Clarphimous
2005-07-15, 05:52
From Asimov's Guide to the Bible:
Eden
Having formed man, God also prepares a definite dwelling place for him and that involves the mention of the first definite place name in the Bible:
Genesis 2:8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden . . .
Notice that it is not the garden itself that is named Eden. One cannot speak of "Eden" as though it were synonymous with the garden, any more than one can speak of "California" as though it were synonymous with Yosemite Park.
The garden is planted somewhere in a land called Eden and the location of that land is "eastward"; eastward, that is, from Canaan, which is the focal point of reference of the Biblical story and the home of both the writers and the original readers of Genesis.
The question, then, is: Where is Eden?
There have been numerous answers to this question, some of them exceedingly farfetched, and no definite answer acceptable to all is possible. And yet, if we were to try the simplest and most direct possible line of thought, a reasonable solution will offer itself.
In the first place, suppose we consider the geography of the region not as it was at the time the ancient Jews believed creation to have taken place (roughly 4000 B.C. by modern dating convention) but as it was in the much later time when the material in the Book of Genesis was reduced to writing.
Genesis is based, to some extent, on very ancient traditions, but these traditions were not reduced to writing until the ninth century B.C. at the earliest. Some strands of the book were not written until several centuries later and the whole was not unified and put together into the form we now have until the fifth century B.C.
The geographical references in Genesis must therefore refer to the situation as it was from the ninth to the fifth centuries B.C. (the Assyrian period and somewhat later) if they were to have meaning to the writer and reader.
Thus, if someone were to write a book today, about the fourteenth-century American Indians, he might well write of "the Indian tribes that inhabited what is now the United States." To save space, he might speak elliptically of "the Indians of the United States," taking it for granted that the readers would realize the United States did not actually exist in the fourteenth century and would not be confused. In ancient times, when every copy of a book was produced by hand and not by the printing press, the need to be economical with words was far greater. It was not to be expected that anyone would write, "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in the land which we now call Eden."
So we must ask ourselves where Eden was during the Assyrian period; and the Bible tells us that quite plainly. It refers to Eden several times--not as a mystical primeval site of a garden in which Adam and Eve roamed, but as a prosaic everyday land which was conquered by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.
Thus, when the Assyrian hosts of Sennacherib were laying siege to Jerusalem in 701 B.C., they sent a message to the men guarding the walls of the city, warning them not to rely on their God for salvation, as the gods of other nations had not saved those nations from conquest by the Assyrians:
2Kings 19:12. Have the gods of the nations delivered . . . gozan, and Haran and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were in Thelasar?
Thelasar ("Tel-assar" in the Revised Standard Version) is the name of an Assyrian province, mentioned as "Til-asuri" in Assyrian inscriptions. It was extended on both sides of the middle reaches of the Euphrates River and so was, indeed, "eastward" from Canaan--about four hundred miles due east, in fact.
And yet, even so, it is not necessary to suppose that the Biblical writer intended the specific, relatively small, area of Eden in the province of Thelasar. Place names have a tendency to broaden out and grow diffuse with time. Thus "Asia," which originally referred to the western section of what is now the nation of Turkey, spread out to include an entire vast continent, while "Africa," originally signifying the norther portion of the modern nation of Tunisia, spread out to include a continent almost as vast.
Consequently, Eden might well have been used not only as a specific geographical term, but also as a rather general one for the entire valley of the Euphrates River. This makes sense, too, for if the Bible makes Eden the original home of the human race, archaeology has revealed that on the banks of the Euphrates River there arose one of the earliest (if not the earliest) of civilizations.
By 3000 B.C., powerful cities dotted the banks of the Euphrates, an elaborate network of irrigation canals was in use, writing had been invented, and, in general, man as a civilized being was in existence.
The Euphrates River
By the time the Book of Genesis was being reduced to writing in its final form, the editor who was arranging the various source materials must have realized that "Eden" had become a vague term and he set about defining the location of the garden more precisely in terms that undoubtedly made sense at the time, but that have become much less clear with the passage of over two thousand additional years.
He set up his definition by placing Eden and its garden at or near the junction of important rivers:
Genesis 2:10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
Genesis 2:11. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
Genesis 2:12. And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
Genesis 2:13. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
Genesis 2:14. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river isEuphrates.
The rivers are listed in order of increasing familiarity to the writer so that the fourth river, the Euphrates, is merely mentioned. No need is felt to locate it by describing the regions it traverses. This is understandable since the Euphrates was familiar to the Jews of the Assyrian period and before and parts of it were not very distant. Indeed, in the time of David, when the Jewish kingdom was at its most extensive and powerful, its northern boundary lay on the upper Euphrates.
The Euphrates was known to the Assyrians as "Pu-rat-tu" from a still earlier term which meant "great river." The Hebrew term used in the Bible is "Perath," clearly a form of the Assyrian name, and our word "Euphrates" originated with the Greeks, who converted the strange Assyrian syllables into a set that made more sense to their own ears.
