Eden

Recall of the religious texts

According to the Judaism, it is about a material place (where spirituality materializes), as it is described in the Torah (). The hearts which are there are informed and enjoy the divine light abundant on them according to the degrees of their merit. The gasoline of the proximity to the divine light, such is the reward.

According to the Christianity, the “paradise” (derivative of by ) is associated with the world of “blessed”, opposed to the world of “cursed” or damnés, among those which already died. One can note a certain analogy with the Greek concept of the Jardin of Hespérides, which strongly inspired the illustration of Cranach. Indeed, only the action shown in this table makes it possible to distinguish the garden from Eden of that from Hespérides and its fruit of gold.

According to the Islam, it is a place of great joy, extremely gravitational: wine and milk, pure water fountains and food in abundance.

According to the textual critical , which is based on the existence of original accounts similar but located within a different geographical framework, Éden would be the trace of a “Semitic cradle” (cf edinu , “steppe” in Akkadien, or edin , “plain” in Sumérien).

Initially according to the biblical account of creation, Adam (who contain the man and the woman), prémice (S) of rational humanity, fu (ren) T created (S) and deposited (S) in the garden of Eden. God then made there germinate and grow trees various species, among which the tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil and the tree of the life .

God gave to Adam only one regulation, to deal with the garden, and a prohibition, to eat fruit of the first above mentioned tree. However, the snake allures the woman, who eats fruit of the tree of the knowledge of the good and evil and gives some to its man.

God expels them immediately garden, because by eating the fruit of the tree of the life they had desobéient with God and had fact preuvent " of ubris" . Angel S (of the Chérubin S, more exactly), are placed in front of the entry of the garden to bar the access of them. One learns, according to, that the trees of Eden were precipitated in the Sheol.

Fall then the curses:

Adam is condemned to work an ungrateful ground and to nourish themselves with the sweat of its face;
Eve will give birth to in the pain;
the snake, is condemned to crawl and eat dust, and with being crushed by a woman while trying to bite the heel to him.

But God takes pity of the human weakness and makes a prediction: a saver will come

Contrary to Christianity, the Judaism does not associate the snake with the Satan. This association is based, in addition to the episode of the Mount of Olives, on the interpretation of passages describing the Satan ready “to devour” humanity as soon as the opportunity arises some. Accordingly, the curse of God “to eat dust” is an analogy with its bad nature. In Christianity, there is also a correspondence established between the and Books of Genesis Révélation.

To note the inversion of values carried out by one of the first sects gnostic Christian women, the Ophites, who turned into to snake the “hero”, trying to transmit the gnosis (knowledge in Greek) and of God, the “bad one” seeking to imprison the man in the creation of the Démiurge.

Geography

The Livre of the Genesis delivers only little information on the garden itself. Eden sheltered the Arbre of the Life, the Arbre of the knowledge of the good and the evil, as well as a luxuriant and varied vegetation, sufficient to provide for the needs for Adam and Eve. Only the verses 2:10 - 14 seem to contain a rather vague index as for the localization:

a river left Eden to sprinkle the garden, and from there it was divided into four arms .

the name of first is Pishôn; it is that which surrounds all the country of Havilah, where gold is.

the gold of this country is pure; one finds there also bdellium and the stone of onyx.

the name of the second river is Guihôn; it is that which surrounds all the country of Coush (Ethiopia? Kush Hindi?) .

the name of third is Hiddèkel; it is that which runs with the East of Ashour (Assyrie, therefore the Tigre). The fourth river, it is the Euphrate.

Putative localizations

Quantity of assumptions were advanced, sometimes without much (even no) of relationship with the biblical text. If the majority locate Éden in the the Middle East, close to old the Mésopotamie, others “saw it” in Ethiopia, with Java, the Sri Lanka, in the Seychelles, the the Brabant, even with Bristol in Florida. Some Christian theologists thought, as the garden of Eden started to be associated with the paradise (cf will infra), than the Garden had never had a clean terrestrial existence, than it was about a “end of celestial paradise on ground” in the literal sense.

