Garden of Eden
Definition
The Garden of Eden was the place God planted “eastward, in Eden” (Gen. 2:8) as the dwelling of the first man and woman before their fall. Eden denotes the wider region, and the garden the plot God planted within it; the garden held two named trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and gave rise to a river dividing into four branches (Gen. 2:9-14). Adam and Eve were driven from it after disobeying God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:22-24).
Biblical Basis
God formed the man and placed him in a garden he had planted in Eden, “to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:8, 15), giving him every tree for food except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death (Gen. 2:16-17). A river flowing out of Eden watered the garden and divided into four heads, the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel (Tigris), and Phrath (Euphrates) (Gen. 2:10-14). After the serpent tempted Eve, and Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit, God pronounced judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man, and expelled them from the garden, “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). Cherubim and a flaming sword were stationed east of the garden “to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24).
Doctrinal Significance
The garden was the setting of the covenant of works God made with Adam, offering life for obedience and death for transgression.1 A. A. Hodge identifies the tree of life as that covenant’s own seal, “the outward sign and seal of that life which was promised in the covenant, and from which man was excluded on account of sin, and to which he is restored through the second Adam in the Paradise regained,” pointing to Revelation’s own promise of the tree of life restored to those who overcome (Gen. 2:9; 3:22, 24; Rev. 2:7; 22:2-14).1 Read this way, the expulsion from Eden is not merely the loss of a place but the barring of access to the life the covenant of works had offered, an access Scripture’s own story line reopens only in Christ.
Location of Eden
Where Eden itself stood has never been settled. Bavinck traces the question’s history: early interpreters mostly avoided trying to locate paradise geographically at all, until Augustine Steuchus (called Eugubinus, d. 1550) proposed in his Kosmopoiia (1535) that the four rivers were branches of a single Tigris-Euphrates system, placing Eden near the city of Corna, a view Catholic and Protestant scholars alike took up. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, others proposed a more northerly site in Armenia, while Friedrich Delitzsch’s Wo lag das Paradies? (1881) argued instead for Babylon, farther south.2 Still others, reading the account as saga rather than history, have identified the Pishon and Gihon with the Indus and Oxus, or with the Ganges and Nile.2 Bavinck concludes that “the different opinions suggest that the precise geography may no longer lie within our capacity to determine,” even while Scripture’s own testimony, corroborated by the concentration of the most ancient peoples, languages, and civilizations there, points broadly to Asia as humanity’s original home.2