Where Would You Find the Garden of Eden?
Where Would You Find the Garden of Eden? The short answer is that you would not find it. The Garden of Eden or (often) the paradise is the place where God is supposed to have created a garden for Adam, the first man. Some people hold it to have been situated in the Mesopotamian region between the River Tigris and Euphrates. The Tree of Knowledge grew in this garden and it was there that man fell from grace in God’s eyes because, at the prompting of Eve, the first woman, he ate fruit from this tree.
Because of this act of disobedience, it is said, God devised three punishments. The man was to till the earth, which was cursed; the woman was to experience painful childbirth; and the serpent who prompted the woman to persuade the man to eat the fruit was from that day to be hated by mankind.
Adam had to be driven out of the Garden of Eden because the Tree of Life also grew there and this would have endowed him with immortality. The inference is that man chose knowledge and death rather than ignorance and eternal life. The Garden of Eden has been portrayed in many famous paintings and poems. In man’s imagination it has always been an ideal to which he longs to return.
Much like records of the great flood, the creation story and the account of the confusion of languages, the story of Eden echoes the Mesopotamian myth of a king, as a primordial man, who is placed in a divine garden to guard the Tree of life. The Hebrew Bible depicts Adam and Eve as walking around the Garden of Eden naked due to their innocence. Eden and its rivers may signify the real Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, or the Promised Land.
It may also represent the divine garden on Zion, and the mountain of God, which was also Jerusalem. The imagery of the Garden, with its serpent and cherubim, has been compared to the images of the Solomonic Temple with its copper serpent (the nehushtan) and guardian cherubs.
Although the Garden of Eden is considered to be mythological by most scholars, there have been other suggestions for its location, for example, at the head of the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea; and in the Armenian Highlands or Armenian Plateau. British archaeologist David Rohl claims it may have been located in Iran, and in the vicinity of Tabriz, but this suggestion has not caught on with scholarly sources.
According to the Bible, the location of Eden is described in the Book of Genesis, chapter 2, verses 10–14:
A river flowed from Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided to make four streams. The first is named the Pishon, and this winds all through the land of Havilah where there is gold. The gold of this country is pure; bdellium and cornelian stone are found there. The second river is named the Gihon, and this winds all through the land of Cush. The third river is named the Tigris, and this flows to the east of Ashur. The fourth river is the Euphrates.