Table of Contents
Few places have been looked for as hard as the Garden of Eden. When I first read Genesis 2 closely, one word stayed with me: the garden was planted. Someone made it, put people in it and later closed the gate. That is the question I keep coming back to on this site. Was Eden a paradise, a memory of a lost land, or a place where humans were made and taught?
I keep these readings side by side. The traditional view sees one garden and one first couple. Paleo-contact writers read Eden as a laboratory of the Anunnaki or the Elohim. Others place it in Sumer, on a sunken continent, or say there was more than one garden. On this page I summarize what each linked page says, and I leave the choice to you.
All Bible quotes on this page are from the King James Version (KJV).
The garden in Genesis
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Genesis 2:8 (KJV)
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
Genesis 2:10 (KJV)
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
Genesis 3:24 (KJV)
- Genesis 2: my reading of the chapter with an alternative translation. The enclosed garden in Eden is a laboratory for the creation of the Adam and the Eve, and some of the Elohim teach humans to cultivate and irrigate crops.
- Genesis 3: The birth chamber: the enclosed gardens as places where the Anunnaki experimented with earthly species, the two trees, and the banishment.
- Humanity’s beginning: Genesis 2:8 in an alternative translation, where the YHWH Elohim put the humans into an enclosed garden within Eden.
- The Adam race: the traditional story of Adam and Eve, the forbidden tree and the banishment, set next to other origin readings.
A laboratory: the paleo-contact reading
Here Eden is not a park but a workplace. Bashar describes many labs, with one main site:
There were many different labs around your planet, but the primary one was in the Middle East.
Bashar, The Hidden Truth of Adam, Eve, and Lilith
- What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?: Bashar reads the snake as a symbol of the Anunnaki wisdom about genetics, and places the main lab near the Euphrates.
- Genesis 3: The birth chamber also quotes Paul Wallis, who says the real name of the entity in the garden is Enlil.
- Billy Carson on a Sumerian Garden of Eden: Carson tells the Eden story from Sumerian sources.
The Serpent just like in the Bible he's the only one that the humans are going to see
Lost Knowledge, Billy Carson and the Garden of Eden, at 18:19
- Billy Carson on Enlil, Enki and Eden: Carson argues that Adam and Eve were not the first people on Earth.
millions of people were on this planet long before Adam even arrived so forget that Adam was first and Eve was first
Billy Carson, Billy Carson on Enlil and Enki, at 6:17
- Was the Human Race Engineered by Extraterrestrials?: Paul Wallis on the ideas in his book Escaping from Eden.
- Lilith: in this tradition Lilith disagreed with Adam and chose to leave the Garden of Eden.
Eden in Sumer: Eridu and the Edin
- Garden of Eden: Desert or Steppe: scholars like Sayce and Smith linked Eden with the Sumerian city of Eridu and with the plain of Babylonia, called Edin in Sumerian. The kiškanû tree of Ea may be the prototype of the Tree of Life.
- Sumer: The First Known Civilization: Jim Marrs follows Sitchin, who has Enlil placed in charge of the Anunnaki colony E-din, perhaps the basis for the biblical Eden.
- Mariana Giovino: The Assyrian Sacred Tree: how scholars came to read the Assyrian sacred tree as the tree of life of Genesis 2 and 3, and why that reading is disputed.
- Sumer, Canals and a Filmed Eden: a documentary on Sumerian canals and gardens.
To build their Garden of Eden, the Sumerians scoured the world in search of commodities they didn't possess.
imineo, Sumer and the filmed gardens, at 31:45
Many gardens, lost lands
One view on this site is that there was not one Eden. I collected it on There Were Many Gardens of Eden: the Pacific, Atlantis, the inside of the Earth and Eridu, each with its own source.
The Garden of Eden was not in Asia but on a now sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean.
James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (1926), p. 1
- James Churchward: The Children of Mu: Mu and the Garden of Eden were one land, and Churchward says the Israelites later copied its destruction tale.
- The Pyramid, the Cross and the Garden of Eden: Ignatius Donnelly argues that the sign of the Cross is a memory of the Garden of Eden, in other words of Atlantis.
- Wieland: Atlantis, Edda und Bibel: Atlantis as the original of Eden and Asgard.
- Lewis Spence: The Occult Sciences in Atlantis: Spence treats the antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden and Atlantis as one place.
- Rolf Telano: A Spacewoman Speaks: the Garden of Eden as the biological laboratory of the Elder Races, inside the Earth, and Adam as a racial name.
What science says
- Out of Africa theory: the fossil evidence from Jebel Irhoud points to human features coming together slowly in many places. In other words, there was no single Garden of Eden in East Africa.
Eden outside Genesis
Eden appears again in Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre:
Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God;
Ezekiel 28:13 (KJV)
I read that chapter on Satan: a fallen angel?. For the guards at the gate, see The hierarchy of YHWH, which places the cherubim and the flaming sword east of Eden.
Books on this site
- Escaping from Eden and The Eden Conspiracy by Paul Wallis
- Echoes of Eden
- Scars of Eden
- The Eden Enigma
Related pages
For every page I tagged with Eden, see the Eden tag archive.
