayyitser?

Tim: Correct. In other words, the design structure of Genesis 1 wants me to

associate fruitful trees and fruitful humans as they both exist on the dry
land and they both have a parallel function described with the same
vocabulary.

Jon: So this is interesting. I have been coming along with you in this journey
of how to see the Bible in its literary form and find meaning from that,
but I just want to mark this. Because what you're doing is you're saying,
days one through six create a pattern, days one through three, create
these domains, days four through six then match those domains with
 Humans are... Trees

inhabitants. So now we see this pairing. Now, if we just look at days

three and six, we now see within this pairing, there's a word.

Tim: They each have more than one act of creation. Two creative acts.

Jon: Two creative acts. And on the second creative act, in day three, it's a fruit
tree, and in day six, it's a fruiting human. That's a fruitful human.

Tim: Fruitful human, yeah.

Jon: And now here's the big, putting it together,...

Tim: The interpretive move.

Jon: ...interpretive move is that now as the reader, well, this is designed in
such a way so that you now start thinking in the metaphor of humans like
trees.

Tim: Correct. That's right. That's exactly right.

Jon: So the biblical authors went to all that work. They could have just said,
"Hey, dear reader, I want you to think about humans like trees."

Tim: Well, in a way they are because this same concept is going to come from
a different design pattern in Genesis 2. The same humans will be likened
to trees again.

Jon: Because they'll be planted in Eden. Is that it...?

Tim: Yes, and another part of it that I'll point out. But you're right. Think of it
this way, and again, this is not my discovery, this is actually very ancient,
but most recently, it was brought to my tension by Hebrew Bible scholar,
David Andrew Teeter, was that if you take a class or look at any
introduction to reading biblical poetry, or listen to our conversations on
biblical poetry, the main design convention of biblical poetry is two or
three short lines that are parallel designed to be paired together in some
way, repeating either the same ideas of vocabulary, but never identical,
always with a little bit of variation so that you think of them as one
combined associated idea. But the differences enrich it. It gives it a
greater depth and metaphorical comparison.

It's that same principle. But here in a narrative, where certain elements
of a narrative are paired, in poetry, you can do it in two short lines, here
a narrative is through literary structure and design. So the bonus act on
two paired days is fruitful trees and fruitful humans. Oh, humans are
trees. Trees are humans metaphorically.

Jon: You're supposed to see a connection here.

 Humans are... Trees

Tim: You're supposed to see connection. That's exactly right. Thank you for
making that explicit. As an interpretive tool, the Bible readers are being
introduced to it on page one, because that's going to be one of the main
way biblical authors communicate.

Jon: I was never taught how to read the Bible that way.

Tim: Me neither.

Jon: And it almost smacks a little bit of Bible code in a way of like, "You know,
let's take something and then find some meaning in it." But at a very
basic level, what you and many other scholars are saying is this is how
the biblical authors are communicating.

Tim: Correct, correct.

Jon: They know what they're doing. They're doing it on purpose.

Tim: Roses are red, violets are blue. Sugar is sweet, and so are you.

Jon: Thank you.

Tim: You're welcome. It's that repetition with variation. So violets are blue. So
are you. Those two lines are not next to each other. They're separated by
sugar is sweet.

Jon: I understand...

Tim: But your mind associates them...

Jon: ...because of the rhyme.

Tim: Because of the rhyming. And then you're like, "Oh, people are like
flowers." Violets are blue and so are you.

Jon: Is that what you're supposed to get from that?

Tim: Oh, "sugar is sweet and so are you" that's the immediately paired line.
But the rhyme from "violets are blue" and then the last line, "so are you"
makes you be like, "Oh, people are like flowers too."

Jon: Really?

Tim: And so people are like flowers and sugar, which means people flowers
and sugar are all like each other as one metaphorical matrix. Because
flowers are sweet in a different way than sugar in a different way than
human. It's a poetic communication strategy, and we are used to it on
smaller levels. It's called poetic rhymes. The biblical authors, it's one of
 Humans are... Trees

their main tools and narrative is to design narratives in paired repetition

and variation.

