Was the Garden of Eden a Virgin Forest?

Henry Breasted's map of the Fertile Crescent. He coined the term "Fertile Crescent."

Alice C. Linsley

The final of the nine questions asked by a reader of Just Genesis is: "Was the garden of Eden a real place or a myth?"

Eden, as it is described in Genesis 2, was a vast well-watered region that extended from the sources of the Nile in Uganda and Ethiopia to the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. This corresponds to the Fertile Crescent described by Henry Breasted (shown above). The biblical writers were aware that this is the cradle of the earliest civilizations.

The term Eden is derived from the Akkadian word edinu which refers to a fertile plain or a well-watered region. Akkadian is the oldest known Semitic language and predates Hebrew by nearly 2000 years. The Akkadian language shares many roots with other Afroasiatic languages. A Yoruba word for the fertile soil of a virgin forest is egàn which is related to the Hebrew word gan, meaning for garden.

Eridu ramparts in the Nigerian jungle

Asar Imhotep made linguistic connections to ancient Egyptian and Yoruba:

Yoruba iju “jungle” is cognate with Egyptian ju “mountain.” The underlying semantic spirit of each term demonstrates a primary connotation of “wilderness.” The wilderness for the Yoruba was the jungle: for the Egyptians it was the inhospitable desert of the red mountains (dsrt). The inhospitable wilderness of the jungle is described in Yoruba as aginju “dark wilderness.” The qualifier agin- (cf. egàn “the soil under the forest cover” – black, fertile, soil) is from the same root oganjo (ogan-jo) “the dark part of the day,” the dead of night, oganjo oru.

(The word for mountain in Ancient Egyptian is usually transcribed djew, not ju.)

According to Genesis, the garden would have been east of Noah's homeland in the region of Lake Chad. In the language of the local Kanuri, Lake Chad is Bahar Nuhu, meaning "Sea of Noah." Other place names in that region are Benue and Borno. These place names mean "land of Noah." 

Genesis 3 states that God drove Adam and Eve out of the garden and caused them "to dwell east of the garden." The same explanation appears in reference to Cain's banishment to the "east of Eden" (Gen. 4:15). These early Hebrew were moving east, and the way back was closed by the angels stationed on the east of the garden (Gen. 3:24).

Related reading: Eden: A well-watered region; The Search for Eden; An Anthropologist Looks at Genesis 3

What Happened in the Garden?

Alice C. Linsley

What happened in the Garden?

Adam and Eve lived in the Garden (egan) of the Lord which was well watered, like “the land of Egypt” (Gen. 13:10). Here a creature more cunning than all the other creatures enabled the man and the woman to "see" that the tree was good to eat, a delight to behold, and desirable to make one wise (Gen. 3:6). The woman admits that "the serpent deceived me and I ate." (Gen. 3:13) Having taken the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve hid from the Lord their God because, for the first time, they feared their Creator. This is exactly what the Serpent wanted. Fear is doubt of God's goodness. The Creator desires to protect the man and the woman from fear, the first obstacle to communion with God, since fear is the opposite of love.

Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise for their own protection and the Lord commanded an angel to guard the gate on the east side of the Garden, barring the way to the Tree of Life, "lest he put out his hand ... and eat, and live forever."

The story of the loss of Paradise speaks of the introduction of the "deliberative will" (θέλημα γνωμικόν) which tends toward self and estrangement from others. This will opposes the "natural will" (θέλημα φυσικόν) which tends toward God and union with the Creator. Adam and Eve chose separation from God when they willed to obey the wisdom of the creature over the goodness of God, upon Whom all humanity is dependent for life. Since humanity is made in the image of God, our salvation entails our restoration to Paradise and unity with God through the renewal of the natural will. This will is renewed the the will of Jesus Christ.

God’s plan to restore Paradise

The belief that humans inherit original sin from Adam and Eve presents a different picture. This tenet, upon which the Latin Church bases its understanding of baptism as a spiritual washing, led people to delay baptism until they were near to death and caused people to fear dying without baptism. This notion of ancestral guilt or “original sin” was articulated by St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) who interpreted St Paul's writings as a platonist, especially this verse: "...through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin passed upon all men because of Adam, [in whom] all sinned" (Rom. 5:12).

David Bradshaw notes that the East-West bifurcation on the question of what happened in the Garden is in part traced to St Augustine's dislike of Greek. He writes, "The change is illustrated by the career of Augustine, who tells us in the Confessions how much he detested Greek as a boy and how glad he was to put it behind him. His entire theological formation seems to have taken place without reference to the enormous body of Greek theological writing which was at that time the main repository of Christian thought. Although this absence no doubt aided the flowering of Augustine’s originality, it meant that the legacy he bestowed on the western church was remarkably disconnected from the earlier tradition." (From "The Concept of Divine Energies", here.)

The concept that all are born sinful because of Adam's sin is not the unanimous view of the Fathers. St. Maximus holds that the significance of the Garden is that we have a corrupted nature. In a letter to his friend Thalassius, he wrote, "Nothing in theosis is the product of human nature for nature cannot comprehend God. It is only the mercy of God that has the capacity to endow theosis unto the existing... In theosis man (the image of God) becomes likened to God, he rejoices in all the plenitude that does not belong to him by nature, because the grace of the Spirit triumphs within him, and because God acts in him" (Letter 22).

By participating in the life of Christ, whose perfect humanity willed to be one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, we are able to enjoy God without fear. The expulsion from the Garden was not a legal judgment requiring expiation, but rather a sigg of God's continuing mercy: "for while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungoldy" (Rom 5:6).

As Christians partake of the Eucharistic food, freely given by God, we return to dependence on God for our life. We also experience a gradual healing of the relationship between God and humanity. The goal is theosis or divinization, a real union with God and closer likeness to Christ than existed even in the Garden.