Garden of Eden: Biblical account, meanings, and cultural influence

It says in Gen 2:10-14 EU:

With this tradition, however, there is a fundamental problem in the precision of the place names: In Jewish tradition, the name גן עדן Gan Eden became the gathering place of the righteous after death (see also: Resurrection or Heaven (religion)), and speculation about its geographical location on earth was avoided. To this may be emphasized the refusal of Judaism to fix precisely both the place of Paradise, the Mount of Revelation, Mount Sinai, and others, in order to avoid the dangers of worship, invocation, the cult of pilgrimage, such as the veneration of holy places, or idolatry (="idolatry"), etc., since even the name of God is used only very cautiously.

David Rohl

The British Egyptologist David Rohl located the Garden of Eden in the area of Tabriz, the capital of the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan. Eden had been located in the plain extending from the city to Lake Urmia. The lake may have been considered the source of the four rivers mentioned in the Bible. The word Urmia means 'cradle of water' in ancient Syriac. Besides the river names Tigris for Hiddekel and Euphrates for Perat, he assumes the Qizil Uzan (Sefid Rud) for Pischon and the Aras for Gihon. The latter was called Gyhun until the 7th century. The Gihon flowed around the land of Kush (Gen 2:13 ELB). From the name of a mountain, the Kusha-Dagh ('mountain of Kush'), Rohl deduces that the region on the river Aras was once known as Kush. He equates the regions of Upper and Lower Nochdi (Iranian for 'near Nod') east of the Tabriz plain with the biblical 'land of Nod, east of Eden' to which Cain moved after the fratricide of Abel.

Manfried Dietrich

The German professor of Ancient Near Eastern Philology Manfried Dietrich, on the other hand, suggested that in a Mesopotamian model for the Genesis narrative the Garden of Eden could be the temple garden of Eridu, since in the older mythology of Mesopotamia the temple garden also plays a role as the exclusive domain of the gods in the creation of humans. In the little known short Sumerian writing The Pickaxe this is described. According to it, the four rivers would not rise in the Garden of Eden, but would converge there. He considered the river Pischon to be the Uqnû-Karun and the Gihon to be the Ūlāya-Kercha.

Juris Zarin's archaeological interpretation

The archaeologist Juris Zarins of Missouri State University, on the other hand, suspects that the Garden of Eden was in a flooded river delta in the area of the northern Persian Gulf. In addition to the rivers Tigris and Eufrat (Euphrates), he identifies the river Pischon as the Wadi Batin and Wadi Rimah, which fell dry, and the Gihon as the Karun. The Garden of Eden he equates with the Sumerian Dilmun. The story of the expulsion from paradise reflects, in his opinion, the transition from wild husbandry to agriculture and animal husbandry: "The land at the united four rivers must have been the Garden of Eden. For it was unusually fertile because of its abundant water content. We are talking here about the Neolithic period, in which the hunter-gatherers of that time became farmers and cattle breeders. The story of the expulsion from paradise is merely a distorted account of the transition of the people living at that time from hunters to cultivators." "Adam and Eve would then correspond to the early tillers of the soil. They sinned by challenging God's omnipotence. Instead of hoping for God's mercy, they took matters into their own hands and trusted in their knowledge and skill in farming." The mouth of the four merging rivers had been much farther southeast around 6000 B.C. due to the sea level being about 150 meters lower due to the ice age."

Considerations on agriculture and livestock

The beginning of agriculture, a leitmotif in biblical prehistory, again points to the highlands of the Fertile Crescent, to the foothills of the Taurus Mountains northeast of the city of Urfa, where the (supposed) grotto of Abraham's birth is located next to the Balıklıgöl. Biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, comparing the genetic material of 68 modern varieties of einkorn­, were able to ­trace them back to a common plant of origin, a wild plant that still grows on the slopes of the extinct Karacadağ volcano. Therefore, the domestication of the grain ­may have begun here. About 100 kilometers southwest of Karacadağ is the excavation site of Göbekli Tepe ('Navel Mountain'). The excavation director, prehistorian Klaus Schmidt, considers the site, built around 9000 BC, to be a sacred building. The fact that he considers hunter-gatherers to be the builders cannot be substantiated by any example. At that time, herds of gazelles and wild asses, among others, roamed Upper Mesopotamia, consisting of 100,000 or more animals, according to paleozoologist Joris Peters. The hunted prey was stored in large meat houses, the archetype of sedentarism, the wild cereals fenced off to protect them from browsing before harvesting. The Old Testament portrays something similar when God instructs man to "cultivate the Garden of Eden and keep it" (Gen 2:15 ELB). When the biotope was depleted, sheep, goats, and the aurochs were domesticated and crops were grown. Food crises and famine occurred during the transition period. The comparison of skeletons of Stone Age hunters with the first farmers shows that the early farmers worked harder, suffered more frequently from diseases and died earlier, possibly mythologically processed as a memory of the expulsion from paradise.

Other theories

Francesca Stavrakopoulou and other researchers consider the narrative of the Garden of Eden to be a poetically overformed memory of the Babylonian exile and of the preceding destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem: Adam was originally the last king in charge of the temple, which, like all ancient Near Eastern sanctuaries, was at the same time a garden and was considered the dwelling place of God. Through his misconduct - the king had allowed a Syrian snake cult - and his arrogance, however, Yahweh had left the sanctuary and decreed that Adam and his people were to be expelled from paradise, respectively Jerusalem and Judah.

Therefore the guards who prevented the return would be in the east of Eden. The land of Nod would be the Syrian Desert, which fits the derivation from the Hebrew word nad (meaning "restless" or "wandering").

A later revision had no longer related this story to the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, but reinterpreted it as a creation story. These scholars refer to the second, presumably older mention of Eden in the Old Testament: The prophet Ezekiel prophesied in Ez 28 EU (retrospectively) the fall of a ruler who had been driven out of Eden because of his hubris:

In contrast, Kamal Salibi's Jerusalem hypothesis assumes that the biblical stories before the Babylonian exile took place in the region of Asir in the Asir Mountains. The Garden of Eden could also be located there. Salibi identified it with the western Arabian oasis Gunaina ("Garden"), which is watered by rivers from Adana ("Eden"), among them the Wadi Bisha ("Pischon"). One of those tributaries, the Wadi Tabala, lies in the western Arabian land of Hawala, which he equates with the biblical "Hawila." After the Babylonian exile, he argues, the place references were made to the new homeland in Palestine. This thesis is widely rejected among experts.