Jon: A lot of people are familiar with it in movies.

Tim: All this happens all the time in movies.

Jon: An object would be on screen and there's no specific attention drawn to

it. It's not talked about like, "Hey, pay attention to this object." It's just
there. And then it keeps reappearing. All sudden you realize, "This is an
important object."

Tim: That's right. Same with movie scores like music. My boys, we listened a
lot to the Star Wars New Hope soundtrack when we're playing with Legos.
Luke Skywalker motif is a melody, a particular melody, that comes up
when he first appears, and then and so many scenes afterwards.
Sometimes it'll be one horn doing a little ta tan ra ra ra raaa. Sometimes
really intense. That's it. It's a little flourish and it brings back the design
pattern of everything that Luke represents in all the stories before that
point. It's the same strategy here through literary design. Humans are
trees in Genesis 1.

[00:33:26]

Tim: Now let's pause. Let's think about what trees and humans both do that's
a little bit different than the other thing. The trees and the humans are
both associated with the word "seed." They have seed in them. God is
depicted as the kind of being who can just self-generate a universe, a
cosmos out of his own power and creativity.

Jon: And word.

Tim: And word. Through His Word. Yes. The word is like seed.

Jon: The word is like seed.

Tim: That's Isaiah 55.

Jon: Oh, really?

Tim: Oh, yeah. Thank you. The word is like seed.

Jon: Isaiah 55.

Tim: We're going to talk about it later in this conversation. god is depicted as
self-generating. He doesn't need something else. He can just self-
generate. In the same way, there's a long paragraph about how trees
 Humans are... Trees

have their seed in them to produce more trees with fruit. That's a whole
sentence.

Jon: A little botany lesson.

Tim: Yeah, it's a little body lesson. Why are we going into that? Tree are not
self-generating in terms of they didn't generate themselves as a species.
They develop from something before.

Jon: Sure.

Tim: But when you look at a tree, our perception and experience of a tree,
they live way longer than humans—many do —and they make you think
of a self-generating concept. Just they have within them in the tiniest
little form the seed form of a whole other huge thing, and it just produces
it. It just grows seeds and then it drops them on the ground and the
nutrients grow. It's a kind of perpetual life. It's a kind of eternal life. Now,
eternal, not literally, but metaphorically.

Jon: It just continues.

Tim: It continues. And if you stop and think about it, humanity as a species is
kind of like that. It has within the birds and the bees, within them, within
a man and within a woman, there's these fluids. And the fluids mix. And
that fluid is called seed in Hebrew. Male sperm in Hebrew is called seed.
So humans are trees. And "bear fruit" is an image of God giving the gift
of self-replicating life to other creatures. It's like they're images of the
divine life and creativity. They're creatures. They didn't generate their
own in the beginning. But once they're given a beginning, they can
imitate God's perpetual life through the form of seed.

Jon: There's something kind of divine about seed.

Tim: Yes, exactly. That's my point. Genesis 1 pair humans and trees as a self-
perpetuating kind of creature. And the animals are too but the narrative
doesn't draw attention to that for animals as such. It really focuses in on
the tree's ability to self-reproduce and the human's ability. Which means I
think we're supposed to pair them. Anyway. That's a meditation point.
Make a cup of coffee or tea, take a long walk, how trees are like humans
and how both are an image of God's own self-generating power and
creativity.

For me, what was interesting when this struck me was the idea of a tree
as this symbol bestowing eternal life in Eden. It makes a lot more sense
when I get into this concept of what a tree symbolizes.

Jon: This is a new thought of a seed being kind of metaphorically connected to

the idea of eternal life.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Correct.

Jon: That a seed has the ability to self-perpetuate, become a living thing,
which has more seeds, which becomes a more living thing. And that can
continue on indefinitely in theory. This idea of an indefinite life is you're
not that far from the idea of eternal life.

Tim: No.

