What does “East of Eden” mean?

Where the phrase comes from

The words close the story of Cain and Abel. After the murder, God sentences Cain to be “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12). Then Cain goes.

Cain left Yahweh’s presence, and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

The Hebrew is qidmat-eden. Nod is on no map. Its name comes from the same root as wanderer, so the land of Nod is the Land of Wandering. To live east of Eden is to live outside the garden, away from God’s presence, in exile. Why Cain killed his brother is a story of its own; the phrase is about where he ended up.

Every step leads east

Genesis points east from the start. God plants the garden “eastward, in Eden” (Genesis 2:8). When he sends Adam and Eve out, he guards the way back on that side.

So he drove out the man; and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

The gate faces east, so the first exiles walk east, and Cain goes further east still. The pattern keeps going. The builders of Babel travel east to the plain of Shinar (Genesis 11:2), the land of Babylon. Lot travels east, toward Sodom (Genesis 13:11). Abraham sends the sons of his concubines away “eastward, to the east country” (Genesis 25:6). In Hebrew the word for east, qedem, also means what lies in front and what is ancient. Many readers notice that in Genesis east is the direction of leaving, while Abraham walks west, from Ur to the promised land. Later the tabernacle’s only gate faced east (Exodus 27:13–16), with cherubim woven into its inner veil (Exodus 26:31): to come near God, a worshiper walked west, back the way Adam left.

Why Steinbeck chose it

John Steinbeck’s working title for his big California novel was The Salinas Valley. For a while he called it Cain Sign. Then, copying the sixteen verses of Genesis 4 into the manuscript, he found his title in the last words of the last verse, in the King James wording: Cain dwelt “in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” East of Eden (1952) follows two generations of brothers, from Connecticut to California’s Salinas Valley: Charles and Adam Trask, then Adam’s sons Cal and Aron, each pair replaying Cain and Abel.

The book turns on the same chapter. Lee, the Trasks’ Chinese American servant and friend, tells how his elders spent two years learning Hebrew to settle one verb in God’s warning to Cain (Genesis 4:7). English Bibles made it a promise or an order; the elders decide it means “thou mayest,” a choice. Steinbeck spelled the word timshel; the Hebrew text reads timshol. In 1955 Elia Kazan filmed the last part of the novel, with James Dean as Cal.

East of Eden today

The phrase carries Genesis with it: life after the garden, where people work hard ground, wander, choose and build. Fittingly, Cain’s next act east of Eden is to found the Bible’s first city, named after his son Enoch (Genesis 4:17). And Nod went on a stranger journey. In 1738 Jonathan Swift made a pun on it, and “the land of Nod” became an English way of saying sleep.