The Bible Commentaries and Others: East of Eden

East of Eden

EAST, EAST OF EDEN When Cain was sent out as a perpetual fugitive he “went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (Gen. 4:16). Since “Nod” in Hebrew means “wandering”—an irony noted by St. Jerome—there is a double edge to Cain’s condemnation. He wanders in the land of wanderings; as Jerome puts it, there is in fact no “Land of Nod.” Strictly speaking, it is a “no man’s land,” in which Cain is said (v. 17) to build a city called Ḥanok or “Enoch” (Jerome, Ep. 46.7; cf. Glossa Ordinaria [PL 113.100]). To “drop into the Land of Nod” has come to mean to have wandering thoughts or daydreams, or to fall asleep; Melville’s Ishmael uses the phrase in this way in Moby-Dick to describe his nearly unfortunate nap in the Spouter Inn, and Charles Reade’s narrator uses it of his “lady” in this sense in Hard Cash (chap. 17). Talmudic lore assigns to the area east of Eden the abode of Adam also after the Fall (Konen 29), the view that Paradise itself was in the East being based upon Gen. 1:8 (although some rabbinic authorities understood that there was a preexisting Paradise situated in the West, or Northwest [Bera. 55b; 1 Enoch 32]). Early English literary references are typically to the monstrous or reprobate descendants of Cain, as in Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World, where the Henochii, citizens of Cain’s city Enoch, are said to dwell “towards the east side of Eden, where Cain dwelt.” Sir John Mandeville reflects the tradition that one of Noah’s sons, Ham, inherited the East after the Flood, seizing it by cruelty, and that his son was Nimrod the giant, who built the “tower of Babylon.” The people of Ham were said to have sexual commerce with demons, producing monstrosities of all kinds, the ultimate incarnation of which was “the Emperor” or Ghengis Khan, with his “Lordes from the East” (Travels, chap. 24).

Dryden, in his essay “Virgil and the Aeneid,” calls Cain the first traveler, who “went into the land of Nod” before either Ulysses or Aeneas was born. But the less pleasant associations with Cain persist, both whimsically—as in the case of O. Henry’s loquacious interlocutor’s wife in “Municipal Report,” who though she “traced her descent back to Eve” felt it necessary to deny “any possible rumor” that she may have had her beginnings “in the land of Nod”—and somberly, as in John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden (1952). In this dark and loosely biblical saga the protagonist Adam Trask marries and moves west to California with his twin sons Caleb and Aron, only to be abandoned there by his sinister wife, who becomes a brothel madam in Salinas after murdering its previous owner.

All these allusions belie other associations of the east with wisdom, magnificence, and spiritual knowledge, such as are reflected in the story of the Magi, “wise men from the east” who came to Jerusalem asking for the king of the Jews, saying that they had “seen his star in the east, and [were] come to worship him” (Matt. 2:1–2, 9). The East in this sense has often been connected, as have the Wise Men, with magic, astrology, and such Eastern religions as Zoroastrianism. Rose Macaulay describes a modern wanderer in the land of Nod who “was in travail with a new set of ideas, and their pressure rent him cruelly. Then one day, ‘I have seen his star in the east,’ cried papa, and became a Theosophist” (Told by an Idiot, 2.20).