Garden of Eden

For other uses, see Garden of Eden (disambiguation).

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

The Garden of Eden (Hebrew גַּן עֵדֶן, Gan ʿEdhen), is the biblical "garden of God", described most notably in the Book of Genesis (Genesis 2-3), but also mentioned, directly or indirectly, in Ezekiel, Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament.

Summary

Genesis 2:4-3:24

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

See Genesis 2-3

The Genesis creation narrative opens with God's creating the first human (adam) from the earth (adamah) and breathing the divine gift of life into him. God tasks him to tend the garden and protect it, but forbids him to eat of one of two special trees in the garden, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Recognising that "it is not good for the human to be alone," God "builds" (the meaning of the Hebrew verb) a woman from a rib of the man so that he will have a helpmate "fitting" to him. The man then sings a song emphasising the bond the first human couple share: "Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, this will be called Woman (Hebrew ishshah) because out of man (Hebrew ish she was taken." Genesis 2 concludes with a statement that this is the origin of marriage, and that the first human couple "were naked and were not ashamed."

The second part of the Genesis Eden story introduces the talking Serpent, who induces the woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, "good for food, a delight to the eyes, and good for becoming wise." The woman eats and gives the fruit to the man, who eats also, "and the eyes of both of them were opened." Aware of their nakedness they hide from God when he comes to his garden to walk in the cool of the evening, and then blame each other and the snake when God discovers their disobedience. God pronounces punishment on all three: the snake will no longer walk but will crawl on his belly, the woman will suffer pain in childbirth, and the man will be condemned to work the ground until he dies and returns to it. God then expels them from Eden for fear that they will eat from the second tree, the Tree of Life", gaining god-like immortality as well as god-like wisdom, and sets a cherub with a flaming sword at the gate to prevent any return.

The story locates the garden with reference to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates), and three regions (Havilah, Assyria, and Kush). 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.

The text of the Genesis garden-story is surrounded by uncertainties. Notable among them are: (1) whether the word "eden" means a steppe or plain, or instead means "delight" or some similar term; (2) whether the garden was in the east of Eden, or Eden itself was in the east, or whether "east" is not the correct word at all and the Hebrew means the garden was "of old"; (3) whether the river in Genesis 2:10 "follows from" or "rises in" Eden, and the relationship, if any, of the four rivers to each other; and (4) whether Cush, where one of the four rivers flows, means Ethiopia (in Africa) or Elam (just east of Mesopotamia).

Ezekiel and elsewhere

See Ezekiel 28:12-19

Main article: Ezekiel's cherub in Eden

In Ezekiel 28:12-19 the prophet Ezekiel (the "son of man") sets down God's word against the king of Tyre: the king was the "seal of perfection", adorned with precious stones from the day of his creation, placed by God in the garden of Eden on the holy mountain as a guardian cherub. But the king sinned through wickedness and violence, and so he was driven out of the garden and thrown to the earth, where now he is consumed by God's fire: "All the nations who knew you are appalled at you, you have come to a horrible end and will be no more."

The trees of the garden are mentioned in Ezekiel 31, and scattered passages from Ezekiel, Zechariah and the Psalms refer to trees and water in relation to the Temple without explicitly mentioning Eden.

Etymology

In the past the favoured derivation was from the Akkadian edinnu, itself derived from a Sumerian word meaning "plain" or "steppe", but it now appears more closely related to an Aramaic root meaning "fruitful, well-watered."

Geography

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

The Book of Genesis does not state a physical geographic location for the garden of Eden, but ideally it is "the garden of God" or divine home (Ezek 31:8-9). Also, according to some ancient myths, all of the world's major rivers flow out of the divine home. Genesis 2:10-14 names the garden of Eden as the source of four rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, great waterways of Mesopotamia, and the Pishon and Gihon. Four waterways were possibly cited because in ancient times, similar to today, the world was charted in four different directions, North, South, East and West.

Location

The Biblical description of the garden says:

Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.[...] The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

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 between Najaf and Kufa in Iraq (Mesopotamia) in the Middle East. There is uncertainty whether the places mentioned in this verse correspond to modern places of the same name. For example, the Hebrew word for the Tigris has been suggested to be Hiddekel, but the locations of the Pishon and Gihon are generally unknown.