Jon: So you're saying that an ancient Hebrew thinker was just sitting
contemplating seeds and the kind of this connection and it's like, "Man,
this is a lot like eternal life." And then that becomes the seed of an idea,
which is that maybe eternal life is best represented by a tree.

Tim: That's right. It helps us understand an imagination where a tree can be

associated with the gift of God's own eternal life. Because trees have
their own kind of perpetual life. Humans have that capacity, but that
capacity is compromised in many ways.

Jon: Now, we're talking on a species level, not on an individual level.

Tim: Of trees?

Jon: Of both.

Tim: Oh, I see. Well, species for humans on the planet level, it would be as,
whatever, phylum or a class or some kingdom. I forget what those terms
are for all of the levels of the species. But fruit tree is what Genesis 1...

[crosstalk 00:38:55]

Jon: It corresponds between mammals or vegetation.

Tim: Oh, that's right. There you go. Yeah, mammals.

Jon: Trees have species. I mean, the other thing is that the tree of life being a
tree is because it's something you partake of.

Tim: That's the Genesis 2 image is about eating from the tree, which is the
kind of the next step in the development of the idea. But Genesis 1 just
basic category, people are like trees, and both are given the gift of
potentially having ongoing perpetual life. That is one of the ways that
Genesis 1 images God's own eternal power...

Jon: When I think of eternal life personally, I don't think of on a species level.
I think of like me being able to live perpetually.

Tim: I see.
 Humans are... Trees

Jon: Which is different, but it's a connected idea.

Tim: Correct. It also makes sense. In the book of Isaiah, when Isaiah
envisions the New Jerusalem, he talks about "my people shall be like the
days of a tree." He brings it up explicitly. The book of Isaiah represents a
sustained meditation on the meaning of trees in the Bible.

[00:41:01]

Tim: There you go. Trees in Genesis 1 is worth pondering and thinking about.
Let's take the next step. Trees in the garden of Eden. Just like the
introduction of trees in Genesis 1 is paired with the introduction of
humans, the same idea happens in the Garden of Eden story. The origin
of humans is designed parallel to the origin of trees.

Genesis 2, we're told in vs. 7 that Yahweh God formed human of dust
from the ground. Hebrew words are significant to kind of get the parallel
here. You can pick up in English too. So the word "formed" is the Hebrew
verb wayyitser. Human is adam. And "from the ground" is min ha-
adamah.

Jon: All right.

Tim: So adam and adamah, human and ground rhyme in Hebrew. Just like
human and humus—human and dirt.

Jon: And humus.

Tim: And humus. That's right.

Jon: Oh, humus being a type of dirt?

Tim: Humans is the English word for a type of soil.

Jon: Is it?

Tim: Human, humus. I think they're related.

Jon: Oh, really?

Tim: It really has roots...

Jon: In the same way that...

Tim: In the same way, in Hebrew, you have adam for human and adamah for
the soil or ground. So he makes human from humus—adam from the
adamah. So wayyitser, adam, min ha-adamah. That's vs. 7.

Jon: Wow. We're speaking Hebrew now.

 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Two verses later, in vs. 9, "And Yahweh God caused to sprout every tree
from the ground." The word for "sprout" is wayyatsmak. So wayyitser for
the human...

Jon: If you form something it's a wayyitser.

Tim: ...wayyatsmak for the tree. So different verbs, but the first three letters
of both of those verbs are identical. Once again, these are pairing
strategies or pairing tools that biblical authors will use of using verbs and
nouns that share similar letters are often a clue for pairing things. Now, if
it were just those two verbs, basically both of them begin with wayyats...

Jon: That can happen.

Tim: ...that can happen. But you get a noun...

Jon: But not intended

Tim: Not intended. So how do I know that there is an intended pairing here?
Well, you get a wayyats verb, then you get in one case adam, another
case, a tree (etz). Then both min ha-adamah (from the ground). So God
wayyats the human from the ground. God wayyats tree from the ground
(min ha-adamah). Once again, what emerges from the ground in this
short, little paragraph here...

