Biblical archeologists have searched extensively for the various locations mentioned in the Bible. While their work has spanned the last couple of centuries, it is far from over. New discoveries are taking place all the time and each of those discoveries requires considerable time to excavate and study. The purpose of all this research is confirming the historic accuracy of the Biblical account. But in the process, we have learned much about what was like in Biblical times and the people represented in the Bible.
Major archeological discoveries, such as the finding of what is believed to be Noah’s Ark, make a strong case for the veracity of the Biblical account. As there is nobody alive today, other than God Himself, who was an eyewitness to those events, the idea is to support the historic account in the Bible with other historic documents that give testimony to those things or physical discoveries which do.
While the science of Archeology is rather exacting, like all the sciences, the process of discovery has never been anywhere close to exact. Archeologists spend painstaking hours in offices and libraries, researching possible sites for the cities and other locations they wish to find. Even so, about the best they can usually deduce is an approximate position. From there, they must go out in the field and search for evidence of what they are looking for. As whatever that is will have been buried by time, under layers of blowing sand, dirt and vegetation, what they look for is often bumps in the ground that don’t look like they were naturally created. As there are no straight lines in nature, finding a hill with straight sides usually indicates a building of some sort.
But finding that hill that could be a building is extremely hard. Some show up easier through aerial reconnaissance and photography, while others can only be found on the ground. Hence, when a discovery is made, it is celebrated throughout the archeological world. Mayan cities in the southern part of Mexico are generally easy to find, as the land is largely flat, with square hills that are temples. Finding something like the Garden of Eden would be considerably harder, as there are no remains of buildings to find.
Another factor that makes this considerably harder for the archeologists is that names of places used as reference change through the years. People move into areas and give landmarks their own names, often without knowing that others have previously given names to those mountains, rivers, bays and islands. The Hawaiian Islands, a commonly known part of the United States, were known as the Sandwich Islands from 1778 to 1819. It wasn’t until the islands were formed into the kingdom of Hawaii (before becoming the state of Hawaii in 1959) that they received the name that we know.
Searching for the Garden of Eden
Of all the discoveries that biblical archeologists have sought after, the one which has eluded them the most is the original location of the Garden of Eden. One would think that this would be relatively easy to find, as the Bible actually gives some pretty clear directions about where it is located.
Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is Hiddekel (Tigris); it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. – Genesis 2:10-14
When we search for these rivers today, it is easy to find the Tigris and the Euphrates, as these two great rivers still flow today and are still known by those names. They run roughly parallel from the eastern part of modern-day Turkey, to the Persian Gulf, passing through Iraq for the majority of their length, with the Euphrates also passing through Syria. These two mighty rivers join up in southeastern Iraq, before emptying into the Persian Gulf.
But the other two rivers mentioned in that passage, the Pishon and Gihon are not so easily identified, as there are no rivers which carry those names today. Some have proposed the Nile and the Ganges as possibilities for these two rivers, but their distance from the Euphrates and Tigris makes that unlikely. It is quite possible that they still exist, having been renamed through the years. But without any historical record having yet been found, showing that those rivers have been renamed, it is impossible to identify them. About the only thing we know, from the Biblical record, is that they come from the same headwaters as the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
A number of different locations have been proposed as likely locations for the original Garden of Eden, some more believable than others. Of these, the most commonly accepted location is near the head of the Persian Gulf, in the area where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together. This would seem to agree with the Biblical narrative, except that it refers to the headwaters of four rivers, not the river estuary of them.
One researcher or another has proposed pretty much every location along the paths of the Tigris and Euphrates. The two rivers come their closest together around Baghdad, an area which used to be known for its marshland, before Sadaam Hussain had his army divert the rivers and stop their flow to destroy those wetlands, denying them to his political enemy.
Going farther upstream, we find that while both rivers originate in Turkey, their headwaters are far from each other. This is still a possibility, as the Bible doesn’t tell us just how big the Garden of Eden was. Even so, there is no place where the Tigris and Euphrates have adjoining headwaters, as the scriptural reference indicates; and that’s without even taking the other two rivers into account.
But Wait a Minute!
Any searching we do for the Garden of Eden, based on today’s maps and rivers, leaves out one major Biblical event… the Flood. Starting in chapter 6 of Genesis, we find the Biblical account of the Great Flood and God having Noah build an Ark, so that he and his family might survive it, along with two of every kind of unclean animal and seven of every clean one.
A worldwide flood, such as the one depicted in Genesis, would drastically alter the face of the earth. One such example of this is the Grand Canyon, located in Arizona, between Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Evolutionary scientists try to tell us that this canyon, which is more than 4,000 feet deep at its deepest point, was formed by the Colorado River over millions of years. There’s just one problem with their conclusion, the river enters the canyon at 2,800 feet above sea level. It is only able to be 4,000 feet deep at its deepest point, because the canyon cuts through a ridge. For the river to have cut that canyon, it would have had to flow uphill (something that water doesn’t do) until it wore away over 1,200 feet of ground and rock, making it possible for it to flow downhill again.
