Adam’s mandate is
nothing less than an ordination. He is in the garden to “till and keep it”—serve
and guard it. The Hebrew verbs for these two activities—‘abodah and shamar—appear
together elsewhere in the Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible,
only to describe the ministry of the priests and the Levites in the holy place
(see Nm 3:7-8; 8:26; 18:5-6). (Scott Hahn, Many are Called: Rediscovering
the Glory of the Priesthood [New York: Doubleday, 2010], 42)