Paradise Lost

Where Is (Was) the Garden of Eden?

There exists now recent scientific admission that all men and women of earth share a common genetic trait with a common female ancestor. In the Bible, this matriarch of mankind is named Eve (lit., "producer of life"). She is the wife of Adam, and is the mother of civilization. She was also one of only two human beings to have inhabited the majestic Garden of Eden before her expulsion after having been beguiled by the serpent and having eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.

The notion of a single female ancestor was oft scorned by the academic community. However, modern science now vindicates that such a single woman did in fact exist. Is there any reason to doubt the Scriptures regarding the existence of her home; the garden made eastward, in Eden?

Skeptics have suggested that Adam and Eve were merely a pre-historic myth, with the tale of Eden a Biblical metaphor of man's fall from grace. Such historians also claimed that the Hittites of the Old Testament, the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem were also creative fabrications of an ingenuous author. Recent archeological excavations have proven the skeptics wrong.

In fact, the garden located in Eden was indeed a real place, with modern scholars so convinced of it's authenticity that many are in search for it in present times. But where exactly was it?

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom had formed.
- Genesis 2:8

The author of the Torah, which includes the Book of Genesis (lit., "origin") is Moses (Exodus 24:4, Numbers 33:2, and Deuteronomy 31:9). Given the extent of the Egyptian conquests prior to this time (c. 1450 BC) and the fact that Moses had been raised by the daughter of Pharaoh in the royal house of Egypt (Exodus 2:5-10), Moses undoubtedly would have been well learned in the geography of the known world.

Others in the Old Testament also knew of Eden. The Israelite prophets knew that the city of Telassar, in Mesopotamia, was in Eden (II Kings 19:12, Isaiah 37:12). Eden must have been a region of considerable size, as the royal house of Eden held court in Damascus in the 8th century BC (Amos 1:5). The prophet Ezekiel linked Eden with Mesopotamia and Assyria (Ezekiel 27:23), noting that the cedars of Lebanon existed in the "garden of God" (Ezekiel 31:8-16).

From Damascus to Assyria and unto Mesopotamia, Eden would have spanned much of what is now the Fertile Crescent, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Somewhere, "eastward" in this land of Eden, God planted the utopian garden.

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, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
- Genesis 2:10-14

At some place in Eden there was a single river that fed four others. These rivers are identified as the Pison, the Gihon, the Hiddekel, and the Euphrates. Identifying those rivers is the key is unlocking the mystery of the location of the garden. It is notable that Moses wrote of each river seemingly in present-tense, indicating that all four rivers were still in existence some 3,500 years ago during his lifetime.

The easiest to identify is the Euphrates, which runs through modern Iraq. To this day, it bears the same name. As for the Hiddekel, the Persians knew it as the "Tigra," and Daniel the prophet wrote from along the Hiddekel River while in ancient Babylon (Daniel 10:4). In the 15th century BC, the Assyrian kingdom was confined to northern Iraq, located between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The eastern Assyrian capitals of Ashur and Nineveh were located close to the Tigris, which we now know to be the ancient Hiddekel River.

The Pison River connected to the Garden of Eden from Havilah, a land of gold, bdellium, and onyx stone. Moses wrote that the children of Ishmael, father of the Arabs, dwelt from Havilah to Shur (Genesis 25:18). Shur, in the Sinai region north of the Red Sea, was the location of the destruction of the Amalekite army at the hands of the Israelite king Saul. The Amalekites had traveled to Shur from Havilah (I Samuel 15:7). Moses also wrote that Havilah was a son of Joktan, and a brother of Ophir (Genesis 10:29). According to Arab traditions, Joktan was the father of the tribes of central and southern Arabia. Ophir had massive gold deposits that fed King Solomon's wealth (I Kings 9:28) as well as onyx (Job 28:16).

Central Arabia seems a strong likelihood for the location of Havilah because of account of onyx and gold. Arabia has gold that has been mined for thousands of years. In 2005, partially based on the discovery of new gold mines, the state-owned Saudi mining company Maadan declared its intention to produce one-hundred tons of gold within a decade. As far as onyx is concerned, stone worship in Arabia predated Islam, and even to this day, the Black Stone of the Kabah (Ka'bah) in Mecca is honored by Muslim pilgrims to the sacred shrine.

Examining satellite photographs of the Arabian Peninsula nearly 15 years ago, Boston University scientist Farouk El-Baz discovered a dry riverbed running underground from the Hijaz Mountains of Saudi Arabia into modern Kuwait. Presented in an article by New Scientist in April, 1993, El-Baz called the mysterious tracing the "Kuwait River." It is now known scientifically as the Wadi al-Batin, bearing a strong resemblance to the description of the Pison River of Eden. Satellite imagery indicates that it would have poured into the modern Shatt al-Arab River, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Euphrates.

According to Moses, the Gihon River swirled through all the land of Ethiopia, or literally, the land of "Cush." The Bible identifies Cush as a grandson of Noah, a son of Ham, and the brother of Mizraim, Put, and Canaan (Genesis 10:1, 10:6). The land of Canaan is well-known as the Promised Land of Palestine. The large seaport city of Sidon, in Lebanon, is the namesake of Canaan's eldest son. Throughout the Old Testament, the land of Put is called Libya and virtually all scholars identify Mizraim with Egypt.