The only way that the Grand Canyon could have actually been formed would be for there to be an inland sea that was held back by that ridge. When the water level rose high enough in that inland sea to spill over that ridge, it would begin to rapidly cut away the ridge, creating that canyon. When could that have happened? In the flood. Interestingly enough, such a canyon, 1/30th the size of the Grand Canyon, was cut in a matter of hours, when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980.
Most of the Earth is covered by thousands of layers of sedimentary rock. Evolutionary scientists have theorized that these layers were laid down over billions of years, creating what can be considered to be a geological column which dates the fossil record back through those eons of time. They base their aging of fossils on that theory, then use the supposed age of those fossils to back up their belief that the sedimentary layers were laid down over hundreds of millions of years.
There’s another much more believable reason for those sedimentary layers; one which solves the inconsistencies that exist with the evolutionary theory. That is, those layers were laid down by the flood. You can accomplish much the same thing with a jar. Just put a scoop full of dirt in the jar, fill it with water and close it tight. Then shake the jar and allow it to set. After some time, you will find stratification of the various parts of the soil, with heavier parts lower down. There may even be insects, trapped in various layers.
As for the fossils that appear in the geologic record, fossilized creatures that appear in the lower layers of the “geologic column” are where they are because they lived in the oceans, possibly deep within the oceans. Other creatures, whose dead bodies had to be washed down to the sea by the flood, show up in the higher stratification layers.
The end result of the flood, besides the destruction of all life, was massive changes to the world’s geography. All shorelines changed considerably, as the overall water level was higher after the flood, than before it. With such activity happening around the world, what makes us think that there would be any identifiable geographic features, such as the rivers mentioned as flowing in the Garden of Eden?
We don’t know for sure, but the Euphrates and Tigris rivers we know today are probably not exactly the same rivers that Adam and Eve would have known. We don’t even know that they flow in the same place. They were probably named after those rivers, by people who had an incomplete picture of their geography, so didn’t know where the other two rivers were. Nevertheless, they wanted to honor the rivers mentioned in Genesis, by using their names.
It is likely that the original location of the Garden of Eden was somewhere in what we know as the Middle East today. All of Biblical history takes place in that part of the world. Mount Ararat, where Noah’s Ark came aground, is most likely in the same region as the headwaters of the modern Euphrates and Tigris. But we really don’t know and can’t know exactly where Eden was.
What About the Tree of Life?
The other question we are left with here, is what about the Tree of Life? Actually, there were two important trees specifically mentioned as being in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Where are they?
The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man who He had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. – Genesis 2:8-9
We really know very little about these two trees, what they looked like or what sort of fruit they had. All we really know is that God planted these two trees in the garden and called them special, giving Adam specific instructions regarding them. Although people commonly depict the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as looking like an apple, we don’t know that. For all we know, it might have looked like an apple; but then, it might have looked like just about anything. The important part is what they did; the fact that he didn’t obey God has affected all of human history.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” – Genesis 2:16-17
Starting with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it’s important to realize that the tree itself probably had no ability to impart this knowledge to Adam and Eve. Rather, they gained the knowledge of evil by disobeying God and eating of the fruit of that tree, after God had specifically told them not to. Gaining the knowledge of evil would have further taught them what good was. Put simply, evil was disobeying what God commanded them to do and good was obeying those commands. There was no need for the tree to have any special ability. God could have chosen any tree, said the same thing and gotten the same result.
But what about the Tree of Life? That was apparently different. Had they eaten of it, it appears that they would have gained eternal life. God was concerned about them eating of this tree and expelled them from the garden to prevent that from happening.
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of US, to know good and evil. And how, let he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. – Genesis 3:22-24
This is a difficult passage; one which many Bible scholars have struggled to understand. In some ways, it seems to go contrary to God’s character, which makes me think that it is not translated as well as it could be. In studying these passages out, I found the following in Adam Clarke’s commentary, which puts this event in a totally different light.
“And the Lord God said, ‘The man who was like one of us in purity and wisdom, is now fallen and robbed of his excellence; he has added to the knowledge of the good, by his transgression, the knowledge of the evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever in this miserable state, I will remove him, and guard the place least he should re-enter. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth form the garden of Eden…’” – Adam Clark’s Commentary – Genesis 3:22, quoting an unnamed source.
Verses 22 to 24 make it clear that there was a tree of life and this quote from Adam Clarke’s commentary shows why God would be concerned about Adam eating of that tree. His action, in expelling Adam and Eve from the garden was therefore an act of compassion, protecting them and preparing the path of redemption, through Jesus Christ. But where is that tree today?
We can say with certainty that wherever the tree was and wherever the garden was, they are now buried under hundreds of layers of sedimentary rock, possibly as much as hundreds of feet thick. The remains of these trees would likely have become petrified, as their biological material broke down and was replaced by stone.
Were it possible that the life force in the Tree of Life prevented it from becoming fossilized and the tree was somehow still alive, it would still be buried far underground. If anyone knew of its location, they would probably try to arrange an expedition to uncover it. After looking at that paraphrase above, it is clear that trying to find the Tree of Life would be ill-advised.