Was Eden actually in Israel?

Bible scholars believe the location of the Eden 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 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.

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. 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.

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.

Copyright 2004, Bruce Paul