As mentioned above, according to the Text, a river Éden irrigates before being divided into four branches: Hiddekel, Euphrate, Pishon and Gihon. If the two first correspond of the general opinion to the Tiger and Euphrate, the identity of the two other rivers is not solved to date.

However, if one takes the Text literally, the garden of Eden, while being close to the sources of the Tiger and Euphrate, should be located according to original narrators established in the ground of Canaan (according to the Jewish tradition, Adam and Eve are buried in the cave of Makhpela, with Hebron) in the Monts Taurus, in Anatolia.

Photographs taken by satellite of these areas show two drained beds of river whose mouth was to lead in the Persian Gulf, where also flow the Tiger and Euphrate.

However, this point would not be that the “mouth” of these rivers, not them source.

The other literalistic ones estimate that the world of the time of Eden was destroyed and altered by the Déluge, that it is thus impossible to locate Éden in a post-torrential geography. Some try to establish a bond with the absorbed city of Atlantis.

One of the favorite localizations is the Sundaland, in southernmost China Sea. However, if it is the case, there cannot be identity between the Tiger and Euphrate of the Genesis and the current rivers. In this vision of the things, the latter would have been famous according to these first by the descendants of Noah returned to the Middle East. This solution can seem tempting, but it is in contradiction with the Bible itself, which describes the countries crossed by these rivers like countries of the fertile Crescent.

The archeologist David Rohl recently estimated the localization of Eden in the North-East of the Iran: according to him, the Garden is a valley located at the East of the mount Sahand, close to Tabriz. It enumerates several geological similarities between this place and biblical descriptions, as well as linguistic parallels seeming to him decisive. This place was then colonized by the Mèdes before they found the Persian empire.

Appeared in 1955, the delivers Urantia locates the garden of Eden in a long narrow peninsula, extending towards the west since the east coasts from the Mediterranean, and for a long time submerged because of powerful volcanic activity, which would have also submerged an arm of the sea binding Sicily to Africa. These assumptions were to date not confirmed by the discoveries of geology.

Sumer and Dilmun

First Sumériens lived in the plains, located in the south of current Iraq. Certain historians working starting from the cultural horizons of the south of Sumer, where one finds the earliest source of extra-biblical legends, pay their attention on the Entrepôt dating from the Bronze Age, located in the island of Dilmun (current the Bahrain) within the Persian Gulf. This island is described as “the place where rises the sun” and “the Earth of Alive”

The account sumérien of Creation, Enûma Elish , presents parallels marked with the account of the Genesis.

After its decline, towards 1500 A.E.C., Dilmun was equipped with a reputation of paradise lost, if filled up perfections that could, according to these historians, to influence the history of the garden of Eden.

Some exégètes tried to locate the garden of Eden in the center of trade of Dilmun.

Church of Jesus-Christ of the Saints of the Last Days

According to the theology of the Church of Jesus-Christ of the Saints of the Last Days, the configuration of the Continent S was entirely modified six generations after the Déluge (Ge. 10:21 - 25), and the countries and rivers described in the Genesis were completely delocalized. This is why it supposes that the garden of Eden is currently in the enclosure of the Independence city, located in the State of the Missouri (where it is always kept, not by chérubins, but a Archange). Independence is for this reason one of the holiest places of the world.

As for the Tiger, the Euphrate, and all the places mentioned at the beginning of the Genesis, it would act of grounds and entirely different rivers, re-elected later on according to landscapes more familiar of the Middle East of the after-Flood.

