Garden of Eden

The Fall of Man by Lucas Cranach, a 16th-century German depiction of Eden

The Garden of Eden (from Hebrew Gan Eden) is described by the Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man — Adam — and woman — Eve — lived after they were created by God. The past physical existence of this garden forms part of the creation belief of the Abrahamic religions.

The Genesis account (specifically, the Jahwist version of the creation story) supplies the geographical location of Eden in relation to four major rivers. However, because the identification of these rivers has been the subject of much controversy and speculation, a substantial consensus now exists that the knowledge of the location of Eden has been lost.

There are some religious groups who have a genesis story containing similar subject elements, but who ascribe various locations to the place of first habitation.

Belief in the veracity of the Eden story fundamentally implicates the concepts of God (specifically, the God of the Abrahamic religions) and creation.

The Garden of Eden story recounts that God placed Adam and Eve in a garden and commanded them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that they were expelled from the garden after they disobeyed Him, having been tempted by a serpent and having eaten of the fruit. The Tree of Life, also planted in the garden, was then denied them by means of a physical barrier, of cherubim and a flaming sword, at the entrance to the garden.

Judaism associates the serpent with Satan, based on the Oral Tradition (received at the same time as the Written Tradition). However, an early gnostic Christian sect, known as the Ophites, turned this on its head, worshipping the serpent as the hero trying to impart gnosis, and casting God as the evil villain trying to imprison them in the creation of the demi-urge.

In the account, the garden is planted "eastward, in Eden", and accordingly Eden properly denotes the larger territory containing 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.

For the association of the Garden of Eden with Paradise, see below.

Geography

Eden as depicted in Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights includes many exotic African animals.

The Book of Genesis 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 could feed Adam and Eve.

"A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers".

The text asserts that from Eden the river divided into four branches: Hiddekel a.k.a. Tigris, Euphrates, Pishon and Gihon. The identity of the latter two rivers have been the subject of endless argument, but if the Garden of Eden had really been near the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates, then the original narrators in the land of Canaan would have identified it as located generally in the Taurus Mountains, in Anatolia.

Satellite photos reveal two dry riverbeds flowing toward the Persian Gulf near where the Tigris and Euphrates also terminate. While this accounts for four rivers in the vicinity, that area is the mouth of those rivers rather than their source.

Alternate locations

If the location of the originally documented account is ignored, then there have been a number of claims as to the actual geographic location of the Garden of Eden, though none of these has much connection to the text of Genesis. Most put the Garden somewhere in the Middle East near Mesopotamia. Locations as diverse as Ethiopia, Java, Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, Brabant, and Bristol, Florida, have all been proposed as locations for the garden. Many Christian theologians believe that the Garden never had a terrestrial existence, but was instead an adjunct to heaven as it became identified with Paradise (see below).

Some literalists point out that the world of Eden's time was destroyed during Noah's Flood and it is therefore impossible to place the Garden anywhere in postdeluvial geography. There is also an attempt to tie this with the mystical sunken land of Atlantis. One favourite location is Sundaland in the South China Sea. In this case the current Tigris and Euphrates rivers would not be the ones referred to in the narrative, but later rivers named after two of the earlier rivers, just as in more modern times colonists would name features of their new land after similar features in their homeland. This idea also resolves the apparent problem that the Bible describes the rivers as having a common source, which the current rivers do not.

One recent claim by archaeologist David Rohl puts the garden in northwestern Iran. According to him, the Garden is a river valley east of Sahand Mountain, near Tabriz. He cites several geological similarities with Biblical descriptions, and multiple linguistic parallels as proof.

The Urantia Book (1955) places the Garden of Eden in a long narrow peninsula projecting westward from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and having been long ago submerged in connection with volcanic activity and the submergence of a Sicilian land bridge to Africa, features unidentified by geologists.

Sumeria and Dilmun

The first Sumerians lived in the plains of what is now southern Iraq. 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 entrepot of the island 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 Sumerian creation myth, Enûma Elish, has clear parallels with the Genesis narratives. After its actual decline, beginning about 1500 B.C.E., Dilmun developed such a reputation as a long-lost garden of exotic perfections that it appears to have influenced the story of the Garden of Eden. Some interpreters have tried to establish an Edenic garden at the trading center of Dilmun.

LDS geography for Eden

In Latter-day Saint theology, the Garden of Eden is believed to be located at what is now inside the city limits of Independence, Missouri, and this land is considered among the most holy. Mormons believe the configuration of the continents was different before the Great Flood and that the geographical descriptions of Eden in Genesis refer to entirely different lands and rivers that were later renamed after more familiar local lands and rivers in the Near East after the Flood.

Eden as Paradise

The word "paradise" (PaRDeS, PRDS, hebr.) used as a synonym for the Garden of Eden is a Persian word, which describes a walled orchard garden or an enclosed hunting park. It occurs three times in the Old Testament, significantly not in connection with Eden: in the Song of Solomon iv. 13: "Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard" ;Ecclesiastes ii. 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. Literary Hellenistic influences led to the Pauline Christian association of "paradise" with the realm of the blest. The Greek Garden of the Hesperides influenced the Christian concept of the Garden of Eden, and by the 16th century, in the Cranach painting (see illustration), only the action that takes place there identifies the setting as not the Garden of the Hesperides, with its golden fruit.

Some anthropologists have 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")... a metaphor reinforced by the words of the Book of Genesis.

Etymology

The origin of the term "Eden", which in Hebrew means "delight," may be with Akkadian edinu, which derives from the Sumerian E.DIN. The latter words mean "plain" or "steppe," so the connection between the terms may be coincidental. However, to modern eyes, the wording "east, in Eden" suggests a geographical rather than metaphorical use of the term.

Eden in Art

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

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.

External links

• Returning to Eden investigates the Garden of Eden motif from a political, historical, and philosophical perspective, viewing it as a precursor of political utopianism.
• Smithsonian article on the geography of the Tigris-Euphrates region
• Review of the Young Earth Creationist Book "After Eden"

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