Eden

Eden (Heb., 'delight'), the name of the district in which the garden of Paradise was situated. It lay 'in the East,' in the highlands of Central Asia (Gen. ii. 8). The name-word paradeisos (Gr., 'a park'), by which the Greek translators rendered the Hebrew gan ('garden') in Gen. ii. 8, &c., came originally from the old Persian pairidaēza ('a walled garden'). In the later books of the Old Testament it occurs in the Hebrew form pardes. Many futile attempts have been made to reconcile with modern knowledge the mythical geography of Gen. ii. 10-14. Two of the writer's rivers, Hiddelk (Tigris) and Phrat (Euphrates), are well known. Havilah is the general designation of South Arabia, Abyssinia, and perhaps India; Cush is the name for Ethiopia and the southern lands of Africa and Asia generally. Schrader, following the early tradition, which goes back as far as Josephus, identifies Gihon with the Nile, and Pishon with one of the great rivers of India; Ewald and Dillmann find the two rivers in the Ganges and Indus; Lassen, Knobel, Renan, and Spiegel think Pishon stands for the Indus, and Gihon for the Oxus. It is clear that the writer himself had no exact knowledge of the position of Eden, but combined as he found them the special Hebrew legend with the general Asiatic tradition. Aryans and Semites alike believed the cradle of the human race to have been among the mountains of Central Asia, from which the great rivers of the earth proceed. The Indians held that the great streams flowed into all quarters of the world from the holy mount Meru in the Himalayas. According to the ancient Iranian tradition, the fertility of the whole earth depends upon the fountain Ardvi-çûra, which comes forth from the heaven-scaling mountain Hukairya, in the far north, and there are two wonderful trees. One of these, called 'the painless,' or 'all-seed,' produces all the seeds of the world's flora, and stands in the lake Vourn-Kasha, south of the holy mountain; the other, the white Haoma or Gaokarena, whose sap gives immortality, and will awake the dead, grows in the water of Ardvi-çûra. From Ezek. xxviii. 13, 14, it is clear that the Hebrews had a tradition of a 'holy mountain of Elohim,' on the sides of which lay the Paradise of Eden (cf. also Isa. xiv. 13). The idea of the tree of life appears in a still earlier form in the Vedas, in which the first man, Yamas, is represented as leading men to the garden of immortality on the summit of the mountain where he lives in fellowship with the gods. It may be also traced in the Babylonian and Assyrian monuments, but nowhere do we find such a deeply ethical and religious view of the primeval state of man as in the biblical account of Paradise. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a peculiarly Hebrew conception, and lifts the whole narrative from the physical into the moral sphere. See ADAM AND EVE, and ATLANTIS; also the commentaries on Genesis; Bertheau, Beschreibung der Lage des Paradies (1848); and Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies? (1881).