Chapter II. The History, As Given In The Bible, From The Creation To The Flood.

Eden—The so-called second story of the Creation and the bilingual Babylonian account—The four rivers—The tree of life—The Temptation—The Cherubim—Cain and Abel—The names of the Patriarchs from Enoch to Noah.

“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed.” There also He made every pleasant and good tree to grow, including the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A river came out of Eden to water the garden, and this river was afterwards divided into four smaller streams, the Pishon, flowing round “the Hawilah,” a land of gold (which was good) and bdellium and onyx stone; the Gihon, flowing round the whole land of Cush; the Hiddekel or Tigris, and the Euphrates.

It is to be noted that it was not the garden itself that was called Eden, but the district in which it lay. The river too seems to have risen in the same tract, and was divided at some indeterminate point, either in the land of Eden or on its borders.

The whereabouts of the Garden of Eden and its rivers has been so many times discussed, and so many diverse opinions prevail concerning them, that there is no need at present to add to these theories yet another, more or less probable. Indeed, in the present work, theories will be kept in the background [pg 070] as much as possible, and prominence given to such facts as recent discoveries have revealed to us.

It had long been known that one of the Akkadian names for “plain” was edina, and that that word had been borrowed by the Babylonians under the form of êdinnu, but it was Prof. Delitzsch, the well-known Assyriologist, who first pointed out to a disbelieving world that this must be the Eden of Genesis. The present writer thought this identification worthless until he had the privilege of examining the tablets acquired by Dr. Hayes Ward in Babylonia on the occasion of his conducting the Wolfe expedition. Among the fragments of tablets that he then brought back was a list of cities in the Akkadian language (the Semitic Babylonian column was unfortunately broken away) which gave the following—

Transcription.Translation.
Sipar,D.S. Sippara.
Sipar Edina,D.S. Sippara of Eden.
Sipar uldua,D.S. Sippara the everlasting.
Sipar Šamaš,D.S. Sippara of the Sun-god.

Here at last was the word Eden used as a geographical name, showing that the explanation of Delitzsch was not only plausible, but also, in all probability, true in substance and in fact. Less satisfactory, however, were the learned Professor's identifications of the rivers of Eden, for he regards the Pishon and the Gihon as canals—the former being the Pallacopas (the Pallukatu of the Babylonian inscriptions), and the latter the Guḫandê (also called the Araḫtu, now identified with a large canal running through Babylon). He conjectured that it might be the waterway known as the Shatt en-Nîl. Whatever doubt, however, attaches to his identifications of the rivers, he seems certainly to be right with regard to the Biblical Eden, and this is a decided gain, for it locates the position of that district beyond a doubt.

To Prof. Sayce belongs the honour of identifying the Babylonian story of the nature and position of Paradise as they conceived it, and here we have another example of the important details that the incantation-tablets may contain concerning beliefs not otherwise preserved to us, for the text in question, like the bilingual story of the Creation, is simply an introduction to a text of that nature. This interesting record, to which I have been able to add a few additional words since Prof. Sayce first gave his translation of it to the world, is as follows—