It was a perfect paradise, but because of the disobedience
of man, humanity lost access to the Garden of Eden forever.
But was it a real
place, and if so where is it today? Even those individuals who might not know
anything about Christianity or the Bible are typically aware of the
Garden of Eden.
A perfect place without
evil, death, or pain, whose vast gardens were full of rich, always ripe
fruits and the most beautiful flowers on all the earth.
In essence, the Garden
of Eden is paradise, and often used symbolically to represent perfect
bliss.
But humanity messed things up by.
.
.
Well, being human.
You're probably
familiar with the story of the apple, and how Eve- the first woman- was
tempted to pluck an apple from the tree of knowledge at the heart of the Garden
of Eden and thus disobeyed God.
After pressuring
Adam to also eat the apple, both Adam and Eve were cursed to
leave the perfect garden of Eden and wander the earth for the rest
of their lives, where they would have to toil with blood, sweat,
and tears to make a living for themselves out of the hard, unforgiving
ground.
And that's pretty
much been humanity's state for thousands of years.
But could there be more to the story than just myth?
Interestingly, the Bible actually records the Garden of Eden as not a
spiritual place, but a very real, physical space that's definitely located
somewhere on our planet.
In Genesis
2: 8-14, the Bible states: The Lord God planted a garden
eastward in Eden.
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.
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Now a river went
out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads.
The name of the
first is Piston.
.
.
.
The name of the
second river is Gihon.
.
.
.
The name of the
third river is Hidaka [Tigris].
;.
.
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The fourth river is
the Euphrates.
The Genesis narrative clearly states that a single
river went through the holy garden, and when it exited it turned into four
rivers.
Two of those rivers are Piston and Gihon, rivers
that we don't recognize today.
But two of them
are well known to us- Hidaka, better known as the Tigris, and the Euphrates.
Both of these
rivers run through ancient Mesopotamia, and straight through the modern
day nation of Iraq.
The two rivers even
share the same headwaters in the area around Mt. Ararat- which means
that finding the Garden of Eden should be as simple as finding the other
two rivers and seeing where they intersect the two known rivers.
But there's a problem, because the Piston and Gihon
rivers are unknown to us, and no other rivers flow out of the same headwaters
as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Famous French
reformer John Calvin made note of the difficulties in using known
geography to locate the Garden of Eden, writing the following: Many think
that Psion and Gihon are the Ganges and the Nile; the error, however, of
these men is abundantly refuted by the distance of the positions of these
rivers.
Persons do not want who fly across even to the
Danube; as if indeed the habitation of one man stretched itself from the
most remote part of Asia to the extremity of Europe.
But since many other celebrated rivers flow by the
region of which we are speaking, there is greater probability in the
opinion of those who believe that two of these rivers are pointed out, although
their names are now obsolete.
Be this as it
may, the difficulty is not yet solved.
For Moses divides the one river which flowed by
the garden into four heads.
Yet it appears that
the fountains of the Euphrates and the Tigris were far distant from each
other.
A popular belief at the time of John Calvin was that
the other two rivers which poured out of the Garden of Eden were the
mighty Ganges and Nile rivers, two of the largest and most important
rivers in the world then and today.
But Calvin notes the
difficulty in this being true, as obviously the rivers are very far apart
from each other, and he notes that one man in the ancient world
surely couldn't have habituated on both the Nile and Ganges- the
distance again is simply far too great.
Calvin then supposes what others have- that the names
of the rivers have been lost to us and that the Piston and Gihon are names for
rivers that we know today by different names.
This isn't entirely implausible;
as the Fertile Crescent was known for being a location of much strife
in ancient times- the names of even two important rivers being wiped out
from the cultural record is not impossible.
But Calvin makes a final observation, that even
if this were true, and though the Tigris and Euphrates share the same
headwaters, they simply don't flow from the exact same source- a
singular, unified river which splits into four.
What we have now is three missing rivers, because don't
forget- the river that flowed through Eden is what split into four to
create the other four rivers.
And yet the author of Genesis is insistent that Eden
was a real, geographical place, and not a symbol or mythological
location.
Creationists and biblical literalists have an answer
for the missing rivers: they were destroyed by flooding.
Rather, by one
specific flood: Noah's flood.
In the Bible, the
world grows so wicked that God decides to wipe the slate clean.
He finds Noah and
his family to be the only faithful people left on the face of
the earth- which to be fair at the time would only have been a few
tens of thousands of people.
Thus to ensure
humanity survives, he orders Noah to build a massive ark that
can hold him and his family along with two of every land
species, male and female of course.
The rain starts
to pour- which confuses people because until that point there had
been no rain- and eventually everything floods leaving only
Noah and his boat full of animals to survive and repopulate the earth.
The bible is
clear that the flood was so bad that it covered even the tops of the
mountains up.
There are obviously a whole host of problems with this
account- namely that it would be impossible to house and feed 2 of every
land species for over a year in one boat.
Also, it would be
impossible to even build that boat without the assistance of modern
technology- though Noah did build for years.
