eastward. To an ancient reader in the Mesopotamian
milieu, the phrase “eastward in Eden” could be taken as meaning that the garden
sits at the dawn horizon—the meeting place of heaven and earth. By its very
nature, the horizon is not a final end point but rather a portal, a place of
two-way transition between the heavens and the earth. Nibley writes: “Egyptians
. . . never . . .speak of [the land
beyond the grave] as an earthly paradise; it is only to be reached by the dead.’
. . . [It] is neither heaven nor earth but lies between them. . . . In a Hebrew
Enoch apocryphon, the Lord, in visiting the earth, rests in the Garden of Eden
and, moving in the reverse direction, passes through ‘the Garden of the
firmament.’ . . . Every transition must be provided with such a setting, not
only from here to heaven, but in the reverse direction in the beginning” ([The
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment], 294-95). “The
passage from world to world and from horizon to horizon is dramatized in the
ordinances of the temple, which itself is called the horizon” ([Teachings of
the Pearl of Great Price], 199).
Situating this concept with respect to
the story of Adam and Eve, the Book of the Bee says that the garden “was
placed between heaven and earth, below the firmament [that is, below the
celestial world] and above the earth [that is, above the telestial world], and
that God placed it there . . . so that, if [Adam] kept [God’s] commands He
might lift him up to heaven, but if he transgressed them, He might cast him
down to this earth” ([Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, In God’s Image and Likeness,
1, 160, see also pp. 139-44, 161) (Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, The First Days &
The Last Days: A Verse-Commentary on the Book of Moses and JS-Matthew in Light
of the Temple [Orem, Utah: The Interpreter Foundation, 2021], 51)