Gan Eden and Paradis

The word “Paradise” (héb. פרדס By ) used as synonym of Gan Eden , has connotations similar to the Persan old man, who describes an enclosed orchard or a delimited hunting ground. The word “paradise” appears three times in the Hebraic Bible, and in other contexts that a relationship with Éden:

in the Canticle of the Canticles 4:13: " Your fruits are a by pomegranate , with the fruits the most excellent etc "
in the Ecclésiaste 2:5: " I was made pardessim and orchards, and J `planted there trees with fruit of any species "
in Néhémie 2:8: " and a letter for Asaph, guard of the garden of the king, so qu `it provides me timber etc "

In the Canticle of Solomon, it is clearly about a “garden”, in the two other examples of a “park”. It is as from the post-exilic period, in the apocalyptic Littérature and the Talmud S, that the “paradise” will be associated with the garden of Eden, in its terrestrial understanding like celestial. In Christian New Testament, the “paradise” is associated with the field of blessed (in opposition to the field of damnés) among those which already died. The garden of Greek Hespérides has affinities with the Christian concept of the garden of Eden, and as from the 16th century, total association will be obvious, in particular in the table of Luc Cranach ( to see illustration ). In this one, only the action which is held identifies the framework like distinct from the garden of Hespérides, and its ''' apples ''' of gold.

According to certain anthropologists, the garden of Eden is not to take as a geographical place , but rather a place of cultural memory of “one simpler time”, where the men lived divine generosity (hunters and gatherers known as “primitive” realizing it supposément without sorrow) in opposition to the “labor” of agriculture (that the “civilized” people make, by “definition”). However, the Book of the Genesis formulates clearly that the culture, even agriculture, existed as well before after the life in the garden; the addition of frustration and the sorrow were added to its work, in punishment of the disobedience of the man, by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil.

The anthropologists thus see humanity like remembering culturally an old passage of primitive disorganization (an easy life) towards the order of civilization (perceived like a suffering), whereas the Jewish scholars as Christian perceive in the account of the Genesis the exact opposite one: the expulsion of a couple (and not humanity) of a “garden” ordered and civilized (the alive man harmonizes some not only with itself but with the animals and speaking directly with God), towards a wild jungle, hunting and the gathering being a more primitive condition of fight, of death, a new ceaseless fight for survival. However, these two sights agree on the point which the man reminds of a better life (a topic also found in the Golden age gréco-Roman, although its description has only few common points with Gan Eden), of easy culture for the believers, hunting and gathering for the academicians. In this last sight, the Eden is only one metaphor, without relationship with reality, a rationalization of the daily suffering.

The writer Ann Druyan, who has a more cynical sight of the question, finds the Eden alarming. Rather than a “paradise”, the Gen Eden would be the place of a crime, where God/relative dysfonctionnel created “children” only to punish them:

“It is disconcerting that Éden is synonymous with paradise whereas, if one thinks of it, it is rather a prison with high security and a monitoring 24:00 /24. It is a horrible place. Adam and Eve do not have childhood. They wake up adult… They do not have a mother, and never had of it… Their father is a terrifying voice, désincarnée, which is furious with them as of the moment of their first awakening. ”

The Jewish and Christian scholars are of agreement on the concept of high surveillance, but only after the disobedience of the man and the woman. They however point out that the interaction of Adam and Eve with their “Father” was highly positive before eating the fruit, and that they had a total freedom before the incident, without what they could not have chosen to eat fruit which had initially been defended to them.

Etymology

The origin of the term “Eden” which, in Hebrew, means “delight”, could also be the term Akkadien Edinu , which itself derives from the sumérien E.DIN. These the last two words mean “flat” or “steppe”, and the resemblance between the terms could be a coincidence. The verb Akkadien Namu which means " who lives the steppe" makes very plausible an illustrated literary use: the writing mésopotamienne of the word resorts to association NA-ME" man-être" or with the sign NAM. The clean direction of this sign NAM (- TAR) indicates " destins" who according to mythology mésopotamienne are registered by the gods on a shelf.

However, according to modern criticism, turning “with the East of Eden” or “the East, in Eden” seems to rather suggest a use of the geographical term than metaphorical.

Eden in art

Le garden of Eden was the subject of frequent representations in Enluminure S and tables like the Sommeil of Adam (or the Création of Eve ), the Tentation of Eve by the Serpent, the Chute of the Man , or the Expulsion . The scene of the Jour of the Nomination in Eden was less often represented. Michel-Angel has depicts a scene garden of Eden on the ceiling of the Chapelle Sixtine. In the poetic register, the large one of the action of the Paradise Lost of Milton occurs in the garden of Eden.

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