Map showing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

In the Middle East

Lebanon

Based on an analysis of Ezekiel 31:15–18, Terje Stordalen has suggested "an apparent identification of Eden and Lebanon in Ezekiel 31" and symbolical relationships between Eden and Lebanon. John Pairman Brown wrote "it appears that the Lebanon is an alternative placement in Phoenician myth (as in Ez 28,13, III.48) of the Garden of Eden". and Paul Swarup also discusses connections between paradise, the garden of Eden and the forests of Lebanon (possibly used symbolically) within prophetic writings. Edward Lipinski and Peter Kyle McCarter have suggested that the Garden of the gods (Sumerian paradise), the oldest Sumerian version of the Garden of Eden, relates to a mountain sanctuary in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges.

Sumer and Dilmun

Some of the historians working from within the cultural horizons of southernmost Sumer, where the earliest surviving non-Biblical source of the Biblical account lies, point to the quite genuine Bronze Age entrepôt of the island Dilmun (theorized by some to be Bahrain) in the Middle / Near East, described as 'the place where the sun rises' and 'the Land of the Living'. The setting of the older Assyrian-Babylonian creation narrative, Enûma Elish, has clear parallels with the more recent 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.

Under the Persian Gulf

The Genesis creation narrative relates the geographical location of both Eden and the garden to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates), and three regions (Havilah, Assyria, and Kush). While the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are well known the Pishon and Gihon are not known at all. Gihon is sometimes identified with the Karun River of southern Iran (ancient Elam) that flows into the Persian Gulf below Basra in Iraq. Kush is occasionally associated with Nubian Kush, but it is also more usually associated with the Kossaei, the homeland of the Kassites (Kashshu), in the Zagros Mountains of north west Iran, who ruled Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia for 5 centuries.

Regarding the Pishon on the location of Eden in Genesis 2:10 says: "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah".

Havillah is thought to have been the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf. Satellite photos of the area show that before 4,000 BC there was a river that drained into the Persian gulf at that area, now known as Wadi al-Rummah and Wadi al-Batin. Dr. Juris Zarins, the Latvian-American Professor of Southwest Missouri State University believes that the Garden of Eden lies in the vicinity, presently under the headwaters of the Persian Gulf, and he further believes that the story of Adam and Eve in-and especially out-of the Garden is a highly condensed and evocative symbolic account of the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture. The story of Eden, Zarins believes, came about 6500 B.C. during the Neolithic Wet Phase when rains returned to the Gulf region. The reaches of eastern and northeastern Arabia, southern Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran became green and fertile again. Foraging populations came back to where the four rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, Karun (Gihon) and Wadi Ramah (Pishon) now ran full, and there was rainfall on the intervening plains. Animal bones indicate that in this period Arabia had abundant game. Thousands of stone tools suggest intensive, if seasonal, human occupation around now dry lakes and rivers. These tools are found even in the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. This region was believed by some to be the homeland of the Proto-Sumerians. Both "Eden" and the word "Adam" also existed in cuneiform, the latter meaning something like "settlement on the plain". Although both words were set down first in Sumerian (the earliest written language), along with place names like Ur and Uruk, they are believed to be older and not of Sumerian origin by some scholars. The Assyriologist Benno Landsberger proposed that these names were all linguistic remnants of a pre-Sumerian people who had already named rivers, cities-and even some specific trades like potter and coppersmith-before the Sumerians appeared. Landsberger called the pre-Sumerian language simply Proto-Euphratian, and it is believed to be associated with the beginning of farming. Other scholars suggest that its speakers were the members of the Ubaid culture of Northern Mesopotamia (Assyria) that spread southwards around the Persian Gulf. The existing place names and words for farming and other crafts were incorporated into Sumerian and written down for the first time. And in developing the mythology the lush and lovely spot called Eden was codified by being written. Zarins writes "Adam and Eve were heirs to natural bounty. They had everything they needed. But they sinned and were expelled. How did they sin? By challenging God's very omnipotence. In so doing they represented the agriculturists, the upstarts who insisted on taking matters into their own hands, relying upon their knowledge and their own skills rather than on His bounty." The 5.9 kiloyear event saw this area revert to the desert it is today. His theory is supported by C. A. Schlabach.