The material cost
alone though would have made it necessary for Noah to be the Jeff
Bezos of his day, though to be fair the flood account doesn't mention if
Noah was rich or not.
Then there are the more scientific problems.
Flooding the entire earth so that even the tops
of the mountains would be below sea level is simply impossible.
All that water would
have had to go somewhere after the flood, and we're talking about
incredible, mind-boggling amounts of water.
At the very least we
should see that water locked up in massive glaciers dozens of miles tall
in the poles, but we don't.
If Noah's ark had
also been coasting on water above mountain top high he would
have had to deal with a thinner atmosphere- though we suppose it’s
possible the atmosphere would have been compressed by the rising
floodwaters to perhaps mitigate some of the altitude sickness
which would be plaguing Noah and his animals.
Perhaps most importantly of all though is the fact that
there's simply zero evidence for a global flood- no matter what Ken Ham (https://content.Swncdn.com/zcast/oneplace/host-images/answers-in-genesis/640x480.jpg) and
his cherry-picked science like to say.
But it might surprise you to learn that evidence
for a regional flood is very much present, and one of staggering scale.
The flood of Genesis is repeated across other ancient
literature, including famously in the epic of Gilgamesh, leading to cries
of plagiarism from critics.
This would be a
stretch for sure, as the two works bear nothing more than superficial
similarities- but both could very well be reporting on a very real event,
just not in quite the scale described in either work.
Sediment deposits found across Iraq indicate that the
region was prone to some massive flooding in the past.
One sediment deposit
in southeastern Iraq is a whopping 3 meters thick, with 2.4 meter
deposits to the southeast of Baghdad.
Those deposits were dated to about 2900 BC, nearly
1500 years before Genesis was officially put down on paper.
The area however was
already home to the descendants of those early scribes, and they
would definitely have witnessed floods devastating enough to wash away
entire villages, and wide enough to cover hundreds of square miles.
Massive floods can indeed rewrite the geography of the
earth; we have ample evidence of large-scale catastrophic flooding
erasing river systems from existence or diverting the flow of ancient
rivers.
But the problem
once more becomes with where the floods took place.
Massive regional
flooding in the Mesopotamian valley wouldn't have been able to reach
to the mountains where the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates lay- that
would have required truly mythical levels of flooding.
Without being able to
extend that far, no amount of flooding could have erased our two
missing rivers from existence.
Climate change could have possibly dried up these two
ancient rivers, but again modern geography doesn't show any evidence of
major rivers linking up with a shared source in the area.
The Tigris and
Euphrates could possibly have shared a source in the past, but even this is
highly unlikely given the terrain and course of the two rivers today.
Even then, the
original river which fed the four rivers that broke off “like the
spokes of a wheel” is also missing from both geology and history - no
people from the area have ever reported any such river in the terrain.
It could be argued then that the Garden of Eden exists
'spiritually', perhaps just out of phase with the real world and
that's why no physical evidence of its location can actually be found.
However, the ancient
writers were adamant that this was a real location- though it might be
best not to find it today even if we could, given that God very
famously set a flaming sword and a troupe of angels to guard its entrance.
The most likely answer though is the simplest: it was
myth.
The Genesis account
is not meant to be taken literally and was simply a mythologized
account of the creation of man, not just an origin story but a way for
early man to explore some truths about God himself and his
relationship with us.
We see the same
in the poetic work of the Book of Job, itself not a historical
account but rather a poetic exploration into some of the most
difficult aspects of life, spirituality, and the nature of good and evil.
What might surprise you is that this is not a new
revelation- Christians throughout history have always believed that
Genesis was not history, but enlightened mythology that was supposed
to be studied for its spiritual truths, not its historical accuracy.
Famed Christian
philosopher William Lane Craig argues that Genesis should be considered 'myth-history', as
it contains accurate historical details alongside what are obvious
mythological passages.
This view fits perfectly
into the way that ancient man understood, and spoke about his world,
combining real history with mythological flourishes woven together into a
single narrative.
What's curious- or sad- about Genesis is that its
ancient audience understood better what parts was myth and what parts
weren't compared to a modern audience.
As Dr. Craig points
out, the ancient Jews lived and died by agriculture, which meant they
understood things like the water cycle extremely well as their lives literally
depended on it.
Genesis claims that
before the flood the earth was watered by springs from beneath it, as no
rain had ever fallen until the fateful day that God flooded the earth.
But an ancient,
farming audience would have understood this to be pure myth due to
their knowledge of the water cycle.
Meanwhile, modern creationists like Ken Ham try to
twist science into making something work that even the ancients knew
was never meant to be taken as physical fact.
This likely is also true
about the Garden of Eden, as man did not descend from two single
individuals but rather evolved from the great apes.
So if you're looking for the Garden of Eden today, it
exists only as a symbol of what man loses every time he disobeys God's
commands- your garden of Eden is the peace you could enjoy if
you followed God’s will such as being kind to those who hate you, or
practicing restraint against your passionate impulses.