Garden Getaway
Sarah laughed ]to herself, saying, “After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?” Genesis 18:12 NASB
Pleasure – By this time you know the definition of hapax legomenon. You also know that such words are extremely difficult to translate. Context helps. Guesswork is good. But in the end, we don’t know precisely what these kinds of words really mean. Here, in this famous story of Sarah’s laughter, we encounter another hapax; this time in the Hebrew word ʿednâ. It is most likely an expression of Sarah’s surprise that she will enjoy sex at her age (and at the age of her husband). But the word is obscure; the only similar words found twice in verses about riches and the fullness of life.
However, there is another possibility. You see, the same Hebrew consonants are also found in the word ʿēden, and that word is not obscure. It is always translated “Eden.” What is the connection to Sarah’s obscure remark? Perhaps the author, who was not too concerned with the vowels, really just wanted us to feel Sarah’s astonishment that she might once again enjoy the delight of the Garden. If the Garden was part of her religious mythology (although she obviously would not have used those technical terms), then maybe she saw how impossible it was to go back there, even for a moment. And yet, she longed for that moment of bliss—as, I’m afraid, we all do. There was once a time of innocence for each of us; a time when time didn’t really matter much, when play and delight washed the world clean, when we didn’t have to know where we were going because we were just going. That is a time we long to recapture, and maybe Sarah is just like us, longing to recapture a time when she and her man were really all that mattered, when time together was all that mattered.
But now that time is long past. Now she remembers the betrayal, the heartache of envy, the self-inflicted wound of substitution. Now the whole journey seems to have been for naught. There will never be a return to ʿēden, a moment of ʿednâ. Just like those other two who once knew the Garden, she has been expelled.
Jump forward many centuries. Enter the Song of Songs. Read about a woman who fought to find the Garden again, who experienced that time of innocent intimacy when the bower overhead protected her and her lover from the world’s remorseless interference. Yes, Song of Songs sounds to me like Sarah’s poem about a lost time. Not that Sarah wrote it. She didn’t. It was composed many centuries later. But the theme is the same. Let me find my way back to the Garden of delight where my lover and I are all that matters, where intimacy is openly expressed between us and the world is pushed outside. Let me experience once more, just for a moment, what it was like when there was only a Garden.
Sarah laughed. Such a thing is not possible for the wounded, is it? Or is it?
Topical Index: ʿednâ, hapax legomenon, Garden, delight, Genesis 12:18
