Wouldn’t it be nice to find the actual location of the real Garden of Eden?
Wouldn’t it be nice to find the actual location of the real Garden of Eden? In theological circles it would be a discovery that could equal that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well guess what? Archaeologist David Rohl claims to have found the site described in Genesis as “Eden” in a lush valley beneath an extinct volcano in northern Iran.
The Jerusalem Report (February 1, 1999) broke the story in the article—“Paradise Found.”
Ten miles from the sprawling Iranian industrial city of Tabriz, to the northwest of Teheran, says British archaeologist David Rohl, he has found the site of the Biblical garden. “As you descend a narrow mountain path, you see a beautiful alpine valley, just like the Bible describes it, with terraced orchards on its slopes, crowded with every kind of fruit-laden tree,” says Rohl, a scholar of University College, London, who has just returned from his third trip to the area, where mud brick villages flourish today.
What made Rohl look in this location in the first place? One factor was that he read about it in ancient Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets held by the Museum of the Orient in Istanbul. The other factor was the work of the late, little-known British scholar Reginald Walker. The ancient tablets described a 5,000 year-old route to Eden. He has been researching the location since the late 1980’s through academic documents.
In April 1997, Rohl did something very remarkable to prove his point. He set out from the Iranian town of Ahwaz, near the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, with only his jeep driver for company. According to the article:
They traveled north toward Kurdistan through what Rohl calls ‘lawless’ terrain, trusting to luck to avoid the various guerilla factions active in the region. Rohl followed a route, documented in the Sumerian cuneiform epic ‘Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,’ supposedly taken 5,000 years earlier by an emissary of the Sumerian priest-king of Uruk. The emissary had been dispatched to Aratta, on the plain of ‘Edin’— known to Sumerians as a land of happiness and plenty—to obtain gold and lapis lazuli to decorate a temple that Enmerkar was building in Uruk. The cuneiform epic describes the dutiful emissary’s three-month trek on foot via seven passes through the Zagros Mountains, to the foothills of Mt. Sahand—the southern edge of Rohl’s Eden—and his successful procurement of the required valuable.
Rohl believes . . . the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of an earthly paradise that had once lain beyond what they called the Seven Heavens. For them, Eden was still very much an earthly place.
The Garden described in the Bible places the headwaters of four rivers in it: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. Obviously, the Tigris and Euphrates are well-known rivers, but the other two have been real problems in the past. Rohl has identified them as the Araxes and Uizhun which puts the headwaters of all four rivers in his Eden. Interestingly, the Uizhun, Rohl’s equivalent to the Pishon which the Bibles identifies with gold, is known locally as the Golden River, and meanders between ancient gold mines and lodes of lapis lazuli.
Making his case even stronger, Rohl says that he has found the “Land of Nod” which the Bible describes as “East of Eden.” Nod was Cain’s place of exile after the murder of his brother Abel. Today the area is called “Noqdi.”
But it doesn’t end there because a few kilometers south of Rohl’s Nod, at the head of a mountain pass, lies the sleepy town of Helabad. Formerly it was known as “Kheruabad,” which means “settlement of the Kheru people.” He believes that this could be a permutation of the Hebrew word keruvim that is translated as “Cherubs.” These people were a tribe of fearsome warriors whose token was an eagle or falcon. [End of quotes]
Was there actually a Garden of Eden? Does the record say yes? The following is from a book published in 1950 and updated in 1969. The book Archaeology and Bible History, written by Joseph P. Free weighs in on the Garden of Eden in the following paragraphs:
One of the main purposes of Genesis 2 is to describe the nature of Adam and Eve’s environment and the events leading up to the fall. All of the essential facts are carefully recorded. Even the general location of the garden of Eden may be ascertained from the facts given. The Bible records that two of the four rivers connected with the garden of Eden are the Euphrates and the Hiddekel (Gen. 2:14). The Hiddekel River is the same as the river which we now call the Tigris. This is demonstrated by Babylonian clay tablets which apply the name Idiglat (of which Hiddekel is a variation) to the river known today as the Tigris.
Thus we see that Eden was in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates, the area known geographically as Mesopotamia (Greek, meaning “between the rivers”), which today is the country known politically as Iraq.
