Eden

"The Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranach der Ältere, a 16th century German depiction of Eden.

The Garden of Eden (Hebrew גַּן עֵדֶן, Gan Eden; Arabic: جنة عدن, Jannat ‘Adn)^[1] is a location described in the Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden (Gen. 2:8). This garden forms part of the creation and theodicy of the Abrahamic religions, often being used to explain the origin of sin and mankind's wrongdoings.

The location of the Garden of Eden remains the subject of much controversy and speculation. The creation story in Genesis relates the geographical location of both Eden and the garden to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates), and three regions (Havilah, Assyria, and Kush).^[2] There are hypotheses that place Eden at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates (northern Mesopotamia), in Iraq (Mesopotamia), Africa, and the Persian Gulf. For many medieval writers, the image of the Garden of Eden also creates a location for human love and sexuality, often associated with the classic and medieval trope of the locus amoenus.^[3]

Etymology

The origin of the Hebrew עדן, which in translates to "delight", may derive from the Sumerian term EDIN.^[4] The Sumerian term means steppe, plain, desert or wilderness,^[5] so the connection between the words may be coincidental. This word is known to have been used by the Sumerians to refer to the arid lands west of the Euphrates. Alan Millard has put forward a case for the name deriving from the Semitic stem dn, meaning "abundant, lush".

The story from source texts

Genesis

"Expulsion from Paradise", marble bas-relief by Lorenzo Maitani on the Orvieto Cathedral, Italy

God charges Adam to tend the garden in which they live, and specifically commands Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve is quizzed by the serpent concerning why she avoids eating off this tree. In the dialogue between the two, Eve elaborates on the commandment not to eat of its fruit. She says that even if she touches the fruit she will die. The serpent responds that she will not die, rather she and her husband would "be as gods, knowing good and evil," and persuades Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then Adam eats from it too. It's at this point that the two become aware, "to know good and evil," evidenced by an awareness of their nakedness. God then finds them, confronts them, and judges them for disobeying.

It is at this point that 'God expels them from Eden', to keep Adam and Eve from also partaking of the Tree of Life. The story says that God placed cherubim with an omnidirectional "flaming sword" to guard against any future entrance into the garden.

In the account, the garden is planted "eastward, in Eden," and accordingly "Eden" properly denotes the larger territory which contains the garden, rather than being the name of the garden itself: it is, thus, the garden located in Eden. The Talmud also states (Brachos 34b) that the Garden is distinct from Eden.

Book of Jubilees

Giovanni di Paolo's The Creation and the Expulsion from the Paradise (1445)

The Book of Jubilees, canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, relates a tradition that the angels did not place Adam in the garden until his 40th day, and his wife Eve on the 80th day. Later on (4:23-27), it states that they also conducted Enoch into the garden of Eden when he was translated from the Earth at age 365, where he records the evil deeds of mankind for all time — adding further that the garden is one of four holy places that the Lord has on Earth, the other three being Mount Sinai, Mount Zion, and the 'Mount of the East' (usually assumed by scholars to mean Mount Ararat).^{[citation needed]}

Geography

Spanish-Arabic world map from 1109 CE with Eden in east (at top)

The Book of Genesis is the primary Scriptural source of information regarding the geography of Eden, but actually contains little information on the Garden itself. It was home to both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as well as an abundance of other vegetation that Adam and Eve could eat:

Genesis 2:10-14

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

In Islam the names of the rivers of paradise (Arabic: Jannah) are Saihan (Syr Darya), Jaihan (Amu Darya), Furat (Euphrates) and Nil (Nile).^[6]

Location

There have been a number of claims as to the actual geographic location of the Garden of Eden, though many of these have little or no connection to the text of Genesis. Most put the Garden somewhere in the Middle East.

In the Middle East

Southern Mesopotamia and The Persian Gulf

The mouth of the river Tigris, a proposed location of the Garden of Eden.

