Myth #26:

God planted a garden eastward in Eden.

The Myth: And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 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. (Gen. 2:8-14)

The Reality: Eden originally represented the Isle of Flames, the first land in the Egyptian Creation myths. In the Heliopolitan tradition, that would locate Eden at Heliopolis.

Where did God plant the Garden of Eden? Much has been written on this subject but without any definitive answer. The text provides few clues. Genesis places it in the east, which is where the sun rises, and also locates it west of Nod, where Cain built the first city. Unfortunately, no one knows where Nod is.

The chief clues to Eden’s location are the references to the four rivers, Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates, all of which split off from a main river that flows out of Eden but which is not named.

The first river, Pison, encompasses all the land of Havilah, which has very good natural resources, such as gold, bdellium, and onyx. The location of Havilah is unknown, but most scholars believe it corresponds to Arabia. Genesis 10, however, which describes various geographical relationships, depicts Havilah as a son of Cush, and Cush is Ethiopia.

The second river, Gihon,“compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.” This places two rivers in the vicinity of Cush, an area south of or near the south of Egypt.

Hiddekel, the third river, goes toward the east of Assyria, and clearly corresponds to the Tigris River, one of the two great waterways of Mesopotamia. The fourth river is still known as the Euphrates, the other great river of Mesopotamia.

What’s wrong with this picture? We have two rivers in Asia and two south of Egypt. How can these four rivers be connected to a single source? What is the mighty water source from which the other four rivers split off? And where is the Nile, which runs through Egypt, between Asia and Ethiopia? The story in its present form represents a late editing by someone familiar with Babylonian traditions but not knowledgeable about African geography.

Several clues suggest that the unnamed mighty river from which these other four rivers flow is the Nile.

1. The Nile is the only major river not listed in the text.
2. Such identification would account for how Eden’s geography could include two rivers south of Egypt that link up to other river sources far to the north.
3. The Garden of Eden story derives from the Heliopolitan Creation myth. In that story, after the first land emerged and the waters drew together in the Nile, the god Shu went down to Heliopolis and became Osiris in the form of the grain, thus planting a garden east of the Nile.
4. Egyptian tradition placed the Tree of Life in Heliopolis.
5. The first land in Egyptian tradition came to be known as The Isle of Flames (because of the flaming mountain that arose out of Nun) and each of the cult centers claimed to be the site of the first land. In Genesis, after God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, he blocked the entrance with fire-wielding cherubs, which suggests the idea of an “isle of flames.”

These points indicate that the story about four rivers flowing from one river coming out of the Garden of Eden had nothing to do with the two Asian waters described in the Genesis story. Originally, the four branches would have been Nile tributaries, two of which split off in the north and formed the Egyptian delta, and two of which split off in the south by Ethiopia.

Subsequently, when the Hebrews came to Babylon, they replaced the names of the two Nile branches forming the Egyptian delta with the names of the two Mesopotamian rivers forming the Mesopotamian delta. They left the two southern branches intact.

As the Hebrews began to look at their history from a Babylonian perspective, they identified many of the biblical stories with similar tales in Mesopotamian literature, often losing track of the original Egyptian roots. As they transferred the rivers from the Egyptian delta to Mesopotamia, the Isle of Flames no longer held any meaning for them. The flames associated with the original isle were transformed into fiery swords wielded by cherubs.

In Mesopotamia, the Hebrews learned stories about a place named Dilmun, which was widely known in that region as an ancient paradise from the first times. As they substituted Mesopotamian traditions for the Egyptian, they believed that Eden and Dilmun may have been one and the same place.