The place that God prepared for Adam to live, and from which Adam and Eve were expelled after the fall.
I. The name
The MT says that God planted a garden in Eden (gan-be˓ēḏen; Gen. 2.8), which proves that the garden was not coextensive with Eden, but must have been a space within it. The LXXla Vg., and later commentators have noted that to a Hebrew-speaking person the name Eden I would suggest the homophone root meaning “delight”; but many scholars are now of the opinion that Eden is not a proper name, but a common name derived from the Sumerian edin‘plain, steppe’, borrowed perhaps directly from Sumerian, or via Akkadian (edinu), which would indicate a plain or flat region as the location of the orchard. Because of its location in Eden, it came to be called the “garden of Eden” (gan-˓ēḏen; Gen. 2.15; 3.23–24; Ez. 36.35; Jl. 2.3), but he also called it “the garden of God” (gan-elōhı̂m, Ez. 28.13; 31.9) and “garden of Jehovah” (I won–yhwh, Isa. 51.3). In Gen. 2.8ss the word I won‘garden, orchard’, and in Is. 51.3 Eden same, paradeisos are translated in the LXXwhich is a borrowed voice from Old Persian (Avestan) pairidaēza, ‘fenced’, which came to mean “park, recreation”, and from this use comes the cast. *“paradise” for the Garden of Eden.
II. The rivers
A river came out of Eden, or the plain, and watered the garden, and from there it divided into four branches (rā˒šı̂m, Gen. 2.10; av “headers”). Scholars interpret the word in different ways. ro˒š ‘head, top, beginning, like the beginning of an arm, as in a delta, running downstream, or the head or junction of a tributary running upstream. Either interpretation is possible, although the latter is perhaps the more likely. The names of the four tributaries or mouths, which were evidently outside the garden, are given as ram (Gen. 2.11), gı̂ḥôn (2.13), ḥiddeqel (2.14), and perāṯ (2.14). The latter two have been unanimously equated with the *Tigris and *eyphrates respectively, but the equatings for the Pison and the Gihon are almost as diverse as they are numerous, from the Nile and the Indio to tributaries of the Tigris in Mesopotamia. There is not a sufficient number of data to enable the precise identification of these two rivers.
Gen. 2.6 states that “a mist went up from the earth (˒ēḏ,) which watered the whole face of the earth.” It is possible that ˒ēḏ corresponds to ac. edûwhich in turn is a word borrowed from the Sumerian go, ‘river’, indicating that a river rose or flooded the area and provided natural irrigation. It would be reasonable to understand it as a reference to the garden itself.
III. The content of the garden
If we take the statement of Gn. 2.5–6 as an indication of what later happened inside the garden, we can interpret that it was an extension of arable land (śāḏeh, ‘field’) that Adam was to till. Plants were supposed to grow there (Yes ah) and herbs (˓ēśeḇ), which we should perhaps interpret as shrubs and cereals, respectively. There were also trees of all kinds, both delicious to look at and good to eat (Gn. 2.9), and two in particular in the middle of the garden: the tree of life, whose fruits would make man live forever (Gn. 3.22 ), and the tree of knowledge (°vm “knowledge”) of good and evil, of which man had been specifically forbidden to eat (Gen. 2.17; 3.3). There are many views on what “the science of good and evil” means in this context. One of the most common considers that it is the knowledge of good and evil, but it is difficult to suppose that Adam did not already have it, and that if he had not, he would have been prohibited from acquiring it. Others relate it to the earthly knowledge that man acquires with maturity, and that can be applied to both good and evil. According to another point of view, the expression “good and evil” is an example of a figure of speech in which an autonymic pair means totality, and therefore means “everything”, and in this context universal knowledge. Against Pelag this theory is the fact that Adam did not acquire universal knowledge after eating the forbidden fruit. Another point of view maintains that it was a common tree selected by God to test the ethical capacity of man, who “would reach an experimental knowledge of good and evil, depending on whether he obeyed the divine prohibition or fell into disobedience” ( NBC, pp. 78s) (* Drop; * Temptation). There were also animals in the garden, cattle (behēmâ* Beast), and beasts of the field (Gen. 2.19–20), which can perhaps be understood as those animals that could be domesticated. There were also birds.