Jon: Trees and people.

Tim: Trees and people. I've already been prepared to make a link between
trees and humans because of the pairing in Genesis 1. It's reinforcing the
same metaphorical concept. People are like trees, which means the future
of humans, their origins and their destiny are going to be linked in some
way. Humans are trees. The origins of trees is similar to humans. I
wonder if the future of humans will be bound up with the future of trees.

And then the next thing you're told is, you know, there was once a couple
special trees: the Tree of Life in the middle of that garden and the tree of
knowing good and bad. Oh, yes. The destiny of humans and trees are
very intertwined in the story.

Jon: I like how there's the detail of all the different types of trees in Genesis 2.
It's like trees that are pleasing eye and then there's trees for food.

Tim: Let's talk about that.

Jon: I just like it because it's like, to me - and you're going to probably help
me really appreciate it - but to me, it's just like, "Here's God in the
garden." And it's not about being...
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Pure functionality.

Jon: Yeah, pure functionality. There's just trees that are just good to look at.

Tim: They're just there because they're beautiful.

Jon: He just wants trees there that you can just sit and go, "Oh, that's a
beautiful tree."

Tim: Yes. It's good.

Jon: That's really generous deal.

Tim: It is. It's drawing attention to the artistic tastes of the Creator. An art
doesn't need to have practical function to be meaningful.

Jon: No. You just sit there and enjoy its beauty.

Tim: Yeah, that's right. It communicates on a different level. Think with me.
You have trees and humans who are fruitful in Genesis 1, you have trees
and humans that both are wayyitsed out of the ground in Genesis 2. And
then what you learn about the trees is they're beautiful, they're good for
eating, and there's one kind of tree that brings life. There's one kind of
tree that brings knowing good and bad that's going to represent a test.

If that's true of trees, if the trees can provide life and can be beautiful,
and can represent a test, and I know that trees are parallel to humans,
human kind of like...

Jon: Human can create life or create death?

Tim: I wonder if there's going to be some humans who are beautiful who will
represent a test and a road of somebody choosing between good and
bad. This vocabulary of pleasing to the eyes and good for food is going to
describe multiple human characters in the book of Genesis. Sarah, when
Pharaoh sees that she is good of sight and he takes her. Rebecca, when
she and Isaac are down in Gerar and Abimelech's, people see that she is
beautiful of sight and she is taken. Joseph is good of sight to Potiphar's
wife, and she wants to take him.

What trees represent and Eden is going to be an idea that is going to

become true of humans. Humans will become trees of testing to other
humans in the book of Genesis—metaphorical trees of testing. And I'm
prepared for that right here. Does that make sense?

Jon: I think I'm following. In Genesis 2, God...what happens first, He forms

human out of the ground. Wayyitser?
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Wayyitser, yeah.

Jon: Wayyitser the human from the adamah. Then wayyits the tree from the
adamah. That happens first, right? But then isn't there the moment
where God just says, "Look, there's a bunch of trees here. Plants, trees
that are good for looking at, good for food." And then He draws attention
to the two trees.

And you're saying, we've already been thinking about trees and humans
as this kind of poetic rhyming of an idea. And so, as a reader, we're being
drawn attention to these trees that are good to look at. And so we
shouldn't be surprised to find, lo and behold, that in the narrative of
Genesis, there's humans that are good to look at. And the trees in
Genesis 2 represent a test of how are humans going to rule the world
with God. So in the same way, the humans who are good to look at
become a test for other humans. Those are two ideas that become
parallel.

Tim: Yeah, that's right. Here's a silly analogy, but it could work. You and I both
have little boys, two little boys. So it's Christmas. At Christmas, let's say
they're younger than they are now, I give one son a bike and the other
son a trike. They rhyme. One's a bike, one's a trike. One boy likes his
bike, one boy likes his trike. The bike is silver. The trike is silver.

