Where was the Garden of Eden located?

The map in Genesis 2

Genesis gives the garden a direction and a river system. God plants it “eastward, in Eden” (2:8), east of wherever the storyteller stands. Then comes the water.

A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers.

• Pishon flows through “the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold,” with bdellium and onyx (2:11–12). Unidentified.
• Gihon flows through “the whole land of Cush” (2:13). Cush usually means the lands south of Egypt. Unidentified.
• Hiddekel “flows in front of Assyria” (2:14). It is the Tigris, Idiqlat in Akkadian.
• Euphrates needs no directions at all.

The Hebrew calls the four branches “heads.” Are they four streams splitting off downstream, or four headwaters? The answer moves the garden by a thousand kilometers.

At the head of the Gulf

Read downstream, the rivers meet at the top of the Persian Gulf. The Tigris and the Euphrates join at Al-Qurnah, in southern Iraq, to form the Shatt al-Arab, and local folklore has long called Qurnah the site of paradise. Visitors were shown an old tree there as the tree of knowledge; it died, and others have been planted. In the 1980s the archaeologist Juris Zarins argued that the garden lay at the head of the Gulf. On that reading the Pishon is the Wadi al-Batin, as James Sauer proposed, a dry riverbed that Farouk El-Baz traced with satellite photos from near Medina to Kuwait, and Zarins took the Gihon for the Karun, which flows out of Iran. Four rivers would then meet in one place.

Where the rivers rise

Read the other way, the four heads are sources. The Tigris and Euphrates both rise in the highlands of eastern Turkey, in the same mountain country as Ararat, and many older writers put Eden in Armenia for that reason. The British author David Rohl has argued for a valley near Tabriz, in northwestern Iran; scholars have not followed him.

The rivers of the whole world

Ancient readers thought bigger. Josephus made the Pishon the Ganges and the Gihon the Nile (Antiquities 1.38–39), and Ethiopian tradition still identifies the Gihon, Giyon, with the Blue Nile. Medieval mapmakers drew paradise at the top of the world, in the farthest east; Fra Mauro’s map of 1459 even labels the Nile “Gion.” In 1498, on his third voyage, Christopher Columbus met the mighty fresh water of the Orinoco pouring into the sea and wrote that he might be near the earthly paradise.

A garden of God

The Bible itself uses Eden less as an address than as a picture of God’s own garden. Ezekiel addresses the king of Tyre:

You were in Eden, the garden of God.

and sets that Eden on “the holy mountain of God” (28:14). Isaiah promises that God will make Zion’s wilderness “like Eden” (51:3). Jerusalem’s own spring is called Gihon (1 Kings 1:33), and many scholars note how the garden’s gold, onyx and guardian cherubim return in the tabernacle and the temple. The Sumerians had a paradise land too, Dilmun, where sickness and death were unknown, often linked with Bahrain.

For Genesis, the garden cannot be visited because it has been closed: cherubim guard the way back on its east side. That is where the phrase east of Eden begins.