Some have attempted to identify the settlements of Cush's descendents in a more liberal geographical context, contending that while Cush included Ethiopia, it is not limited to the Nubian nation of East Africa. This argument stems from the apparent complication that there is no river in Ethiopia presently connected to the Tigris, Euphrates, or Wadi al-Batin. Expanding the territory of the land of Cush, hypothetical placements of the Cushites have included western Iran, home of the "Kassites" that plagued Hammurabi, or even the Hindu-Kush Mountains of Pakistan/Afghanistan.

There are substantial, textual problems with this more liberal view. Primarily, the Gihon River was said to have encompassed all of Cush in the time of Moses. No river in Asia runs anywhere near Africa, so none of these rivers come close to encompassing the "whole land of Cush" if the territory in question is outside of East Africa. God gave Moses a rather vivid description of Havilah, but not of Cush. This may have been because Moses was already quite familiar with Cush as identified by God.

Moses himself had married a Cushite woman (Numbers 12:1), and assuredly, as he had been raised in the house of Pharaoh, would have been familiar with the Cushites to Egypt's southern border. Most translators define Cush as meaning either dark or black, and the prophet Jeremiah rhetorically asked if the Cushite could change the color of his skin (Jeremiah 13:23). To the Hebrew slaves of Goshen, who had never been east of the Red Sea, the land of Cush would have been an obvious reference to the Ethiopian Nubians.

That the Gihon is the "same" river that encompassed all of Cush may indicate that Moses knew of a river in Ethiopia, but not by that specific name. Many Ethiopians believe that the Blue Nile, which wraps its way through the Sudan and Ethiopia, is the Gihon River of the Bible and thus it is held sacred by the locals. This identification seems problematic, though, based on modern plate-tectonics. If the Gihon River is the Blue Nile, it would have been forced to vault over the African Plate across the Red Sea and onto and across the Arabian Plate. There, it would have connected with the Tigris, Euphrates, and Wadi al-Batan near the Persian Gulf.

If the Gihon River of Moses includes the modern Blue Nile, it would seem to vindicate proponents of Pangaea and the concept of a single-continent landmass. Perhaps in the 1656 years between the creation of Adam and the flood of Noah, the Gihon River flowed from Eden across Arabia and onto Africa, when the two continents were one.

As Gihon literally means "gushing" or "bursting," it may be inferred that the Gihon was a large river that carried a massive payload and, during the flood of Noah, burst apart at its own seams. If the Gihon flowed west, away from Eden towards Africa and burst, it would have likely torn a new path for itself in Africa, flowing away from Arabia. Today, the Nile Rivers flows south to north, towards the Mediterranean, away from Arabia.

The confluence of the Wadi al-Batin, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers near Kuwait makes southern Mesopotamia the most probable vicinity of the Garden of Eden. The ancient Sumerians may have had some insight into the matter, referring to the plain of Babylon as "Edinn." If this was the home of the Garden of Eden, it may now be buried deep beneath the sands of the desert, or even underwater, in the Persian Gulf.

Students of the Bible have suggested a number of other locations for the Garden of Eden. A popular option is in eastern Turkey (Anatolia) near Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark came to rest after the great flood. Some see symbolism that God would have started life anew in the same place where it began. The headwaters for the Tigris and Euphrates originate in the Turkish mountains, and the Tigris does move east towards ancient Assyria; however, there is no written record nor is there topographical evidence than any river stemmed from this region to reach Havilah in Arabia or to Ethiopia.

Another claim put forward is that Eden may have been in modern Israel. Again, symbolism reigns here with great weight. Did Jesus Christ atone for the transgressions of man on the very ground where Adam and Eve were beguiled by the serpent and first sinned? This scenario requires one to believe that an ancient and undetected river spanned from the Black Sea down to the Red Sea, connecting with the Tigris and Euphrates in Turkey, with the Nile in Egypt, and somehow with the Pison in Saudi Arabia. As Eden apparently spanned from Damascus to Mesopotamia, planting the garden in Israel could hardly be described as "eastward."

Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith even suggested that the Garden of Eden was actually in Missouri, near Kansas City. He wrote that American Indians, who are Mongoloid, were actually ancient Israelites, who are Caucasoid. This was all told to Smith after he met with the Spirit of God in the woods.

Some things have to be taken with a grain of salt.
When Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, God placed an angel at the garden's east entrance to keep away all men, lest any should try to enter (Genesis 3:23-24). For some reason, the northern, southern, and western hedges of the garden were already inaccessible. After the fall of man, the garden was rendered permanently inaccessible.

Wherever the Garden of Eden was, it will forever remain a symbol of the perfection of God's creation that was decimated by man's rebellion from God's will. It was a rebellion that could only be rectified by the blood covenant of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ, who reclaimed at Calvary what the serpent tried to swindle away from man in the garden.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
- Genesis 3:14-15


Originally published by author on MySpace.com, 2006