What Does Genesis 2:11 Mean?

The LORD God takes the man and places him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. The purpose is immediate and practical: the man is not placed in the garden to enjoy it passively but to cultivate (abad) and guard (shamar) it. Work is pre-fall: the calling to productive stewardship is given before disobedience, before the curse, before the painful toil of the fallen agricultural world. Labor is the gift of the created calling, not the punishment of the fall.

The words used for the man's work in the garden, abad (to serve, cultivate, work) and shamar (to guard, keep, watch over), are used together in the Pentateuch for the duties of the Levites who serve in and guard the sanctuary (Numbers 3:7-8; 18:5-6). The garden is conceived, in this lexical pattern, as a proto-sanctuary: the place where God meets with the human, where human service is directed toward the maintenance of the sacred space. The man is the garden's priest-steward.

The placement of the man in the garden is an act of commissioning, specifically positioning. God places the man in the garden with a purpose: tend and guard it. Later, when the man is expelled from the garden, the expulsion is expressed in the same vocabulary negatively, the man is "sent out" from the Eden to work the ground outside (3:23). The garden work was the man's calling; the cursed ground is the place where the calling is carried on, in diminished and painful form, after the fall.