Where Was The Garden of Eden?

Many efforts have been made to pinpoint this location

(OpenAI)

The Garden of Eden is one of the most enduring images from the Bible. It describes a place of perfect paradise where man lived alongside the beasts of the field and God without any sin or decay. The garden was fed by bountiful rivers and contained a multitude of large fruit-bearing trees and animals. (Depending on who you ask, the animals could even talk!) The idea of Eden is still used as a stand-in for natural beauty and abundance, along with themes of idyllic living.

So, where exactly was this garden of plenty?

Interestingly enough, the Bible describes the exact place where the Garden of Eden supposedly existed. Genesis chapter two reads:

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

So the Garden of Eden was located around the headwaters where four major rivers flowed out of (or into), and two of those rivers have names that people will recognize: the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Using this information, it should be easy to pinpoint this location on the map, right? Not quite.

The exact location of the Garden of Eden has been theorized to be in a number of different locations.

10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of iHavilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium…