Our libraries and the internet are filled with ideas on where Eden might be, including Tibet and South America, but the majority of Bible scholars believe the location of this unusual orchard existed in one of two areas. The northern location is thought to be in Armenia or Eastern Turkey where the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates reside. The area is also interesting because this is the final resting place of Noah's Ark, and some scholars have drawn elaborate maps of the river in Eden flowing down Mt Ararat into the four rivers mentioned in Genesis chapter 2. This makes for interesting musing among our dear Armenian brothers, but is really quite geographical implausible. This model is dubious because a few of these rivers, as we will soon learn, would have had to cross oceanic crust to get to their final destinations. For the purpose and scope of this study, let us simply state that this never happens. Yet some persist, and are still running around trying to find the remnants of those other two long forgotten rivers.
The southern and most widely accepted location of Eden is in Iraq or Kuwait where the Tigris and Euphrates empty out into the Persian Gulf. To reconcile the Biblical narrative that Eden's river fed into the headwaters of these four rivers and not the delta you have to imagine ancient peoples thinking that headwaters were like a serpent's head, and that they believed headwaters were where the water actually left the river. This is a ridiculous fabrication and in no way reflects our knowledge of the times and cultures surrounding Moses, who wrote the Genesis account.
To reconcile these difficulties, some have suggested that determining the location of Eden is impossible because of the devastation of the flood, and the changing geography described in Genesis 10:25. Yet after an honest reading of the Genesis 2 account, and knowing that the audience for this narrative is the Hebrew people that have just escaped captivity in Egypt, the description seems far to elaborate to be anything but a detailed report of where these four rivers were understood to emanated. The location of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are undisputed. The problem scholars have had through the years is accepting the clearly defined location of these other two rivers. So where are they?
"The name of the first is Pishon; it runs through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is pure; pearls and lapis lazuli are also there)" (Genesis 2:11, 12). The name of the river Pishon itself is not very helpful, but the name of the people Havilah identifies the area. The people are Arabian, as the Havilah are referenced in Genesis 25:18, and 1 Samuel 15:7, and are thought to be one of the Joktanean tribes in northern Arabia. During the time of the Exodus, there was a location around Medina, towards the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, that was renowned for its pure gold and today remains the only location in Arabia where gold is still produced. Also, there's been a lot of buzz about an ancient river discovered through Shuttle Imaging Radar photos, which started in the Hijaz Mountains near Medina and flowed 530 miles northeast into the Persian Gulf off the coast of present-day Kuwait. This matches our Biblical and archeological information perfectly, so our first river mentioned in this Genesis 2 account was in Arabia, and the headwaters for this river would have been as far south as Medina.
The name of the second river is Gihon; it runs through the entire land of Cush (Genesis 2:13). Once again the name of the river itself is not very helpful to us, but this word Cush or Kuwsh in the Hebrew means black, and is mentioned 29 times in scripture. Cush invariably refers to Ethiopia, but this is really not so surprising as this area was well known among the Hebrew people, and they would have quickly identified the headwaters of the Nile to have originated here.
You can see the Bible scholar's dilemma! How do you connect rivers with headwaters in eastern Turkey, Arabia, and Ethiopia? How does this one river in Eden feed the headwaters of four rivers that are thousands of kilometers apart? The problem with these scholars perspective, however, is that they never asked themselves a far more fundamental question in the first place. How does one river ever feed the headwaters of four other rivers? Hydrology rarely works this way! The top of any river basin always has many rivers that funnel down into one river, not the other way around. A river doesn't spill a little bit of its water into one channel, go along a bit further and spill some more, until it feeds the headwaters of four different rivers. It empties itself out into that very first channel!
If we can solve the mystery of Eden's location, we need to stop thinking about a process of one river feeding four other rivers over the surface of the earth. This fact provides us with our first real clue in our treasure hunt, and is easily explained earlier in the Genesis 2 account. "Now no shrub of the field had yet grown on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. Springs would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground" (Genesis 2:5, 6).
So if we can imagine the Eden River acting as the initial water resource, flowing down below the earth's surface to eventually feed the springs of every main river resource known to the Hebrew people. Every key river known to them other than the Jordan River which is suspiciously missing here, but we will address its absence later. If the four water heads were fed through some kind of sub-terrain process, it's possible that Eden could have been located anywhere, but finding the center of those four water heads might be a good place to start. Once again we're dealing with educated guesses here, but somewhere around Israel or Jordon wouldn't be a bad guess.
There are a few other hints in the Bible that can help us here. It says in Genesis 4:16 that "Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden", and then in 2Kings 19:12, and Isaiah 37:12 it mentions "the children of Eden which were in Telassar". So Eden must be somewhere west of Telassar, which is thought by modern archaeologists to have been in southern Assyria, due East of Israel. In fact, all of the Assyrian kingdom seems to be disqualified by Ezekiel 31, as the passage compares the greatness of Assyria with the trees of Eden - "Which of the trees of Eden was like you in majesty and loftiness?" (Ezekiel 31:18) If the grandeur of Eden was surpassed by Assyria, Eden could never have resided in any part of the kingdom. It's important to note here that Assyria had concurred all of Northern Israel, but Judah remained independent until the Babylonian captivity.
