Tree of life
A tree whose fruit gives life without end. In Genesis it grows in the middle of the Garden of Eden beside the tree of knowledge; Jews call the Torah a tree of life, Kabbalists draw the ten sefirot as one, and Norse myth has its own world tree.
Meaning
Genesis puts “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. Once Adam and Eve have eaten from the second, God sends them out of Eden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”, and sets cherubim and a flaming sword “to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 2:9 and 3:22–24, King James Version). The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 reads the writer’s idea as a tree whose fruit had the magical power to give immortality to whoever ate it. The same words became a figure of speech in Proverbs, where wisdom “is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her”, and the Torah scroll is still rolled on wooden rods called atzei chayim, “woods of life”. Christians read the tree again in the last chapter of the Bible, by the river of the heavenly city. Jewish mystics drew the ten sefirot, the aspects of God, as a tree; Norse myth has Yggdrasil, the ash at the centre of the world; and since Charles Darwin biologists have drawn the descent of living things as a “Tree of Life”.
Origin and history
Where the idea came from is a scholars’ question. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article, by Emil G. Hirsch and George A. Barton, notes that Karl Budde had argued that the original story in Genesis had only one tree, the tree of knowledge. Barton’s view, given there, was that the especially sacred tree of early Semitic life was the date palm, which stood for both knowledge and life, and that splitting the two between two trees came later. He thought the tradition reached the Hebrews by way of Babylonia, where the palm was the sacred tree of a sacred garden and its name was sometimes written with the sign for a god, and he pointed to Solomon’s Temple, carved with cherubim, palm trees and flowers. Mesopotamia’s own sacred tree has its page under the Assyrian sacred tree.
In Hebrew writing, the Encyclopedia traces the tree from a literal tree in Genesis to a metaphor in Proverbs (“The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life”; “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life”) and then to a feature of the heavenly paradise in Ezekiel and the apocalypses. Ezekiel sees trees by a river flowing from Jerusalem “whose leaf shall not fade”; the Book of Revelation, quoting him, calls it the tree of life. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch gives it “a fragrance beyond all fragrance”.
The Qur’an tells the story of Eden with one forbidden tree. Satan whispers to Adam, “shall I shew thee the tree of Eternity, and the Kingdom that faileth not?”, and elsewhere tells the couple that God forbade the tree “only lest ye should become angels, or lest ye should become immortals” (Sura 20 and Sura 7, in J. M. Rodwell’s translation). Rodwell noted that these passages do not make the distinction Genesis makes between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.
Is the tree of life in the Bible?
Yes, in its first book and its last. In Genesis 2–3 it stands in Eden and is guarded after Adam and Eve are sent out. Proverbs uses the phrase four times as a figure of speech. In Revelation 22 it grows “on either side of the river” of the heavenly city and “bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations”; the chapter ends with a blessing on those who “have right to the tree of life”.
What kind of tree was it?
Genesis does not say. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, outside the Hebrew Bible, describes its fruit as beautiful and like “the dates of a palm”, and Barton took the date palm to be the tree behind the story.
The Torah as a tree of life
Proverbs 3:18 is the root of the Jewish image. Menachem Posner of Chabad.org notes that in many congregations the verse is among those chanted as the Torah is returned to the ark after the reading, which has given rise to many songs beginning etz chayim hee. Because the Hebrew etz means both tree and wood, the two wooden dowels a Torah scroll is rolled on are called atzei chayim. Posner also points out a small difference in the wording: Proverbs calls the Torah “a tree of life”, etz chayim, while the tree in Eden is “the Tree of Life”, etz hachayim.
The tree of the sefirot in Kabbalah
In Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, the tree is a picture of God. Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism, describes the ten sefirot as “the mystical Tree of God or tree of divine power each representing a branch whose common root is unknown and unknowable”. The image is old. The Bahir, the oldest Kabbalistic text, edited in Provence in the twelfth century, already says that all the divine powers “form a succession of layers and are like a tree”, and in the Zohar the tree and the human body are the two main images of the sefirot. Scholem lists their usual names, from Kether Elyon, the “supreme crown” of God, through Hokhmah, “wisdom”, to Malkhuth, the “kingdom” of God, at the foot. One reading in and around the Zohar, he writes, holds that the sefirot were revealed to Adam in the shape of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, the middle and the last sefirah, and that Adam’s sin was to separate them. The main work of Isaac Luria’s school, by his follower Hayim Vital, is itself called Ets Hayim, the Tree of Life.
