True, even with a language thought to be extinct, it’s always possible that some new text could emerge that enables scholars to learn it. Highly unlikely for most of them (especially since most dead languages are associated with low-literacy cultures), but still possible.
It’s certainly not the case that Hebrew somehow disappeared for 2000 years. It’s true that nobody spoke it as their first language, but it’s the language of the Bible and of Jewish liturgy. Every minimally educated Jew has always known how to speak it, at least until secular education became a thing in the nineteenth century. It was generally considered disrespectful to use it outside of religious contexts (and many Orthodox are still pissed at Ben-Yehuda about that), but people certainly could converse in it when there was a reason to do so, such as if they didn’t have any other language in common or didn’t want to be overheard by gentiles.
Applause!!! 
NY Resolution to acknowledge things that made me chortle.
I’ve never heard of the English language killing its victims.
OTOH, the English language is on the receiving end of all manner of violence.
Just outside Moscow, according to Chekov. Sorry I couldn’t help myself.
Meanwhile and back to the OP, ISTM the complilers of Genesis would have assembled the text as best they saw fit out of what they saw as their best favored sources from either preexisting text or oral tradition, and they were most likely not really all that invested in corroborating it or nailing down a location enough for someone to travel there, that was not their point. So it gets set down as somewhere in some putative location “where the great rivers all come close, in the ancient land of Eden”, general direction of the end of Mesopotamia away from wherever they were, and that’s as far as they went since they were never going to launch an expedition to verify the old story.
Yes, we contrast that to locations in the lands of Canaan/Jordan Valley that they describe more clearly, but that is as part of the compilation of the lives of the ancestors, sourced from storytellers who would tell them “oh yeah, that hill two thirds of the way from town A to town B on the main trail, near my village, that is where the patriarch so-and-so did X or Y thing”.
Eden is the place mankind cannot return to.
Even assuming that it’s real, and that its position was known, why would any believer give its exact location? Wouldn’t that contradict the direct word of God?
Thank you, Professor Higgins.
Maybe you couldn’t get to Eden itself, but you could probably sell tickets for a road trip to see an angel with a fiery sword. 
That’s probably the only obvious scam in history that never happened. With Mt. Ararat becoming a tourist trap, I can’t understand why Eden hasn’t as well.
I mean, if they put a guy into an angel costume waving a reflective sword, we would have heard about it. And if no angel appeared, we would have heard about that. And if the perpetrators got chopped up into canned scam, we would have heard about that too.
I thought Aziraphale gave the sword to Adam so he and Eve could stay warm after the Expulsion.
In no way did it disappear. It was not used in conversation, this is true. But if Hebrew disappeared, then where did the last 1000 years of Torah writings - Rashi, Rambam (Maimonides), Ramban (Nachmanindes), Ibn Ezra, Tur, Shulchan Aruch, etc, etc - come from? It was used not only in prayer services, but in Torah learning, and Torah was learned by Jews the world over in that very language. It was not limited to elite scholars. The writings of Ramban and the Shulchan Aruch were meant to be laymens’ (of their times) easy reference guides to Jewish law when looking for answers in the Talmud got too confusing. Jews were expected to understand the language.
Eliezer Ben Yehudah certainly deserves credit for reviving its use as a conversational language. But he didn’t reconstitute it from two thousand years earlier, he made use of the language that was known and used in study and prayer in his own day.
Sure, that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that Hebrew wasn’t a living, evolving language in that time, or that it had some pretty major gaps if you intended to use it for 20th century conversations.
The point is that everyone learning Hebrew for those 2,000 years did so by reading religious texts, commentaries on those religious texts, commentaries on commentaries, and so on. The body of work was certainly being added to, but by reinterpreting what was already there.
Traditionally, books of religious commentary are arranged with the actual text on the inner middle of the page, with commentaries surrounding that text, and commentary that follows around that, etc - this is done so that if the book is damaged (by water, insects, etc) the bits that will be lost are most likely to be the newest commentaries.
It seems to me that this sort of philosophical approach is very, very good at preserving the original. And with every Hebrew speaker focusing the majority of their efforts on the central text and the most respected commentaries, it isn’t surprising at all that the Hebrew tongue would barely change during the Diaspora.
Unlike all those people who came before me (until my grandparents, who were born in Israel), I learned Hebrew from my parents using it as an everyday language, or from watching cartoons dubbed in Hebrew (or produced in Israel). Poets like Hayim Nahman Bialik were far more influential on my Hebrew than the Bible, or Rambam, etc. and that’s true of the vast majority of Israelis today (it may not be true of the extremely devout). I don’t think you can minimize that.
If you’re making up a story you can place it wherever you want, and whether it’s a real place or not doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to focus on the lesson from the story, not the details such as where it happened. It’s equivalent to asking where Santa’s workshop is.
Um, the North Pole. Not sure why you’re so determined to miss the point of the OP.
But what you’re doing is minimizing the influence that the Bible, Rambam, etc, had on Bialik and the like. The basics of Ben-Yehuda’s language - all of your most common nouns, verbs and adjectives, all of the grammatical rules - they all come from the language as it was used by all those Torah scholars and readers over the centuries.
And most books of religious commentary, are actually written as their own volumes, not added to the margins of older texts. Most standard Jewish religious texts (i.e., the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch) have just two commentaries surrounding the text, one toward the binding and one away from it. Some books will have additional commentaries below the text and its surrounding two. But none of them are written in some onion-like format like you’re describing, where the newest commentaries are in perpetual danger being lost to physical damage.
I’m not minimizing it at all. My point is that for 2,000 years Hebrew was taught stricly from biblical and midrashic sources. And then, with the revival of modern Hebrew, that changed. Most people now learn Hebrew from much more secular sources. And further, those sources are far less set in stone now. My cousins’ kids growing up in Israel today have a generationally different perspective on Hebrew than I did. Their grandkids will see even more differences. The pace of change is enormously enhanced now.
North Pole? You’re obviously in the US. Kids in the UK and Finland think it’s in Finland or Lapland. At least according to this.
“Each Nordic country also claims Santa’s workshop to be located on their territories. Norway claims he lives in Drøbak. In Denmark, he is said to live in Greenland (near Uummannaq). In Sweden, the town of Mora has a theme park named “Santaworld”. The national postal terminal in Tomteboda in Stockholm receives children’s letters for Santa. In Finland, Korvatunturi has long been known as Santa’s home, and two theme parks, Santa Claus Village and Santa Park are located at the Arctic Circle in the municipality of Rovaniemi.”
So where is Santa’s workshop? That’s the point. When you make something up, like the Garden of Eden, it doesn’t matter where it is, or where they thought it was.
Apparently you missed the part of the title that talks about the authors of Genesis. You’re right, it’s nonsensical to ask about where “Eden” is. Do you mean Eden or Eden or Eden?
Luckily for you, the purpose of this thread is perfectly clear whether or not you believe that the Eden of the Bible is real. You are doing the equivalent of barging into a thread titled “In the 1964 film Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, where is Santa’s Workshop located?” and telling everyone else they are wrong to discuss this because Finnish kids think Santa’s Workshop is in Finland.