Is Assyria more beautiful than the tree of life?

Question

Ezekiel 31

3 Consider Assyria, once a cedar in Lebanon,
with beautiful branches overshadowing the forest;
it towered on high,
its top above the thick foliage.

Ezekiel compares Assyria to a cedar that is better than any tree in Eden.

8 The cedars in the garden of God could not rival it, nor could the junipers equal its boughs, nor could the plane trees compare with its branches-- no tree in the garden of God could match its beauty.

Genesis 2:9

The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground--trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Can it be that it is more beautiful than the tree of life? What does it mean?

Answer 1

This question does not have an answer because we are comparing two trees of completely different natures, specifically:

• The tree of life in the garden of Eden was a LITERAL (real, actual) tree
• The tree to which Assyria is likened is a FIGURATIVE (non-literal, imaginative) tree.

The cedar of Lebanon to which Assyria is likened is called "beautiful and tall" simply to denote its political dominance at the time that Ezekiel wrote about (Eze 31:3, 8, etc), which was about 100 years before Ezekiel's time when Assyria was the dominant power in the middle east.

Thus, because the tree in the prophecy is figurative and the tree of life literal, an actual comparison is not possible because Ezekiel only used it as a rhetorical device, a figure of speech.