The Bible begins in the Garden of Eden but ends in the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem. When I first realized this, it bugged me, not only because as a farmer I tend to like gardens better than cities, but also because it seemed to contradict the Bible itself, which also prefers gardens to cities.

The Lord plants the first biblical garden as an intimate sanctuary for an innocent Adam. The first biblical city, by contrast, is built as a sort of anti-sanctuary by a guilty Cain. Before God sends Adam out of the garden, he mercifully provides the naked vagabond with a covering that was also a sort of exoskeleton of protection—a garment of skin. When Cain sins, God likewise marks him with a protective sign as he sends him away to be a penitential wanderer on the earth.¹ Cain, however, has his own ideas and builds what he thinks will be a more reliable exoskeleton—the first city.

This act both rejects the promise of God’s protection as untrustworthy and attempts to avoid the penance of wandering. Cain’s city thus incarnates everything disordered about fallen humanity: violence, fear, rejection of God’s commands, insecurity, hatred of remedial penances, and, ultimately, an attempt to make an order of things based on the work of man apart from and outside of the reality revealed by and in relation to God.

And Cain’s city is not an isolated instance. The tower of Babel embodies mankind’s attempt to recreate aspects of what was lost from the Garden: order, security, control, purpose, and glory. All of these human plans are good, but apart from, outside of, and against a right relationship to God, they become the worst sort of human poison, which is why God consistently, and mercifully, steps into the narrative of Scripture and wrecks them (Genesis 11).

Biblical cities continue to be founded or re-founded on these basic anti-principles, making them the negative inversion of the Garden. Cities embody the victory of fallen mankind’s tunnel vision, or self-delusion. St. Augustine hauntingly named this psychosis as incurvatus in se. This “curving in on the self” is symbolized, in a special way, by the city walls and gates that keep the enemy—especially God and his demands—out. Cities are founded, re-founded, and protected not only on this skewed, partial, and anti-relational view of reality, but also, as you find out later, on human sacrifice, child sacrifice, and ritual rape of the most horrific sort (Genesis 19:1-5; Exodus 1:22; Judges 19:22-28; 2 Samuel 16:22; 2 Kings 3:26-27; Matthew 2:16).

Reality City

But if the Bible is so critical of cities, what is it doing presenting a city—not a garden—as the joyful consummation and perfection of all things at the end (Revelation 21:2)? This question gets immediately into a problem thorny enough that St. Thomas Aquinas dealt with it in the first question of his Summa Theologiae. It is the problem of biblical symbols, why God uses them at all, and how they can mean different things and be taken in many different senses. After giving several reasons for why God would choose to make use of symbols in Scripture, St. Thomas says something remarkable about how God does so: “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only, as man also can do, but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.”²

St. Thomas first compares a human author and the divine author—they both signify by words. Then, however, he contrasts them—only God can signify by means of “things themselves (res ipsae).” Human authors use words, metaphors, images, and symbols to signify, but God uses really-existing things. God means something by material, natural, and historical realities—gardens and cities included. At best, human authorship or interpretation makes use of, corresponds to, and reveals some aspect of the meaning of reality. Divine authorship or interpretation, however, makes reality to be what it is.

There are two profound implications to this insight. The first is that those really-existing material and historical things that God uses to signify his meaning do not first exist and only later have a symbolic meaning attached to them. Rather, in the divine plan from before the beginning, the being of a thing and its signification are inherently connected. God created these really-existing things to be the way that they were so that they could reveal what he wanted to reveal by them. To take a famous biblical example, God did not first create marriage and later decide to use it as an effective, intimate, and experiential symbol of the love that was to exist between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:22-32). That might be the order of experience or discovery on the part of the reader, but it is not the order of being, in which each creature communicates from its inception (Romans 1:20).

The second implication is a practical one for the biblical interpreter. The work of the biblical interpreter is not only to discover the meaning of words and imagery, but also to discover the sense in which God intends the things behind the words to signify. What does dirt or water indicate? What does wheat or a grapevine mean? What does a lion or a lamb or a man or a woman communicate? What does a garden or a city tell us? The world, for the biblical scholar, is a forest of symbols³ that communicate, if we learn the language, by means of likenesses. But how can we know them?

To Serve and Protect

The Bible shows Adam in the garden acting like God who named the parts of the universe he had just created. Adam similarly names the animals and reveals thereby his preternaturally graced ability to know the natures of things, including the intimate knowledge of what that thing signified in the divine plan.

Although the preternatural gifts were lost or mitigated by original sin, the divinely-ordered signification of things is still there in things, still known to God, still available on some level to a man who pays attention to the garden of nature, and is still contained in divine revelation (Wisdom 13:1-9). Divine revelation, in turn, is present in Sacred Scripture and Tradition, but the essential embodiment of Scripture and Tradition, as both Scripture and Tradition agree, is the sacred liturgy.⁴ Liturgy, in turn, is the intimate priestly experience and action of bringing about and accomplishing the right relation of all things to the God who made all things: nature and history, cosmos and culture, garden and city.