Concerning the precise location of Eden within Mesopotamia, we note two views:
1. Friedrich Delitzsch located it just above Babylon, where the Tigris and Euphrates approach each other within a short distance.
2. George Frederick Wright, geologist at Oberlin College, favored the area further south, near the head of the Persian Gulf. This latter location is seemingly supported by the clay tablets which say that Eridu, a town in southern Mesopotamia, was reputed to have in its neighborhood a garden, “a holy place” in which there grew a sacred palm tree. This legend may still retain some significance in pointing to the location of the original Garden of Eden.
The location of man’s origin upon the earth has been the subject of much speculation, resulting in the theories which place the beginning of civilization in several different places, ranging from Egypt to China. Recent archaeological discoveries, however, point definitely toward the Near East and Mesopotamia, confirming the Biblical indication concerning Eden as the location of man’s origin. The present day scholar, William F. Albright, well summarizes the evidence when he says, “Archaeological research has thus established beyond doubt that there is no focus of civilization in the earth that can begin to compete in antiquity and activity with the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean and the region immediately to the east of it—Breasted’s Fertile Crescent.” [End of quotes]
Genesis Chapter 2 speaks of four rivers. Hebrewversity.com had this to say about two of them:
[The Hebrew] meaning of the name ‘Pishon’ comes from the old Hebrew root ‘P-O-SH’ which means “to jump” or “to bounce” and refers to the strong stream of the water.
The second river’s name is ‘Gihon,’ which comes from the Hebrew root ‘G-Y-CH’ which means “to gush”—and as in the case of the first river ‘Pishon’—refers to the state of the water.
A river by the name of ‘Gihon’ can be found outside of the Old City of Jerusalem today. This river is named ‘Gihon’ because of the Biblical description of the crowning of King Solomon, as described in I Kings:
The king also said unto them, Take with you the servants of your lord, and cause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own mule, and bring him down to Gihon:
I would like to conclude with an intriguing anecdote. Today, the Hebrew name of the Jerusalem water company is…’Gihon!” [End of quote]
The article “Scientific Search for the Garden of Eden,” subhead “The remarkable geological and geographical accuracy of Genesis 2,” was written by Dave Armstrong and published January 18, 2022. Excerpts follow:
Carol A. Hill is a Presbyterian geologist, whose work on Noah’s flood has been very useful in my research on that topic. She has also addressed the question of whether Eden, as described in the Bible, was an actual place that can be located through an analysis of the story in Genesis and its connection to geography and geology. She ponders the topic in her article, “The Garden of Eden: A Modern Landscape,” published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, March 2000. All indented citations will be hers, unless otherwise identified.
[Special note: The editor has taken the liberty to use the AKJV for all Scriptural passages in this article.
The Wadi al Batin/Wadi Rimah system drains some 43,400 square miles of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The now dry Wadi al Batin enters the Persian Gulf at Umm Qasr in Kuwait, but in the past the Pishon entered the Gulf north of Umm Qasr, in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin. The evidence for this is a triangular, fan-shaped, delta plain of cobbles and pebbles in the Dibdibah area, which has its apex near Al Qaysumah and which extends northward toward the Euphrates. The cobbles and pebbles of this gravel plain are composed of crystalline rock that is characteristic of the western mountains of Saudi Arabia, and they decrease in size as they approach the Gulf area. The geological implication of this is that the source of the cobbles was to the southwest in Saudi Arabia, and that enough water once flowed in the Pishon River to transport rock debris from the Western Highlands down toward the Euphrates-Tigris river basin.
From the Persian Gulf at Umm Qasr, the now dry Wadi al Batin can be followed to the southwest, upstream past the borders of Kuwait, and into Saudi Arabia, where it is incised into a Tertiary limestone-sandstone sedimentary rock terrain. Then, just past Al Hatifah, the dry riverbed is engulfed by immense sand dunes and disappears.