IV. Adjacent Territories
Three territories are mentioned in relation to rivers. The Tigris is said to “go to the east of Assyria” (qiḏmat ˒aššûrliterally “in front of ˒aššûr”; Gen. 2.14), an expression that could also mean “between ˒aššûr and the viewer. Name ˒aššûr it could refer to the state of Assyria, which began to emerge in the early 2nd millennium BC, or to the city of Assur, the mod. Qalat Sharqat on the west bank of the Tigris, the oldest capital of Assyria, which had a flourishing time in the early 3rd millennium BC, as excavations have shown. Since even at its smallest extent Assyria probably occupied both sides of the Tigris, it is likely that it refers to the city, and that the phrase correctly expresses that the Tigris ran E of Assur. Second, the Gihon River is described as “surrounding (sāḇaḇ) all the land of Cush” (kûš, Gen. 2.13). *Cush in the Bible generally refers to Ethiopia, and this passage has been commonly interpreted (eg. °vrv1) with that meaning; but there was also a region with this name to the E of the Tigris, from which the Kassites arose in the 2nd millennium, and this may be the meaning in the mentioned passage. Thirdly, the Pison River is said to have encircled the entire land of *Havilah (Gen. 2:11). Several products of the region are mentioned: gold, *bdellium and stone soham (Gen. 2.11–12), the latter translated “onyx” in °vrv2, whose meaning, however, is uncertain. Since the term bdellium is generally taken to indicate an aromatic gum, a characteristic product of Arabia, and the other two biblical uses of the name Havilah also refer to parts of Arabia, in most cases this context is taken to refer to some part of that peninsula.
V. The location of the Garden of Eden
There are numerous theories about the location of the Garden of Eden. The most common, adopted by Calvin, p. For example, and in more recent times by F. Delitzsch and others, he considers that the garden was somewhere in the S of Mesopotamia, and that the Pishon and the Gihon were channels connecting the Tigris and Euphrates, or tributaries that they united them; or, according to another theory, the Pishon was the watercourse between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, which surrounded the Arabian Peninsula. These theories consider that the four “arms” (av “heads”) of Gen. 2.10 are tributaries that joined in a main flow, which then emptied into the Persian Gulf; but according to another group of theories they were arms that came out of a supposed common source and they try to locate the orchard in the region of Armenia, where the Euphrates and the Tigris are born. The Pishon and the Gihon, then, are linked to several smaller rivers in Armenia and Transcaucasia, and in some theories by extension, assuming the author was unaware of the true geography, to other rivers such as the Indus, and even the Ganges.
The expression “in Eden, to the east” (Gn. 2.8), literally “in Eden from the front”, could mean that the garden was in the eastern part of Eden, or that Eden was in the E from the point of origin. narrator’s view, and some commentators consider it to be “in Eden in ancient times”, but in any case, since there is no certainty about the meaning of the other indications of location, this information cannot add greater precision.
In view of the possibility that, if the flood was universal (* Deluge), the geographical features that could have helped verify the place where Eden was have been modified, the location remains unknown.
SAW. Dilmun
Among the Sumerian literary texts discovered earlier this century at Nippur S of Babylon was found one describing a place called Dilmun, a pleasant place, where disease and death were unknown. At first it had no drinking water, but Enki, the god of water, commanded the sun god to remedy this situation, and when this was done other events took place, in the course of which the goddess Ninti is mentioned (* Eve). Later the Babylonians adopted the name and idea of Dilmún, calling it “land of the living”, abode of their immortals.
There are certain similarities between this Sumerian notion of an earthly paradise and the Biblical Eden, leading some scholars to conclude that the Genesis narrative depends on the Sumerian. But an equally feasible explanation is that both refer to a real place, and that the Sumerians would have added mythological elements gathered during their transmission.
Bibliography. G. von Rad, The Book of Genesis, 1977; S. Croatto, Create and love in freedom, 1986; S. Muñoz Iglesias, Introduction to the reading of the Old Testament, 1965. On point VI, °SN Kramer, History begins in Sumer, 1962.
S.R. Driver, The Book of Genesis8, 1911, pp. 57–60; J. Skinner, Genesis², ICC, 1930, p. 62–66; WF Albright, “The Location of the Garden of Eden,” AJSL 39, 1922, pp. 15–31; EA Speiser, “The Rivers of Paradise, Festschrift Johannes Friedrich, 1959, pp. 473–485; MG Kline, “Because It Had Not Rained,” WTJ 20, 1957–8, pp. 146ff. On point VI, SN Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, 1956, pp. 193–199; NM Mange, Understanding Genesis, 1966, pp. 23–28.
TCM
Douglas, J. (2000). New Biblical Dictionary: First Edition. Miami: United Bible Societies.
Source: New Bible Dictionary