Then I pause, and I give a short lecture to the boy given the bike about
how you're going to be tempted to hog this for yourself to never let
anyone share it and enjoy it. And I'm going to encourage you to share
this bike when your friends around and want to take a ride on it. Let's
stop right there. Do I mean that the trike will not also represent a same
kind of test when that son is playing with the trike? No. Actually, a similar
thing will hold. But I assume that if it's true of the bike, then it will also
be true of the trike. That he'll need to share it. It will represent a test of
his generosity.

That's the kind of communication strategy happening here. The trees and
the humans are parallel. The trees are beautiful of sight, good to take.
One offers life, the other offers death, and good and bad. And so that will
also be true of humans. And lo and behold, I'm going to meet a whole
bunch of humans that are beautiful of sight and good for eating
metaphorically, and people will take them and bring disaster on
themselves, just like the trees of Eden. That's very intentional in the book
of Genesis. People are trees. And people can be trees of life or trees of
testing about good and bad in the story.

Jon: Man, is this why Jesus curses the fig tree?

 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Oh, we'll talk about that. We will talk about that. Yes, we're laying the
biblical imagination groundwork that will make sense of a lot of strange
tree stuff including the fig tree that Jesus curse.

Jon: Because you give this long story of the bike and the trike. I'm wondering,
doesn't Jesus do something with his parables similar that we could
probably just grab? Like some sort of like...

Tim: Oh, interesting.

Jon: The victory came to mind but...

Tim: Well, yeah. Essentially, there's a handful of texts in the prophets that
Jesus is tuned into where Jerusalem is a victory that is going to wither
and die when Israel is exiled. So Jesus is announcing yet another way of
destructive exile on Jerusalem by cursing the fig tree.

Jon: To go back, imagine you have this wise mentor person in your life and
you're taking a walk through the woods and you get to a fruit tree, and
he tells you in this beautiful way, "Isn't human life a lot like this fruit
tree?" And he just kind of wax poetic about that. Then he tells you a
story about how trees can become a crux of a moment of decision and
test. You're saying me as a young Padawan (learner) should go, "I see
what you're doing. You're telling me that humans in my life are going to
be a lot like a test."

Tim: Some of them will be like a tree of life, some of them will be like a tree of
knowing good and bad, and I should learn how to avoid certain trees and
learn how to hang out and eat from other certain trees. But you know,
the tree of life only occurs in one other book of the Old Testament. And
it's the book of Proverbs and Lady Wisdom, the tree of life. But then also
righteous people are a tree of life. The righteous, the faithful are trees of
life to those who are around them. People can be trees of life in the book
of Proverbs.

Jon: I always pictured the tree of life being something much more cosmic than
just the fact that people can bring life.

Tim: Oh, well, people who are like the tree of life. The tree of life is cosmic.
We'll talk about this. This is the next thing we're going to talk about,
symbolism of the tree of life. But people can be likened to the tree of life.
They can be a vehicle of God's life and love and blessing to others around
them, which is what the tree is, a vehicle of God's life coming into you.
Thank you. That's good clarification.

Here, to round this off, people are like trees. This is from Matthew
Sleeth's book that I mentioned, Reinforcing Faith. He carries the
metaphor forward. In Genesis 1 and 2 people are like trees in terms of
 Humans are... Trees

producing fruit. He had this cool image in the book of an X-ray, or a CT

Scan of a human lung.

Tim: I have a picture here.

Jon: It looks like a bush.

Tim: Just Google it. It's called a bronchogram. But it's a scan photo of the
vessels of the human lung. It's a tree.

Jon: Yeah, it looks like a tree.

Tim: It's a tree design. He just says, "Listen, what is the function of our lungs?
It's creating these cell structures that are meant to capture as much CO2,
right, to inhale and then to absorb it into the tissue mixed with blood so
they can get reoxygenated." That's exactly the function of the branch
structures of a tree is to absorb CO2 and transform it within the tree into
the O2.

Jon: Actually, isn't it the leaves that do that in a tree?

Tim: Oh, that's right. But the branch structure is developed precisely to
produce as many leaves as possible for the purpose of absorbing CO2.

