Earthly paradise, garden of delights in which God placed Adam and Eve after their creation. They stayed there for their period of innocence, and were expelled when they disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. This word comes from the Hebrew or rather the Chaldean pardes , which the Greeks translated as παράδεισος, literally meaning an orchard, a place planted with fruit trees, and sometimes a forest of tall trees . The Persians thusly named their fruit gardens and the parks where they nurtured all varieties of wild animals, as is seen in Cyropaedia by Xenophon of Athens.

Moses calls it the Garden of Eden , that is to say the garden of delights , a word whose etymology some have found in the Greek ἡδονὴ, voluptas ; however in Hebrew , Eden is the name of a country and a province where the earthly paradise was located.

There are many difficulties concerning its location; some, like Origen, Philo, the ancient heretics Seleucus and Hermias, and Paul Venetian in the last century, believed that the earthly paradise never existed, and that we should explain allegorically everything that Scripture says; some believed that it existed outside the ordinary world - in the third heaven, in the heaven of the moon, in the moon itself, others - in the middle region of the air, underground, and still others - below ground in a hidden place, far from the knowledge of men, in the place now occupied by the Caspian Sea.

The sentiments of those who placed it on the earth are no less divided. There is almost no part of the world, says Calmet, where we have not been looking - in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in America, on the banks of the Ganges, in the Indies, in China, on the island of Ceylon, in the Mountains of the Moon in Ethiopia etc.

The most likely belief for the general designation of the earthly paradise is that it was located in Asia, but when it comes to determining what part of Asia, there is a fresh division of opinions.

Some, such as Father Hardouin, place it in Palestine, around the lake of Gennesaret; a Silesian author named Herbinius, who wrote on this matter in 1688, shares this opinion. Mr. le Clerc, in his commentary on Genesis, puts it around the mountains of Lebanon, the Anti-Lebanon mountains and Damascus close to the sources of the Orontes and Chrysorrhoas, but in neither one of these two positions have any trace of rivers been discovered which, according to Moses’ description, were the watering cans of the earthly paradise .

Hopkinson, Mr. Huet and Bochart place the earthly paradise between the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the place of their separation, because, according to the story of Moses, these two rivers are among those that watered the Garden of Eden. The Phase, they add, was the western channel of the Tigris and the Gihon channel was west of the same river which empties into the Persian Gulf. According to them, Ethiopia, one of the countries fed by the rivers, according to Moses, was undoubtedly the Saudi desert, as the same author gives his wife the name Ethiopienne , who was of that country; and Havilah, the other country, must be Chusistan, province of Persia, where once gold, bdellium and onyx were found, which Moses speaks of. The major difficulty of this arrangement is that Moses speaks distinctly of four rivers, each of which had its source in the Garden of Eden, and here we only find two rivers which to tell the truth, form four branches but whose course is barely different, and is not opposed as suggested by the text of Genesis.

Father Calmet and a few other highly distinguished critics have placed the earthly paradise in Armenia in the soucewaters of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Araxes and Phani, which they believe to be the four rivers designated by Moses. The Euphrates is clearly expressed in Genesis. The Chidkel is the Tigris re-named Diglito today. The Gehon is the Araxes, Ἀράξης in Greek, which means impetuous like Gehon in Hebrew, and we recognise this river as the one of which Virgil said - pontemque indignatus Araxes [“and the Araxes, who despised a bridge” —Aeneid, 8.728] . The expanse of Eden was in that country -as far as we can judge by some vestiges which have remained in the holy books. The country of Chus is the ancient Scythia, located on the Araxes, and Havilah or Chevilah , famous for its gold, appears to have given its name to Colchis, equally famous among the ancients for the same metal which the Phase carries in its waters. The most plausible objection made against this, is that, according to Chardin, the Phase (the Rioni today) has its source in the mountains of the Caucasus, on the side of the northern kingdom of Imiret and quite far from Mount Ararat; but this problem does not appear justified as the settlement of Eden necessarily covered a large area, since it was the source of four major rivers. See Calmet’s commentary of the Bible, and his dissertation, particularly on the earthly paradise .

There are still several other views on this point. Postel argues that the earthly paradise was placed under the North Pole. He bases this idea on an ancient legend of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, which claims that the ecliptic or path of the sun first cut at right angles to the equator, and consequently was passing over the north pole: others on the contrary think it was not limited to any particular place, that it extended across the face of the earth, they say, as a continuous and varied scene of exquisite pleasures until it was changed by the sin of Adam. But these two beliefs are both equally inconsistent with the text of Genesis.

The Orientals believe that the earthly paradise was on the island of Serendib or Ceylon, and that Adam, having been cast out of heaven, was relegated to the Rahonn mountain (Adam’s Peak) located on the same island at two or three days from the sea. The Portuguese call this mountain pico de Adam , or Adam’s mountain , because it is believed that the first man was buried under this mountain after a penance of one-hundred and thirty years. In addition to this earthly paradise , the Muslims have three more, one near Obollah in Chaldea, the second near the Naoubendigian desert in Persia, and the third near Damascus in Syria. See d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale p. 378 and 708 [1]; Calmet, Dictionnaire de la Bible . [2]

Notes

1. http://books.google.com/books/about/Bibliotheque_orientale.html?id=BKREAAAAcAAJ

2. http://books.google.com/books/about/Dictionnaire_de_la_Bible.html?id=bxsAAAAAQAAJ