(The English Bible has reached us, to a large extent, from the Hebrew, via first Greek, then Latin. Many Hebrew names reach us in Graeco-Latin form therefore. In general, the Catholic version of the Bible clings more closely to the Graeco-Latin, where the King James Version and even more the Revised Standard Version tend to return to the original Hebrew.)
The Euphrates is indeed a "great river." It is the longest river in southwestern Asia, flowing for seventeen hundred miles. Two streams rise in eastern Turkey, the more northerly only seventy-five miles south of the Black Sea. They flow west separately for about two hundred miles, then join to form the Euphrates. Flowing south now, the river approaches within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean Sea, enters Syria and turns southeast, leaving Syria and passing through Iraq until it finally pours its waters into the Persian Gulf. Though rising and passing so closely to seas that open into the Atlantic Ocean, the river reaches the Indian Ocean at last.
It is a sluggish river that is navigable for quite a distance. During the spring the melting of snow in the mountainous source area causes its level to rise in a slow, potentially useful flooding. Properly controlled, this water supply can be used to turn the nearby land into a garden of fertility and productivity, and throughout the Biblical period irrigation canals were used in this manner.
The third river of Eden is the Hiddekel, which is the Hebrew version of the Assyrian "i-di-ik-lat." It is described in Genesis 2:14 as going "toward the east of Assyria"; that is, forming the eastern boundary of Assyria, and this assuredly was not so. Assyria was an extensive domain the the centuries when Genesis was written and lay on both sides of the river. However, Assyria is the Greek form of the Hebrew "Ashur," which applied not only to the nation, but to its original capital city. It is the city that is meant here and the Hiddekel does indeed skirt the city on the east.
The Hiddekel is not as long as the Euphrates, but its length is quite respectable just the same--1150 miles. It is more turbulent than the Euphrates and is not really navigable except for small boats and rafts. It is perhaps because of the savage danger of its turbulence that the Greeks gave it the name "Tigris" ("tiger"), the name by which we know it today.
The fact that the Biblical description of the rivers of Eden mentions "a river [that] . . . was parted, and became into four heads" might lead one to think that the Tigris and Euphrates (along with the other two rivers mentioned) must have a single source. This is almost so. One of the sources of the Tigris River is a lake in eastern Turkey that lies only a dozen miles south of one of the streams that go to make up the Euphrates.
There might therefore be a strong temptation to attempt to locate the garden of Eden specifically in eastern Turkey, except that there is no need to suppose that the writers of Genesis felt obliged to make use of our modern geographical conventions.
When we say that a river parts into two or more streams, we take it for granted that we are imagining ourselves to be moving downstream. But suppose two rivers join as they move downstream. If you follow the joined river upstream you will find it part into the two rivers.
Let's see how this applies to the Euphrates and the Tigris. The two rivers flow southeastward in almost parallel fasion. At one point, about 350 miles from the Persian Gulf, they approach within twenty-five miles of each other, then move apart before approaching again.
In the time of the earliest civilizations that rose in the region, the Euphrates and the Tigris entered the Persian Gulf by separate mouths, that of the Tigris being almost a hundred miles east of that of the Euphrates.
At that time, however, the Persian Gulf extended about 175 miles further northwestward than it now does. The rivers, flowing southwestward from the Turkish mountains, carried mud and silt with them, slowly forming a delta that filled in the upper end of the narrow Persian Gulf, moving the seacoast 175 miles southeastward in six thousand years.
The Tigris and Euphrates had to continue flowing over the new land as it formed. As it happened, the Tigris flowed south and the Euphrates east. Eventually they met to form a single joined river, now known as the Shatt-al-Arab, which is 120 miles long.
At the time the Book of Genesis was reduced to writing, the Tigris and Euphrates had already joined to form the common stream and surely the reference in Genesis 2:10 is to the parting (working upstream) of the Shatt-al-Arab into the Tigris and the Euphrates. The reference to the garden of Eden would then be, specifically, to the lower stretches of those two rivers, near where they come together and as it happens, it was precisely there (in the days before the two rivers had yet come together) that civilization arose.
That leaves the first and second rivers of the garden, the Pison and the Gihon. Neither river can be identified, though glamourous guesses have been made for each. Thus, the Pison ("Pishon" in the Revised Standard Version) "compassath the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold . . . bdellium and the onyx stone." (The Anchor Bible has "lapis-lazuli" in place of the onyx stone.)
Havilah is thus pictured as a land of wealth, where one can find gold and other precious material. In searching for a fabled land of wealth that will represent Havilah, later Europeans had a tendency to fix upon India with its proverbial "wealth of the Indies." In that case, the Pison (or Pishon) might be the Indus River, the long river--as long as the Euphrates--that drains what is now Pakistan, flowing into the Arabian Sea.