Iran's Azarbaijan province

David Rohl suggests that the land of Eden was a vast area referred to in ancient Sumerian texts as the Edin (lit. "plain" or "steppe"), north east of Mesopotamia beyond the Zagros Mountains, in the Armenian Highland. The Garden of Eden was then located in a long valley "in the east of Eden," to the north of Sahand volcano, near Tabriz. He cites several geographical similarities and toponyms which he believes match the biblical description. These similarities include: the nearby headwaters of the four rivers of Edin, the Tigris (Heb. Hiddekel, Akk. Idiqlat), Euphrates (Heb. Perath, Akk. Purattu), Gaihun-Aras (Heb., Gihon), and Uizun (Heb. Pishon); the mountain range of Kusheh Dagh (the land of Kassite Cush, not to be confused with the unrelated Cushite lands in modern Sudan); and Upper and Lower Noqdi (the Land of Nod). In his book From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible, Eric H. Cline says "his suggestions have not caught on with the scholarly establishment. His argument is not helped by the fact that it depends upon speculations regarding the transmission of place-names for both the various rivers and nearby related areas from antiquity to the present. In the end, while Rohl’s suggestion is not out of the question, it seems no more probable than any other hypothesis, and less likely than the Mesopotamian theories suggested by Speiser, Zarins, and Sauer."

Jerusalem

Several religious traditions identify the location of the garden of Eden with the city of Jerusalem, in particular Gihon Spring.

Other areas

Jackson County, Missouri, North America

See also: Adam and Eve (LDS Church)

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. 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". 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. (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 and that this approach would be consistent with the configuration of the super-continent Pangaea.

In the footnotes of the Pearl of Great Price that are published by the church, it is stated that there were lands and rivers that were given names later attached to other lands and rivers as in the Book of Genesis. 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.

Adam's Peak, Sri Lanka

Adam's Peak, named after a footprint-like formation found near the summit of a conical mountain. The Buddhist tradition deems it to be the footprint of the Buddha, in Hindu tradition that of Shiva and in Muslim and Christian tradition that of Adam. Moreover there are four rivers starting from this mountain.

Interpretation

Eden as paradise

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

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.

"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 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.

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 Seven Heavens.

Psychoanalytic treatment

The myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has been interpreted psychoanalytically as an archaic form of the Oedipus myth. The Garden of Eden symbolizes the closed parental system which is safe but oppressive and the Tree of Knowledge represents individuation and freedom but also risk, and even death. This interpretation of the Garden of Eden recalls the semantic use of 'to know' as a metaphor for sexual relations elsewhere in the bible.

In Jewish eschatology

In the rabbinic literatures of the Talmud and the Jewish Kabbalah, the scholars agree that there are two types of spiritual places called Garden in Eden. The first is rather terrestrial, of abundant fertility and luxuriant vegetation, known as the "lower Gan Eden". The second is envisioned as being celestial, the habitation of righteous, Jewish and non-Jewish, immortal souls, known as the "higher Gan Eden". The Rabbanim differentiate between Gan and Eden. Adam is said to have dwelt only in the Gan. Whereas Eden is said never to be witnessed by any mortal eye.

According to Jewish eschatology, the "higher Gan Eden" is called the "Garden of Righteousness". It has been created since the beginning of the world, and will appear gloriously at the end of time. The righteous dwelling there will enjoy the sight of the heavenly Chayot carrying the throne of God. Each of the righteous will walk with God, who will lead them in a dance. Its Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants are "clothed with garments of light and eternal life, and eat of the tree of life" (Enoch 58,3) near to God and His anointed ones. This Jewish rabbinical concept of a "higher Gan Eden" is opposed by the Hebrew terms Gehinnom and Sheol, figurative names for the place of spiritual purification for the wicked dead in Judaism, a place envisioned as being at the greatest possible distance from "heaven".

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

• Antediluvian
• Antelapsarianism
• Christian naturism
• Fertile Crescent
• Golden Age
• Jannah
• Persian gardens
• Tamoanchan
• The Summerland
• Utopia

Bibliography

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External links

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