This is where the satellite photos come in. These photos indicate that the Wadi al Batin continues to the southwest, beneath the sand, and emerges as the Wadi Rimah (that is, both wadis were part of the same river system in the past, before being covered by sand dunes). About eighty miles further in the upstream direction, the Wadi Rimah bifurcates into the Wadi Qahd on the northwest, and the Wadi al Jarir on the southwest. The Wadi al Jarir continues up gradient to the area of the Mahd adh Dhahab gold mine exactly as the Bible says: 11The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
The evangelical Protestant flagship magazine Christianity Today took note of this theory in its article, “Do Photos Evidence Lost Edenic River,” published October 7, 1996:
Former NASA scientist Farouk El-Baz was assessing environmental damage to the Kuwaiti desert after the Persian Gulf war when he first noticed smooth pebbles of basalt and granite that looked out of place amid the local limestone.
“We can find these rocks in abundance only in the western part of the Arabian peninsula,” he said, “right on the east side of the Red Sea.” El-Baz is now director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing. His satellite photo analysis revealed a dry channel connecting the western mountains with Kuwait, partially covered by sand dunes.
The Hijaz Mountains, from which spring this “Arabian River,” do produce gold, and the river passes a city called Hadiyah. The discovery makes it much harder for skeptics “to ignore the possibility that the Biblical texts accurately preserve many earlier traditions,” archaeologist James Sauer wrote in Biblical Archaeology Review
El-Baz says the climate in the Arabian desert and other nearby areas was much wetter about 5,000 years ago. He believes some of the river’s flow may still be in an underground aquifer and available for irrigation.
Armstrong wonders, “Where was Eden?”:
Of all of these ancient mounds, Eridu is archaeologically one of the oldest settlements known in southern Mesopotamia, dating to about 4800 BC. According to ancient Mesopotamian tradition, Eridu ranks as the oldest city in the world, and it was also regarded as a sacred city. The mound of Eridu is located about twelve miles southwest of Ur.
Geologist Carol Hill concludes:
The Bible locates the Garden of Eden at the confluence of the four rivers of ancient Mesopotamia. The Bible correctly identifies the Pishon River as draining the land of Havilah (Arabia), from whence came gold, bdellium, and onyx stone. The Bible also correctly identifies the Euphrates and Tigris, both of which are modern rivers which drain approximately the same area of Mesopotamia as they did in ancient times. The Gihon, while not positively identified, is probably the Karun (and/or Karkheh), which “encompasses” (winds around) the whole land of Cush (western Iran). Thus, the Bible locates the Garden of Eden as somewhere near where the head of the Persian Gulf may have existed some 6,000 years ago—that is, on a modern landscape similar to that which exists in southern Iraq today.
I’m not persuaded by Dr. Hill’s selection of Eridu as Eden because, in my opinion, it doesn’t appear to line up with the Biblical description in Genesis 2:10. A location southeast of it makes much more sense to me, in terms of the confluence of the four rivers, according to a map that shows all four proposed rivers (the four Dr. Hill agrees with).
I’m actually not as much interested in pinpointing Eden as I am in showing that the Biblical indicators of location are of a sort that can be scientifically analyzed. That’s the exciting and fascinating aspect of all this.
From Genesis Chapter 1 to Revelation Chapter 22, the last chapter of the Bible, it is true and righteous altogether. The last word of this beautiful, inerrant Book was penned nearly 2,000 years ago, with no words added to or subtracted from it, and it remains the constant authority for all things of consequence. The challengers still jeer from the sidelines, but to no avail. It was Charles Darwin’s contention that as science grew in knowledge, it would prove that God and His Bible were irrelevant. However, the contrary has always been the case. Today’s science continues to confirm, usually inadvertently, one Biblical truth after another, miracles and all.
I need to know its true. Everything depends upon it, and I do mean EVERYTHING. When Genesis and a six-day creation is true, when the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve are true, when the devil, the forbidden fruit, and the fall are true, when Noah and the global flood are true, then I John 1:7 is true:
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
Then, John 11:25-26 is true:
25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
Then, Revelation 21:1-5 is true:
1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
True, true, every jot and every tittle is TRUE! Surely this solid Rock, this holy, unchanging and living Book, is the only place to build a life that will last forever. Choose life and live.
GOD SAID, Genesis 2:8:
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
GOD SAID, Mark 13:31:
Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.
MAN SAID: I want sound bites, nothing intense or deep! My phone does my thinking for me. I love food and cars, dope and booze, hi-tech stuff and sex. That’s what I call living! The Bible and its condemnation of all the fun stuff doesn’t fit with today’s enlightened lifestyles like mine.
Now you have THE RECORD
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