-Removed-It makes more sense to believe it was a real tree. If it were just metaphorical then God would have no need to chase them out and place security around the tree to protect it from unauthorized access. But either way it is irrelevant.
What is useful to see is that those those insist it is a real tree also insist on believing much of the bible is literal. Christians who do that YECs who believe that the universe is 6000 yrs old.
@mchill saidThe tree of life is a common enough symbol in many cultures, as are other archetypical symbols, such as the way, the mountain, the journey to the underworld, and the arduous task.
Is the Tree of life literal or not?
I'm leaning in the direction of "No" it is not literal, and getting the answer is going to be pretty difficult since the geographical location of the garden of Eden as described in the bible is now under water. - Interesting question though
Once one accepts a literalist interpretation that it was a real tree, then the question arises, what kind of tree it was. A pine, a cypress, or some other? This is the point of my rhetorical question above, what kind of apple was it? Mine was, of course, a trick question -- there wasn't any apple. Apples were unknown in the Middle East in Biblical times. The origin of the popular mis-identification of the forbidden fruit with apples is based on a silly mistranslation, a confusion between the Latin words mฤlum (an apple) and mฤlum (an evil), which are written malum in non-Latin languages.
Was it a real tree? If so, was it a cypress or a pine or some other? If you go down that road, you're missing the point of Genesis. Taking references in Genesis to a tree literally is the crudest, most materialistic, least spiritual way of understanding what is going on in that book. Neither would an archeological excavation which identified the species of the putative Tree Of Life answer any question pertinent to the spiritual quest (for salvation). The point is best understood if one takes the passage as an allegory with a moral message.