It is no accident, then, that the one biblical figure who unites and transforms garden and city is the figure of the priest in his sanctuary, doing his liturgy. The first example is Adam, who is both gardener and priest. When the Lord puts him in the garden “to serve it and guard it” (Genesis 2:15), the Hebrew verbs used there (abad and shamar) are never used in tandem elsewhere in the Bible except when describing the duties of those who had care for the tabernacle and sanctuary (Numbers 18:7). This is also why, much later in the Bible, the resurrected Jesus, the New Adam and High Priest of the new covenant, is in a garden and is mistaken for the gardener: it was not a mistake (John 19:41; 20:15).

And yet, although the Man from the garden is presented as a priest, he is never named one. That designation is first given to someone from a city. We have already pointed out the dismal reputation of cities in the Bible, but there is one exception—the city first named Salem, later Jebus, and later still Jerusalem (Genesis 14:18; Joshua 18:28; Psalm 76:2). The priest, who is also a king of that city, is named Melchizedek. This mysterious figure comes out to celebrate liturgically and sacrificially the great victory of Abram over the five kings who had captured his nephew Lot and his household.

Melchizedek offers bread and wine in a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God Most High and bestows a blessing on Abram. In the New Testament era, we might be so used to hearing about bread and wine as a sacrifice that we are tone deaf to the radical transformation of biblical symbols that just occurred in this short and cryptic vignette of Abram’s victory and the priesthood of Melchizedek.

The Spoils of Toil

Bread and wine, earlier in Genesis, are both introduced in the context of a curse. The Lord says to Adam, just before sending him away from Eden, that because he disobeyed, the earth from which he was taken and to which he is now going to return, is cursed. As a result of this curse, he will labor by the sweat of his brow to produce a pathetic substitute for the Edenic food he formerly enjoyed—a lousy comestible called bread (Genesis 3:19). Wine shows up similarly, functioning as the occasion of the first curse uttered by a man in the Bible, when Noah cursed his son Ham for what he did to him while he was suffering the effects of the first wine-induced drunkenness (Genesis 9:20-25).

In addition to this, bread and wine as realities and symbols unite city and garden. They are the end products of a ponderously long chain of agricultural and culinary and organizational crafting. If you do not believe me, try making bread sometime, and let me know at which step you are ready to quit: tilling, planting, tending, harvesting, drying, threshing, winnowing, grinding, mixing, or baking. Or just read The Little Red Hen. Wine is somewhat easier, but planting, trellising, pruning, gathering, crushing, fermenting, straining, and bottling is still a lot of work—and waiting. Both require tools, organization, cooperation, exchange, knowledge, and backup—in other words, a city.

But that, exactly, is the point of presenting bread and wine as really-existing things in the way that the Bible does. The work of man in cooperation with nature and God is transformed from futile to fruitful, and from fallen-human to transfigured-divine, from curse to blessing. God is interested in the best kind of victory because that is the one that best reveals the kind of God that he is. The deepest victory is not the obliteration of non-being by creation ex nihilo, nor the uncreation of evil by force of almighty will. The deepest victory is what we might call creation ex malo in which a greater good is created out of evil, where a blessing is fashioned out of what was cursed, and where life comes out of death (Genesis 50:20). Ultimately it is everything revealed by the meaning of the name Jesus: “The Lord Saves” (Matthew 1:21).

Ultimate Urban Garden

When the Bible concludes by showing us the city, the New Jerusalem, adorned to meet her husband, it is important to recognize not only her beauty, but her transformation. She has walls, but the gates are always open. She is founded on innocent human sacrificial blood, but it gives life. She has no temple, but is herself the holy of holies. She is a gigantic city, but within her is the garden of Eden. Nothing has been lost, but everything has been transformed (Revelation 21:1-22:5).

When Jesus from Bethlehem (“house of bread”), celebrated the first Eucharist with bread and wine, in the city of Jerusalem, according to the order of the high priesthood of Melchizedek, as the sign that signified and accomplished the one human sacrifice that redeems all the sin of the world, and that brought forth his bride who is a city from his side⁵ (John 19:34; Genesis 2:21), he knew exactly what he was doing. If we contemplate our biblical symbols carefully, and liturgically, we can know it too.

1. The Hebrew word (‘ot) is the same as the mark or sign-cross made from the blood of the Passover lamb marking the doorposts and lintels of the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 12:13). The word can also mean “pledge of protection.”
2. Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.10.
3. I borrow this happy phrase from the book of the same title by Abbe Claude Barthe (2023).
4. Providentissimus Deus, 15; Divino Afflante Spiritu, 26; and Dei Verbum, 21 are three examples from relatively recent Magisterium that Scripture and the liturgy share the same symbolic language, and that Scripture is best understood within the context of the Church’s tradition of liturgy.
5. The Greek word John uses for the “side” of Christ is the same word the Greek translators of Genesis had used for the “side” (pleura) of Adam.