Archaeologist Juris Zarins claimed that the Garden of Eden was situated at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers run into the sea at 29°47′0″N 48°38′0″E / 29.783333°N 48.633333°E / 29.783333; 48.633333, from his research on this area using information from many different sources, including Landsat images from space.^[7] In this theory, the Bible’s Gihon River would correspond with the Al-Qurnah in Iraq, and the Pishon River would correspond to the Wadi Al-Batin river system (also now called the Kuwait River) that 2,500-3000 years ago drained the now dry, but once quite fertile central part of the Arabian Peninsula from the Hijaz mountains 600 miles to the South West.

On the History Channel's Decoding the Past, in the episode "Mysteries of the Garden of Eden", it is noted that circa 6000 BC, ocean levels were rising, and that near the present entry of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf there are geological traces of two fossil rivers from that time frame entering from east and west of the Persian Gulf, conjectured to be the Pishon and Gihon. The conjecture was presented that the Garden of Eden referred to a low-lying fertile valley in what is now the Persian Gulf, which was flooded when the seas rose past the level of the lowest passes of the mountains near the present Strait of Hormuz.

Sumer and Dilmun (Bahrain)

Some of the historians working from within the cultural horizons of southernmost Sumer, where the earliest surviving non-Biblical source of the legend lies, point to the quite genuine Bronze Age entrepôt of the island theorized by some to be Dilmun (now Bahrain) in the Persian Gulf, described as 'the place where the sun rises' and 'the Land of the Living'. The setting of the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Elish, has clear parallels with the Genesis narratives. After its actual decline, beginning about 1500 BC, Dilmun developed such a reputation as a long-lost garden of exotic perfections that it may have influenced the story of the Garden of Eden. Some interpreters have tried to establish an Edenic garden at the trading-center of Dilmun.

Iran

Another possibility was proposed by archaeologist David Rohl who states that there were two gardens of Eden. One that existed pre-flood in Iran, which was the original garden of Eden. And one that existed after the flood in Bahrain. Based on archaeological evidence, putting the garden in north-western Iran. According to him, the Garden was located in a vast plain referred to in ancient Sumerian texts as Eden (lit. "Plain", or "Steppe") east of the Sahand Mountain, near Tabriz. He cites several geological similarities with Biblical descriptions, and multiple linguistic parallels as evidence. In the Sumerian texts, an emissary is sent north through "Seven Gates", also known as Mountain passes in ancient texts. Hebrew lore includes references to Seven layers of Heaven, the 7th being the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. Just beyond the seventh gate, or pass, was the kingdom of Aratta.^[8] The region today is bound by a large mountain range to the North, East and South, and marshlands to the west. The eastern mountain region has a pass leading in and out of the Eden region. This fits with the Biblical geography of Eden containing marshlands to the west,^[9] and the Land of Nod to the east, outside the Garden. Geographically speaking, it would form a "wall" around the Garden, conforming to the definition of the Persian word pairidaeza (paradise) and the Hebrew word gan (garden), both of which mean a "walled garden or park". Additionally, this location would be bound by the four biblical rivers to the West, Southwest, East and Southeast.

Jerusalem

Several religious traditions identify the location of the garden of Eden with the city of Jerusalem,^[10] in particular Gihon Spring.^[11]

Outside the Middle East

Jackson County, Missouri

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormons or Latter Day Saints), the Garden of Eden is believed to have been located in present-day Jackson County, Missouri.^[12] According to Mormon theology, Independence, Missouri, was revealed to be the "center place" of Zion and the original dwelling place of Adam and Eve in the Garden which God planted "eastward in Eden".^[13][14] Mormons believe that Adam and Eve traveled 85 miles north to the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman after they had transgressed and were driven from the Garden.^[15] (Adam-ondi-Ahman is sometimes mistakenly associated with the location of the garden itself). As for its location in the western hemisphere, some Latter-day Saints have presumed the continents were not yet separate before the Great Flood^[16] and that this approach would be consistent with the configuration of the super-continent Pangaea.^[17] While geologists consider that the continents had separated by the Cretaceous period, some Latter-day Saints and other Christians have pointed to the account in Genesis which states that the earth was "divided" in the days of Peleg.^[18]

In the footnotes of the Pearl of Great Price that are published by the church, it is claimed that there were lands and rivers that were given names later attached to other lands and rivers as in the Book of Genesis.^[19] The geographic descriptions of Eden in the Bible would therefore refer to entirely different lands and rivers than those carrying the same names today, whose names were transposed after the biblical flood to local lands and rivers in the Near East.

