The Bible describes the location of the Garden Of Eden as follows:
Gen 2: 10 – 14: A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
This description gives us some clues to its possible location.
- Eden was at the head waters of all four rivers
- The Tigris runs along the east side of Ashur ( Assyria / Northern Mesopotamia ) and we know where that city is located.
In general there are two suggestions as being the location of Eden (see fig 1 below).
- The southern location (location one) is proposed as the Euphrates and Tigris meet there. However the Bible says the Garden Of Eden was at the HEADWATERS of both those rivers – and location one (near the Persian Gulf) is where both rivers finish, not start. Both rivers run from up north (in Turkey) in a southerly direction down to Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
- The northern location – somewhere in Turkey, works as being close to the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. However there are no two other rivers or dried up rivers that could match the Pishon and Gihon.
However – no one knows for sure. The other two rivers mentioned either don’t exist now or have been renamed over the last 6-7000 years and there is no guarantee that the current Euphrates and Tigris rivers were the originally named rivers.
To make matters more difficult, taking into account the flood of Noah, we can be sure that many rivers moved course, land rose, land sank and geography changed dramatically. All the original rivers may have been wiped out – along with the Garden Of Eden.
In short – no one knows where the garden was located – and for every purpose of Biblical scholarship, faith or history – the actual location is not important. Even if we did know – the Bible records God put guards in place to make sure humans would never enter there again.