So Eden was in Judah, and the river of Eden flowed down into what is now the Dead Sea. Many modern scholars do believe that Eden was located in the northern Persian Gulf area, but very few of them have degrees in geology, so they simply haven't understood other potential hydrologic mechanisms relating to Eden's location, and they've forced different locations for the first two rivers based on the Tigris and Euphrates river geography. It's clear where the first two rivers were when you focus on the Bible text. The scholars thought they had to contrive these other locations because they've only been able to conceptualize bringing all four of these rivers together above ground.
According to our model, if you were to send water down into the ground to ultimately feed what would become some of the greatest rivers in the world, one of the best place on the planet to do this would be to direct those waters into this Dead Sea rift, which descends down not only 1400 ft below sea level, but continues down another 1200 ft to the bottom of the sea. In fact, all of the rivers mentioned in Genesis 2 are in top of, or in close proximity to the "Great Rift Valley", which the Dead Sea is just a part of. The headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come remarkably close together in area known as Elazig in Turkey, just 150 Km from the top of the Great Rift Valley in Kahramanmaras. The Great Rift Valley then moves down through Israel and south along both sides of the Red Sea, following the coast of western Arabia to supply Pishon in Medina. Then, continuing south into Africa the rift moves along both sides of Lake Victoria, which is the location of Gihon's headwaters or what is better know as The Nile.
If you think this is a remarkable insight, consider this: every one of these rivers listed here in Genesis chapter 2 would be the ultimate destiny of the exile and punishment of the Hebrew people as a result of their idolatry and unbelief. They were slaves beside the river Gihon before the Exodus, they would walk beside the waters of Pishon during their wondering in the wilderness, the 10 northern tribes were taken captive to the banks of the Tigris River during the Assyrian invasion, and Southern Israel was carried away to the shores of the Euphrates during the Babylonian captivity. These rivers had enormous spiritual implication, as though God was reaching out to them through His Spirit, nourishing and sustaining His people during their greatest times of tribulation. For these waters of encouragement emanated from their land of promise, and would restore a remnant to return back home. Why else would God call Abraham all the way from Ur of the Chaldees to this Promised Land, if it were not where the river of life once flowed and would flow again? Why else would the rivers of these other nations be mentioned in the Genesis account and not the Hebrews people's river, the Jordan River, unless the Jordan wasn't a noteworthy feature at this time?
As a final evidence for this hypothesis of Eden's Judean location, we need to consider the burning sword God put in place to keep man from eating fruit from the tree of life. "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim's, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24). The word flaming here is "lahat" and might also be translated burning. The word used to describe how this burning sword moves around is, "haphak", and is used in Job 37:12 speaking of churning clouds, and also in Judges 7:13 speaking of a tumbling roll of bread.
So to locate our burning sword, we need to find a geographical barrier that would act as a deterrent to anyone attempting to access the tree of life, burns like fire, and churns like clouds or tumbles like a roll of bread. A body of water certainly churns like clouds and tumbles like a roll of bread, and you could even imagine how the waves on the surface could be perceived to be like swords moving back and forth. If our Genesis 3 burning sword is a body of water, the Dead Sea would be a good candidate because its waters burn your eyes, nose and throat like fire. Also, as incredible as it may sound, radar enhanced satellite imaging of the Dead Sea area show the previous extent of this body of water and how it use to look just like a sword.
Jesus and the Tree of Life
If the Dead Sea is indeed the burning sword of Genesis 3:24, the ramifications are astonishing, and would effect everything we understand about the Bible and Bible prophecy. Initially, I believed that the tree of life is submerged somewhere under the sea of death, painting a pristine portrait of the gospel message, eternal life is offered to those who are baptized through the waters of death. Exceptional analogy, but it's not true because it doesn't really follow the description we see in Genesis. Here we read that, "the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the middle of the orchard" (Genesis 2:9) and that the Cherubim's and burning sword were placed at the east of the garden (Genesis 3:24). So where was the tree of life?
Ezekiel was called up to the river bank four thousand cubits from the temple, where he found a vast number of trees (Ezekiel 47:7). This is about 2 km or 1.2 miles from the temple, and would place us in the Mount of Olives. This is a very significant place in scripture as: Ezekiel had a vision of God and the cherubim here (Ezekiel 11:22-23), Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem from here (Luke 19:28-44), Jesus gave his Olivet discourse from here (Matthew 24:1-51), Jesus was arrested here (Luke 22:49-51), and Jesus ascended into heaven from here (Acts 1:1-12). The Mount of Olives is also where Jesus is prophesized to return (Acts 1:11).
Just a little east of this point, on the south-east slope of the Mount of Olives is Bethany, where Jesus made his Judean home. Here Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead to demonstrate to the world that he was indeed the tree of life (John 11:1-44). If this incident is matched together with his cursing of the fig tree in Bethany, which could be representative of cursing the "tree of knowledge of good and evil", the tree of life would have originally been located in the Bethany area.
But how do we deal with the river of life? If Bethany was the location of the tree of life, how does this river of life flow down from the temple on Mount Moriah and go up through the Mount of Olives which rises 60 meters above the Kidron Valley? There will be an earthquake and the Mount of Olives will be split in two when Jesus returns. "Then the Lord will go to battle and fight against those nations, just as he fought battles in ancient days. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives which lies to the east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in half from east to west, leaving a great valley. Half the mountain will move northward and the other half southward. Then you will escape through my mountain valley, for the mountains will extend to Azal. Indeed, you will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of King Uzziah of Judah. Then the Lord my God will come with all his holy ones with him" (Zechariah 14:3-5).
Get all the information on this issue at:
www.faith-friends.com/Eden
Copyright 2004, Bruce Paul