Western Europe

Western European thinking often separate the source of our historic origins and the Middle East developments that followed. The green, lush lands of Britain are often thought as an Eden and a place of our historic origins.

Ribble Valley (England)

Amongst the theories which place the Garden of Eden outside of the Middle East is that of the Ribble Valley where the Rivers Calder and Hodder and Dawen flow into the Ribble. The landscape of the valley provides the mentioned 'wall' for the garden and the marshland to the East are the moorlands of the Penine hills. The area remains fertile and tranquil today as it would have been then and this unique landscape appealed to the Romans who developed a settlement in the nearby Ribchester.

Mòinteach Bharbhais (Scotland)

According to some strands of Scottish Gaelic tradition the Garden was located in Mòinteach Bharbhais (Barvas Moor) on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Climate change has since altered the topography and prevailing weather considerably.^{[citation needed]}

Interpretation

Eden as paradise

"The Garden of Eden" by Thomas Cole (c.1828)

"Paradise" (Hebrew פרדס PaRDeS) used as a synonym for the Garden of Eden shares a number of characteristics with words for 'walled orchard garden' or 'enclosed hunting park' in Old Persian. The word "paradise" occurs three times in the Old Testament, but always in contexts other than a connection with Eden: in the Song of Solomon iv. 13: "Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard"; Ecclesiastes 2. 5: "I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits"; and in Nehemiah ii. 8: "And a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king's orchard, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace which appertained to the house, and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me." In the Song of Solomon, it is clearly "garden;" in the second and third examples "park." In the post-Exilic apocalyptic literature and in the Talmud, "paradise" gains its associations with the Garden of Eden and its heavenly prototype. In the Pauline Christian New Testament, there is an association of "paradise" with the realm of the blessed (as opposed to the realm of the cursed) among those who have already died, with literary Hellenistic influences observed by numerous scholars. The Greek Garden of the Hesperides was somewhat similar to the Christian concept of the Garden of Eden, and by the 16th century a larger intellectual association was made in the Cranach painting (see illustration at top). In this painting, only the action that takes place there identifies the setting as distinct from the Garden of the Hesperides, with its golden fruit.

Alan Millard has hypothesized that the Garden of Eden does not represent a 'geographical' place, but rather represents 'cultural memory' of "simpler times", when man lived off God's bounty (as "primitive" hunters and gatherers still do) as opposed to toiling at agriculture (being "civilized").^[20] Of course there is much dispute between Judeo-Christian and secular scholars as to the plausibility of this idea - the refuting claim being that cultivation and agricultural work were present both before and after the "Garden Life".

The Second Book of Enoch, of late but uncertain date, states that both Paradise and Hell are accommodated in the third sphere of heaven, Shehaqim, with Hell being located simply " on the northern side:" see Seventh Heaven.

Eden as a Kingdom

The Expulsion illustrated in the English Caedmon manuscript, c. AD 1000

Eden as depicted in the first or left panel of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych. The panel includes many imagined and exotic African animals.^[21]

The structure and order defined by God in the Garden of Eden is also believed to have been the early structure for the Kingdom of God. Immediately following the creation of Man, God commands them to "fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground" (Gen 1:28). The obvious references to domination are important to the Christian view of Man's relation to nature and Man's role in the Kingdom of God.

Later, in Chapter 3, the "Fall of Man" is followed by the pronouncement of a curse. This curse contains references to the enmity between the Kingdom and its subjects—as had been described in 1:28—that would affect the kingdom unto the present day: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers."

In art

Garden of Eden motifs most frequently portrayed in illuminated manuscripts and paintings are the "Sleep of Adam" ("Creation of Eve"), the "Temptation of Eve" by the Serpent, the "Fall of Man" where Adam takes the fruit, and the "Expulsion". The idyll of "Naming Day in Eden" was less often depicted. Much of Milton's Paradise Lost occurs in the Garden of Eden. Michelangelo depicted a scene at the Garden of Eden in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Garden of Eden

• Smithsonian article on the geography of the Tigris-Euphrates region
• Many translations of II Kings 19:12