Jon: Got it. And the long structure, you've got all these tiny little sacks that
are like leaves.

Tim: The corresponding leaves. Yeah.

Jon: And they capture that. So the human lung is like an inverted tree. I
thought this was clever. It's just a way of furthering the metaphorical
connection and interdependence between trees and humans. Trees
provide life for humans on the fruit level. That's Genesis 1. But humans
are also like trees in Genesis 2 in more ways than one. And here in the
ways that trees...

Jon: Ways that the biblical authors didn't even realize.

Tim: Yeah, totally. Interesting bronchogram. Anyway, I thought that was just a
cool analogy.

Jon: Nor did they realize that the lung of a tree was creating oxygen.

Tim: Yeah. That the lungs of humans is...

Jon: Absorbing, yeah.

 Humans are... Trees

Tim: I thought that's cool. Listener of the podcast, look up bronchogram on

Google image. It blew me away. I couldn't believe it. I was like, "That's a
tree. I've got an inverted tree inside my lungs." I thought that was cool.

[00:57:26]

Tim: So we just on Genesis 1 and 2, people are compared to trees. In Hebrew,

the main Hebrew word for "descendant" is the word for "seed." And the
word seed for a plant or a tree and the word seed for human is the same
word zera. In Hebrew, zera.

Jon: This becomes, for me, what's problematic in terms of talking about
tracing the idea of the seed and connecting it. Because remember the
word "offspring" was kind of the closest thing in English?

Tim: Yeah. Because we don't say "your seed" when we talk about people's
children.

Tim: No, we don't.

Jon: It's just not something to say.

Tim: It's not an English phrase.

Jon: You probably can hang. If someone came and said, "Here, I want to
introduce you to my seed..."

Tim: And you'd be like, "Oh, this a Bible nerd." The word "seed" when you see
it in the Old Testament, it's translating the word zera. But what you don't
see is that the word descendant is 9 times out of 10 also the Hebrew
words zera. And there's an important metaphorical connection between
them. Namely, that people are like trees.

Tim: Fruit can refer to descendants as well.

Jon: Fruit of my loins.

Tim: Be fruitful and multiply. Bear fruit. Children can be seed, namely, the
thing inside the fruit, or children can be fruit. They both can work.
However, fruit can also be used metaphorically to describe not children,
but the results of one's life. What you produce in life can be called fruit.
Like in Psalm 92, the righteous flourish like a palm tree. They grow like
cedars of Lebanon. They bear fruit in old age," which doesn't necessarily
mean they keep having kids. It goes on to talk about their life choices—
their fruit.

This one's interesting. There's lots of women who struggle with infertility
in the biblical story. All the generations in Genesis: Sarah, Rebecca,
 Humans are... Trees

Rachel, Hannah. And the Hebrew word for infertile is the Hebrew word
"akar," which means to be uprooted or disconnected from your root.

Jon: To be infertile is to be uprooted.

Tim: We don't have a metaphorical connection of that in English, but the

Hebrew word for infertile is "unrooted."

Jon: Wow.

Tim: Without root.

Jon: Whoa. Disconnected from the ground.

Tim: So you're tree but you're not connected to the vital source of life that
God has given to the ground. That's why a fertile womb is described as a
blessing just like fertile fruit trees is blessing. Fertile flocks is a sign of
divine blessing because it means you're connected to the life of Eden that
God has packed into all creation. Isn't that interesting?

Jon: Yeah.

Tim: Vocabulary of "cutting off" or "withering" is regularly applied to humans

to describe death or destruction or...

Jon: If somebody cut off a branch or leaves wither.

Tim: Correct. It's a regular biblical phrase to be cut off from your people or to
be cut off from the land of the living. That's the tree image cutting off the
branch or cutting down a tree. To cut someone off. Where did that come
from? Oh, we actually have it in English, but it means "severing a
relationship." I cut them off.

Jon: I cut them off.

Tim: Is that the thing people say? I think so.