As for the Gihon, that seems to be clearly described as compassing "the whole land of Ethiopia." Ethiopia was, in ancient times, a land to the south of Egypt, and a nation bearing that name is still located about five hundred miles south of Egypt nowadays. A tributary of the Nile River rises in Ethiopia and it seems logical to suppose, then, that the Gihon is the Nile River.
If we go no farther in our reasoning, then, the four rivers of Eden would be the INdus, the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, in that order. This is an intriguing guess. There are only two civilizations, as far as is known, that compete in age with that in the Tigris-Euphrates region. One arose on the banks of the Nile and the other on the banks of the Indus.
And yet the picture cannot be correct. Neither the Indus nor the Nile comes anywhere near the Tigris and the Euphrates. The closest approach of the Indus to the Tigris-Euphrates is twelve hundred miles and the closest approach of the Nile is nine hundred, and this certainly does not gibe with the Biblical statement that the four rivers all come together. (While not everything in the Bible can be taken literally, it must certainly be supposed that the Biblical writers could tell when four rivers came together in a region of the world known to them.)
Let's consider the land of Havilah first. Whatever it is, it can't be India, since a word for India does occur in the Book of Esther and, in Hebrew, it is "Hoddu." Havilah itself is mentioned elsewhere, notably in Genesis 25:18 where it is described as part of the region in which the descendants of Ishmael live:
Genesis 25:18. And they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, and thou goest toward Assyria . . .
It is reasonably certain that the Ishmaelites were tribes of the Arabian borderland, southeast of Canaan and southwest of the Tigris-Euphrates and so, without trying to pin it down too carefully, we can suppose that Havilah was somewhere south of the Euphrates River.
If this is so, then the Pison (Pishon) may have been a tributary of the Euphrates, flowing into its lower stretches from Havilah to the south and west. It may not have been an important stream and, in the gradual desiccation of the area that has taken place in recent ages, it may have disappeared. (It may even have been a man-made canal, confused by the Biblical writer with a natural stream.)
And what about Ethiopia? That is far off in Africa. The Hebrew word, which is here translated as Ethiopia in the King James Version, is "Cush." Undoubtedly, there are occasions in the Bible where Cush does indeed refer to the region south of Egypt and where it is justifiably translated as Ethiopia. Very likely, this is not one of those places. Indeed, in the Revised Standard Version, the Gihon is described as flowing around the "land of Cush." The word is left in its Hebrew form and no attempt is made to equate it with Ethiopia.
More often than not, the Biblical Cush refers to some Arabian tribe. There is a reasonable possibility that the word "Cush" in Genesis 2:13 refers to the land of the people whom the ancient Greek geographers spoke of as the Kossaeans, and whom modern historians refer to as the Kassites. They dwelt east of the Tigris and had a period of greatness in the centuries before the rise of Assyria, for between 1600 and 1200 B.C., the Kassites controlled the great civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates.
If this is so, then the Gihon may have been a tributary (now gone) of the Tigris, flowing in from the east--or, possibly, another man-made canal.
We are thus left with the following situation. The Pison (Pishon) joins the Euphrates near its ancient mouth and the Gihon joins the Tigris near its ancient mouth. The two double rivers then join in the new land gradually formed afterward. The four rivers all come together over a reasonably small area and the very ancient civilization that rose in that area may represent the historical kernel within the story of the garden of Eden.
This region was called, in the primeval period, by a name which we now render as "Sumer" or "Sumeria." In the Sumerian language, the word eden means "plain." No one knows where, exactly, the Sumerians came from, but if, as seems likely, they originally entered the area from the hilly regions to the east, they may well have thought of themselves as coming "to Eden"; that is, "to the plain."
If so, then the term "Eden" may point specifically at Sumeria, and its identification with the later Eden farther up the Euphrates may be accidental (even though it pointed us in the right direction).
In Hebrew, eden means "delight" or "enjoyment," which seems appropriate for the garden, but this is, in all likelihood, merely a fortunate etymological accident since Hebrew and Sumerian are not related languages. (in fact, Sumerian is not related to any known language.) Nevertheless, the accidental Hebrew meaning helped crystallize the feeling that Eden might be a mystical term without actual geographic meaning and that the place originally inhabited by mankind was merely "the garden of delight" with no place name at all.
One more speculation is possible. By 2500 B.C., centuries before Abraham was born, the Sumerians had already passed their peak. New tribes from the north, the Akkadians, took over "the plain" and harder times must have come for the Sumerians, who were now a conquered people. They must have looked back nostalgically to the great days of "the plain."
Can the Biblical tale of the glorious garden of Eden, lost forever, have been a reflection, at least in part, of the Sumerian longing for a past that had vanished?
[This message has been edited by Clarphimous (edited 07-15-2005).]