If people living in biblical times thought the Bible was true it’s because they were blissfully ignorant, or brainwashed. If audiences of Richard III thought it was true, it’s because they were ignorant. It was a fictitious story based on a true person.
The Bible has lots of real people and real places in it, but that doesn’t mean any of the stories are even remotely true, even if the authors at the time thought they were. Thinking something is true and something actually being true can be very different things.
I’ve heard some people say they are the same rivers today that were mentioned in the Bible, that is, there aren’t two other Tigris and Euphrates rivers that they could have been referring to instead.
I tend to believe that since these are major rivers that a lot of people living in the Middle East would have at least heard of. If the authors didn’t know about the true Tigris and Euphrates I would be surprised, and if you’re going to make up the name of two rivers they could have come up with something completely different like they did for Pishon and Gihon which are likely not real rivers.
Just because real place names are mentioned in a fiction work doesn’t make the work any more true. Historical fiction typically uses this gimmick.
According to author Robert Lawson, Benjamin Franklin lived in Philadelphia in colonial times. In Ben and Me, he had a talking mouse named Amos who invented the Franklin stove and discovered electricity. The fact that Franklin was a real person who lived in colonial times in Philadelphia doesn’t prove that Amos could talk or invent anything.
You’re moving the goal posts. You said it was pointless to ask where to find locations mentioned in a work of fiction. I pointed out that the Bible is full of real-world locations. That has nothing to do with any argument about “making the work more true.”
@Musicat, I’m not sure who you think you’re arguing against here. Nobody here is claiming anything about Eden being real. If it’s 100% fictional, it could still be fictionally in an identifiable real location, and some people might find that interesting, even if you don’t.
Asking about the authors of Genesis is by itself not addressing the question well either.
In the Christian Bible, Genesis is copied in its entirety from the Torah. Current bible scholars attribute Genesis to at least three different sources over time. The exact manner in which it came to be remains open to debate. But what is clear is that it is an assemblage of much older oral traditions, taken from at least three different sources, over a period of centuries. Moreover, the time of insertion of the stories into the the texts has no correlation with when the stories are set. There are two separate Garden of Eden stories, long with many other duplication of stories - including the creation. There seems to be some evidence that the editing together of the narrative has been done to serve socio-political ends.
A big influence on the beliefs came during the Babylonian exile, where Judaism acquired a lot of its more religious rather than historical roots. The Garden of Eden is probably one of these stories, as Mesopotamian culture contains a very similar story. The influence of Zoroastrianism on the Abrahamic religions is deep.
Overall, the authors of Genesis thought that the Garden of Eden was located wherever the Mesopotamian myth placed it, which is consistent with it being in Mesopotamia. Not that they were necessarily aware that it was a Mesopotamian myth by the time they wrote it down. They weren’t making stuff up at this point. They were codifying existing tradition.
This video makes interesting watching about the current ideas about the origins of Genesis.
Unsupported speculation: Mythically speaking, I think the Garden of Eden represented a collective memory of a time when the Middle East was lusher, which might have been the case long ago. Prehistory. Maybe humans weren’t self-aware at that time, with identity politics and such. Not necessarily innocent or gentle, but without the vocabulary for advanced scheming or recording of same. It may be that drying climate forced civilization to develop, as it was no longer possible to live off the land without labor or cooperation. The four waters are the 4 cardinal directions, still represented in some types of gardens as a representation of the cosmos with a fountain at the center.
Yeah, I don’t understand the difficulty in understanding the question. I know Harry Potter is not real, but I can tell you where the author claimed the magic entrance to the train that takes you there is located, for example (Kings Cross, between platforms 9 and 10.) It isn’t actually there, it doesn’t actually exist, but you can locate it roughly in the real world. That’s all that’s being asked here, whether the location given in Genesis can correspond to any known location, whether specifically or generally. It does not mean the garden actually existed, nor does it mean anyone who hypothesizes at the location believes of a literal Garden of Eden. For all we know, it could have been a legend of an unusually fertile land or something that got telephone gamed by oral tradition and time.
Storytelling is a global word that has many subdivisions. Mythmaking, folk tales, tall tales, fantasy, urban legends, disinformation, playwriting, movie making, fiction, stand-up comedy, shaggy dog jokes, monologues, fairy tales, songwriting, and probably dozens of others categories have been identified. They have points in common and those points have been pulled out and studied to see why stories are told, why they work, and what impressions they leave on readers, watchers, and hearers. Yet they also have unique aspects that allow us to identify and classify works.
I’m not big on academic discourse, so I’ll leave it to experts to rip stuff apart. For this discussion I’m talking about intent. Instructive stories are not the same as stories purely for entertainment. Origin stories serve purposes: to indoctrinate, to educate, to lay down laws and rules and mores, to bind people together in a common tale, to glorify those bound people, to separate, even isolate them from others. That’s not how we think of fiction today; we would call that something far closer to propaganda. Propaganda is a loaded, negative term in common usage, but looking at it as a mere yet extreme specimen of how to use language to one’s advantage reveals styles and techniques that are found in other types of stories. Finding them says something revealing about the stories. That propaganda and religious tracts overlap in their bones should be obvious to any outsider, and separates them from other subcategories of storytelling, like fiction.
So to me fiction is not an appropriate word for origin stories and religious myths. Thinking of them that way restricts understanding.
The question is not “Where is Eden”. That is clearly unanswerable, because Eden does not exist, at least not in our world. The question is “Where did the authors of Genesis believe that Eden was”, which is answerable (even if with a bit of difficulty). Let people who are attempting to answer, attempt to answer.
The truth or lack thereof of the Bible is not the topic for this thread, which is in FQ.
I still don’t understand what is meant. Can you clarify what you understand this to mean, in terms of the Edenic river and the 4 named rivers? How is it different to what the translation appears to mean?
I am no serious biblical scholar. I get my info from two college courses- The Bible as Literature and The Bible as History. I use the Anchor Bible and Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. Asimov is a easier read and he mostly uses the Anchor Bible as his primary source anyway.
I am recounting what he said in his book, but I double checked it with sources from Google and the Anchor Bible.
That is what current Biblical Scholarship says, that four rivers flowed into the land known as Eden. Since there are many rivers in that precise area and many have combined, or disappeared, I have no doubt that Genesis was referring to minor but real rivers “Pison” and “Gihon”. There are dissenters, of course, but I feel this is the right answer.
That’s over 50 years old. I wouldn’t use as a source of current biblical scholarship, especially if his source was the 1956 Anchor Bible.
Biblegateway.com allows you to choose from 64 versions of the Bible. I checked 20 or so at random and every single one said four rivers flow out of Eden. Could you cite what version says into?
The Tigris and Euphrates don’t flow out of anywhere. I eamn in a vague area they do, but not one source
Don’t use modern geographical conventions here.
10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
But if someone choose to believe Eden was somewhere up in Armenia, that is the second most argued area, and of course they could be right.
1956 is not that old when we are talking something that occurred some 4-8000 years ago. I mean, it is not like there has been any recent archaeological discoveries.
But if you have some more recent scholarship to cite, sure trot it out.