The Kabbalah Centre’s tree
The tree taught by the Kabbalah Centre, the movement that drew celebrity followers such as Madonna, is a modern teaching. Philip Berg founded what became the Kabbalah Centre in New York in 1965; Nicole Bauer, writing for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, says that he combined classical Kabbalistic ideas with New Age thought, and that from the 1990s the Centre addressed a non-Jewish audience as well, in the language of self-help. Its own course describes the Tree of Life or the ten sefirot as “ten filters of energy from the Endless to the physical world”.
The cross as a tree
Christian legend joined the tree of Eden to the cross. The Golden Legend, the medieval collection of saints’ lives, says the wood of the cross “was found of Seth in Paradise terrestrial”. Adam’s son Seth went to the gates of Paradise for the oil of mercy for his dying father. In one version an angel gave him a branch; in another, a piece “of the tree that Adam ate of”, which Seth planted on Adam’s grave and which stood there until Solomon’s time. On the axe from the Mammen grave in Denmark, buried in the winter of 970–71, a tree is carved that the National Museum of Denmark says “may symbolise the Christian Tree of Life or the pagan tree Yggdrasil”.
Darwin’s tree of life
In On the Origin of Species (1859) Charles Darwin compared the descent of species to a growing tree, its dead branches the fossil groups that left no descendants. “So by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life,” he wrote, “which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”
Read next
- Next in Symbols across culturesLabyrinthA single path that winds back and forth to a centre and out again. In Greek myth it was the building Daedalus made at Knossos to hold the Minotaur; medieval churches laid it in their floors, and the Chartres labyrinth of about 1205 to 1215 is still walked.
- In Mesopotamian symbols and godsAssyrian sacred treeA stylised tree carved again and again in Assyrian palaces between winged figures or kings, often under the winged disc. It is no real plant; the Metropolitan Museum calls it a symbol of the fertility, abundance and prosperity of Assyria.
See also
Yggdrasil, Latin cross, Axis mundi, Crescent moon, Spiral, Cosmic egg.
Sources
- The Holy Bible, King James Version, Project Gutenberg eBook #10, Project Gutenberg, Genesis 2:9, 3:22–24; Proverbs 3:18, 11:30, 15:4; Revelation 22:2, 22:14
- Tree of Life (Jewish Encyclopedia), Emil G. Hirsch and George A. Barton, “Tree of Life”, The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1906), JewishEncyclopedia.com (Kopelman Foundation), Biblical data; critical view
- Etz Chayim: The Tree of Life in the Bible and Beyond, Menachem Posner, Chabad.org (Internet Archive copy, 30 December 2025), Chabad.org, sections “Etz Chayim Songs”, “Torah Dowels”, note 3
- Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem, 3rd revised edition (Schocken, 1961), Internet Archive, pp. 75, 212–215, 231–232, 254, 330
- Kabbalah Centre (World Religions and Spirituality Project), Nicole Bauer, “Kabbalah Centre”, World Religions and Spirituality Project, 12 May 2017, World Religions and Spirituality Project, timeline; history
- The Ten Sefirot in Our Lives, Eitan Yardeni, online lesson, 26 March 2019, The Kabbalah Centre, lesson highlights
- The Koran (Rodwell translation), J. M. Rodwell (trans.), The Koran, Project Gutenberg, Sura 20 and note 27; Sura 7
- The Golden Legend, Volume 3, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, in William Caxton’s English, Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University, Of the Invention of the Holy Cross
- An axe with double meaning, National Museum of Denmark
- The grave from Mammen, National Museum of Denmark
- Yggdrasil (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
- On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, first edition (1859), Project Gutenberg, Chapter IV
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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