EDEN. - The place where the earthly paradise was located (Gen. 2:8, 15). The Hebrew "edhen," according to the ancients, means "delight, pleasure" (II Sam. 1:24; Ps. 25 [36]:9); for the moderns, "steppe," "uncultivated plain," like the Akkadian edinu, or "fertile field," like the Sumerian edin. In the Sacred Books it also indicates:

1) a region on the Euphrates, east of Aleppo (II Kings 19:12; Is. 37:12; Ez. 27:23; Am. 1:5): it is the Bīt-Adini of the Assyrian monuments; 2) a Levite descended from Gershon, from the time of King Hezekiah (II Chron. 29:12; 31:15).

On the location of E. the indication of 4 rivers could be helpful: "A river rises in Eden to water the garden; beyond there it divides and becomes four branches (Phison, Gehon, Tigris, Euphrates)" (Gen. 2:10-14). But the identification of the Phison and the Gehon is unknown. Other difficulties arise regarding Havilah and Cush, the lands watered: Gen. knows two Havilahs: one Asiatic (10:29) and one African (10:7), and two Cushs (10:6-8). And it is moreover likely that, with the migrations of peoples, the names of the rivers passed from one region to another.

The countless opinions on the location of E. can be reduced to four groups: 1) near the course of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and precisely: a) on the Armenian plateau (among others Hoberg, Hetzenauer, Strack, Kalt, Šanda): the Cush is identified with the Araxes, and the Phison, which encircles the land of Havilah, in which are found gold, bdellium, gems (the region of Colchis, of which the myth of the Argonauts treats), with the Phasis: a change in the conformation of the soil is supposed; b) on the middle course of the Euphrates, where the Belich and the Ḥabū converge (P. Riessler); c) on the lower course of the same Euphrates, near Babylon, where it joins with the Tigris, while afterwards the two rivers again separate by means of canals, two of which would be precisely the Phison and the Gehon: cf. nēhar kēbhār of Ez. 1:1 (F. Delitzsch and S. Theis). 2) Detaching themselves from the Mesopotamian basin, the ancients, little knowledgeable about geography, spoke of the Euphrates, Tigris, Ganges and Nile (Flavius Josephus, Antiq. Jud., I, 13). F. Hommel, J. Feldmann think of Arabia; Niebuhr, Engel of the vicinity of Damascus. 3) A. Ungnad places E. in the firmament, which the Sumerians called gū-edin-na. 4) Philo and the Alexandrian school place E. in the world of ideas, and the modern mythologists and folklorists among the meadows of fantasy. The last two interpretations are to be discarded, since in Gen. 2 a real place is described. Among the various proposed locations, that of Delitzsch presents the fewest difficulties. "Probably the author did not intend to determine a precise place, but only to attribute to four streams of the paradisiacal garden the names and the beneficent fertility of the waters (not the course) of the four greatest rivers then known. In such an interpretation nothing prevents us from understanding, with the ancients, the Ganges (or better the Indus, as closer to the Hebrews) by Phison and the Nile by Gehon" (A. Vaccari).

Bibliography7 works

BIBL.: Ferd. Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies, Leipzig 1881; O. Zöcker, E.-Ophir-Ephraim, Munich 1893; J. Feldmann, Paradies und Sündenfall, Münster 1913; A. Deimel, Wo lag das Paradies, in Orientalia, 15 (1925), pp. 44-45; S. Theis, Das Land des Paradieses, Trier 1928; A. Bea, Institutiones biblicae, II, 1, De Pentateucho, 2nd ed., Rome 1933, pp. 149-52; A. Vaccari, s. v. in Enc. Ital., XIII (1932), p. 456.

Vincenzo M. Iacono

@incollection{ec5_eden, author = {Jacono, Vincenzo Maria}, title = {Eden}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {V}, pages = {70--71}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/eden} }

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