The Garden of Cyrus

...experience of fifteen hundred years left much for future discovery in botanical agriculture; nor am I fully persuaded that wine was the invention of Noah; that fermented liquors, which often occur naturally, remained unknown to human luxury or experience for so long; that the first sin of the new world was no sin of the old; that Cain and Abel were the first to offer sacrifice; or, because the Scripture is silent on the matter, that Adam or Isaac offered none at all.

WHETHER Abraham, who was raised in the first lands to be settled, followed some rule regarding this pattern when he planted a grove at Beer-sheba, or whether at least a similar arrangement existed in the garden of Solomon, is a point that probability might argue for. This would be consistent with the wisdom of that eminent botanologer original: "botanologer"; a student of plants or a botanist and orderly arranger of all his other works. This is especially true since this was one way he pursued a noble form of happiness, according to his own description: “I made gardens and orchards for myself, and planted trees in them of all kinds of fruit. I made pools of water to irrigate the wood that produces trees” Ecclesiastes 2:5-6. This was no ordinary plantation if, according to the Targum Targum: an ancient Aramaic translation or paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible or Chaldee paraphrase, it contained all kinds of plants—some brought from as far away as India—and if its size stretched from the wall of Jerusalem to the waters of Siloam.

AND if Jordan was actually Jaar Eden original: Jaar Eden; "Forest of Eden" (that is, the river of Eden), and Gennesaret was actually Gansar original: Gansar; "Prince of Gardens" (or the prince of gardens); and if it could be proven that the plain of Jordan was watered not just by comparison but because it was literally the Paradise of God (as the learned Abramas Nicholas Abram (1589–1655), a Jesuit scholar and commentator suggests), then Solomon was not far from the original model of all plantations. And since even in Paradise itself the tree of knowledge was placed in the middle of the garden, whatever its overall shape was, it did not lack a center and a rule of decussation decussation: the act of crossing or intersecting in the shape of an 'X' or cross. Whether the groves and sacred plantations of antiquity were not also arranged in this orderly way, either by quaternios quaternios: groups of four or quintuple ordinations quintuple ordinations: arrangements of five, specifically the quincunx, is a question well worth considering. For since the ancients were so methodical in building their temples—observing the proper placement, direction, style, form, and order in architectural relationships—it is likely they were just as precise in the groves and plantations around them, choosing specific forms and species to honor their respective deities. And in their groves dedicated to the sun, this was a suitable number to denote the days of the year through multiplication, and it might hieroglyphically hieroglyphically: symbolically, like a sacred carving represent...