Garden Of Eden

QUESTION: Where was the Garden of Eden?

ANSWER:

The location for the real Garden of Eden has been in question for a long time. In fact, it is a high probability that the Garden of Eden was completely destroyed by the flood.

Some of the various locations picked out for the Garden have been Turkey, Egypt, India, and Ethiopia. However, in the last few years, the location has been narrowed down to the Middle East. Over the years, people have claimed to have found the Garden of Eden.

One archaeologist 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 dated February 1, 1999, broke the story in the article called, “Paradise Found.”

Just 10 miles northwest of Tehran, the capital city of Iran, lies an industrial city called Tabriz, and it is here that this archaeologist believes the biblical garden lies. Today, the area flourishes with mud brick villages, but as you descend a narrow mountain path, one sees a beautiful alpine valley just like the Bible describes it with terraced orchards on its slopes crowded with every kind of fruit-laden trees.

In order to make the journey to this remote location, you must travel from western Iran north through the Zagros Mountains of Iranian Kurdistan down Mt. Sahand, which is a towering mountain described in Scripture as the Prophet Ezekiel’s Mountain of God where the Lord resides among red-hot coals (Ezekiel 28:11-19). This mountain once housed a volcano which is now extinct, and cascading down this mountain is a small river, the Adji Chay (the name of which translates in local dialect as ‘walled garden’). The people in this community hold this mountain as sacred and attribute magical powers to the river’s water.

Why would the archeologist tend to believe this is the original Garden of Eden? One factor is that he read about it in ancient Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets held by the Museum of the Orient in Istanbul. The ancient tablets describe a 5000-year-old route to Eden, and in these tablets was documented an epic story called, “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” supposedly written by an emissary of the Sumerian priest-king of Uruk. The emissary had been dispatched to Aratta on the plain of Edin – known to the Sumerians as a land of happiness and plenty -- to obtain gold and lapis lazuli to decorate a temple that Enmerkar was building in Uruk. This epic describes the emissary’s three-month trek on foot via seven passes through the Zagros Mountains to the foothills of Mt. Sahand and his successful procurement of the required valuables.

Will we ever truly know where the Garden of Eden was located? The Garden, described in the Bible, places the headwaters of four rivers in it: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Gihon, and the Pishon. The Tigris and Euphrates are well-known rivers still in existence today, but the other two have been problematic to locate.