- 8) And I, the Lord God, planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there I put the man whom I had formed.
- 9) And out of the ground made I, the Lord God, to grow every tree, naturally, that is pleasant to the sight of man; and man could behold it. And it became also a living soul. For it was spiritual in the day that I created it; for it remaineth in the sphere in which I, God, created it, yea, even all things which I prepared for the use of man; and man saw that it was good for food. And I, the Lord God, planted the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and also the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
- 10) And I, the Lord God, caused a river to go out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
- 11) And I, the Lord God, called the name of the first Pison, and it compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where I, the Lord God, created much gold;
- 12) And the gold of that land was good, and there was bdellium and the onyx stone.
- 13) And the name of the second river was called Gihon; the same that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
- 14) And the name of the third river was Hiddekel; that which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river was the Euphrates.
- 15) And I, the Lord God, took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it.
- 4) And Adam and Eve, his wife, called upon the name of the Lord, and they heard the voice of the Lord from the way toward the Garden of Eden, speaking unto them, and they saw him not; for they were shut out from his presence.
- 41) And Cain was shut out from the presence of the Lord, and with his wife and many of his brethren dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
- Discussion of the book, "What Happened in the Garden of Eden".
- Discusses the meaning of Eden being "bountiful".
- Apocryphally, the place where Adam lived before the flood, could not have been in the old world.
- The Garden of Eden could not have been in Missouri. (Because, Adam WAS in Missouri, and had been kicked out of Eden.)
Notes
We really don't have any idea how long Adam and Eve would have been in the Garden of Eden, but we can roughly estimate from the division of the history of the earth as it pertains to God's plan, into seven periods of 1000 years, that they were kicked out roughly around 4000 B.C.
Moses 5:41 asserts the existence of a land of Nod to the east of Eden.
The primary scholarly theory traces the idea of the Garden of Eden back to the Gu-Edin as identified by the Sumerians. Linguistically this seems appealing, but if we are to identify the Garden of Edin as an actual place, it would seem that I would need to look elsewhere and imagine that either the name was either only conveniently copied to represent the concept of the original, or that the Sumerians copied the name from an older tradition of the original. Regardless, for the purposes of wordplay and theme, the Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Aramaic Edens all seem to be highly relevant to the how the Garden of Eden is represented in the Hebrew stories.
Hebrew
In Hebrew, the Garden of Eden is Gan Eden. It translates more literally to "Garden of Delight" or "Garden of Pleasure". The root is ayin-dalet-nun, and the meaning of the root is to "luxuriate" or "delight".
Ugaritic/Aramaic
In Ugaritic, this root carries the meaning of "well-watered throughout". In Aramaic, a prefixed 'm' on this root means "provider of abundance" and describes someone who makes the land fruitful and lush by providing water.
Sumerian
In Sumerian, the word eden (or edin) literally means "plain," "steppe," or "open uncultivated country". Many believe that this is the origin of the Hebrew word, with the Ugaritic and Aramaic usages representing an earlier phase of the word's evolution. Some identify a particularly fertile (and contested) region, known as the Gu-Edin (Edge of the Plain), as being the origin of the idea of the Garden of Eden.
Cross-References