Jon: Yeah.

Tim: "Cut them out of my life."

Jon: But I don't know if that's connected to agriculture or if it's just this idea
of cutting in another sense.

Tim: Interesting.

Jon: Because you can cut fabric or you can cut all sorts of things.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: This one's interesting. If people are trees, then water is what's necessary
for trees to grow and flourish. And so water is a regular image of all kinds
of things that come from God to make human life's flourish. So God's
Spirit is breath is compared to water in multiple places. Isaiah 44 "I'll
pour out water on the thirsty land, streams on the dry ground. I'll pour
out my Spirit on your seed and my blessing on your seed."

Jon: Oh, wow. In the same way that the stream waters the ground, God's
Spirit is watering.

Tim: Animates humans. People are trees. In other places, God's Torah, his
instruction will be like water; it gives life. But the point is is that all these
images of God's Word or life-breath or Spirit being something that grows
trees is all connected to this base metaphor from Genesis 1 and 2.

Jon: Metaphorical scheme.

Tim: People are trees. Correct. This is why, when you get to Psalm 1, you get
the righteous person who's faithful to God and neighbor. He meditates on
the Divine Word, and he's like a tree planted by streams of water whose
leaves never fade. So humans can become the eternal tree of life to other
humans, if they connect themselves to the divine source of life.

So Psalm 1 is just somebody who really thought for a long time about
Genesis 1 and 2. Or it's written from the imagination of somebody soaked
in Genesis 1 and 2. People are trees. This was really helpful for me.

Jon: Yeah, that's really interesting.

Tim: Because this will pay dividends as you go into the rest of the Bible of
sorting out imagery and why it occurs so often, why a man who claims in
word indeed to be the Creator, hanging upon a tree can give the gift of
God's own life and spirit to the rest of creation. The meaning of the cross
takes on so much more significance, I think, when you understand how
these metaphor images work in the Hebrew Bible,

Jon: I'm excited for this, then to continue and the dots to connect, for this to
land. I think I came into this conversation thinking we're going to talk
about the tree of life more specifically. What we've done is we've shown
how in the biblical imagination and the writings this metaphorical scheme
of people like trees being really foundational. That just seems like a
launching pad now.

Tim: It is.

Jon: And then we're going to talk now specifically about this cosmic tree, the
tree of life. And it's connected. Because we've already seen that humans
become like a tree of life.
 Humans are... Trees

Tim: Humans are like the tree of life and the tree is testing...

Jon: The Tree of Life is a specific kind of tree that humans can be like because
humans are like trees.

Tim: Yeah, that's right.

Jon: Great. Sounds good.

Tim: Right.

Jon: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Bible Project podcast. Next
week, we'll continue this new discussion on trees. We'll discuss the sacred
trees of the ancients.

Tim: The ancient peoples from the remote Western world of Egypt to the
eastern river Marshes of Babylonia lived in the land, not simply on it.
They were all agrarian cultures whose livelihood was found and
maintained among the shade, fruit, shelter, and beauty of trees. There
can be little doubt that this lifestyle had a significant effect on these
ancient cultures and the way they perceive the world. Trees were some of
the most sacred elements in Ancient Near Eastern civilization.

Jon: Today's episode was produced by Dan Gummel. The Bible Project is a
nonprofit in Portland, Oregon. We have many free resources that show
the Bible as unified story that leads to Jesus. It's all up at
thebibleproject.com and it's all free because of the generosity of people
around the world who are part of this with us. So thank you so much.

Joy: Hi, this is Joy Danette and I'm from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I first
heard about The Bible Project through YouTube. I use The Bible Project
with my three kids 11, 9 and 7—three boys—as well as with our teens at
our church. We're even doing the study of Daniel right now. My favorite
thing about The Bible Project is the imagery it's so simple and it helps
clarify some really big issues around theology as well as where we come
from and where we're going.

We believe that the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a
crowdfunded project by people like me. Find free videos, study notes,
podcasts, and more at thebibleproject.com.