Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Where was Eden?
Four rivers, two of them known. Mesopotamia, a lost pre-flood geography, or a holy mountain described as a garden.
Genesis 2:8-14, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: can Eden be found on a map? Meet me where the two creeks join. Perfectly clear to people who live there. Useless if one creek has dried up and nobody remembers the other's name. Genesis names four rivers. Two are still on the map and two are not.
Genesis 2 places the garden in Eden, in the east, and traces four rivers from it: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Readers have tried to find it ever since.
The garden is planted "in Eden, in the east." The Tigris and the Euphrates are well known. The Pishon and the Gihon, and the land of Havilah, are not securely identified.
Lennox does not try to locate Eden. His point is that the whole world was not like Eden: God planted a garden, and the text leaves open what differed inside and outside it.
The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, edited by Walton, says most scholars place Eden in or near the northern end of the Persian Gulf, that "in the east" simply indicates Mesopotamia and is typical of primordial narratives, and that some look instead near the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates in the mountains. In The Lost World of Adam and Eve he reads the garden as an ancient Near Eastern motif for sacred space, a symbol that stands for something beyond itself, without denying that it was real.
Heiser reads Eden as God's home on earth, the place his council met, and notes that the Old Testament describes Eden both as a garden and as a mountain, the two common pictures of a divine dwelling. The MacArthur Study Bible says the Pishon and Havilah are uncertain because the text describes pre-flood geography that has since been dramatically altered.
The Mesopotamian placement has to explain the two unknown rivers. The altered-geography reading cannot be checked against anything. The sacred-space and divine-mountain readings have to say how a garden with named rivers relates to a mountain of God.
Not vague. Two of the four rivers are named exactly and are still flowing.
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- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener, note on Genesis 2:10-14
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), proposition 13
- Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015), on Eden
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Genesis 2:10-11
