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EDEN: FACT OR FANTASY ?

CHAPTER 1

HOW IT ALL BEGAN?

The creation story in the Bible begins in the first book, Genesis, in chapter 1, the first verse:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The next 25 verses describe how God created light, separate from darkness; a firmament to be called heaven to divide the waters; dry land, called earth; grass; herb yielding seed; fruit trees; seasons; days and years; a great light to rule by day; a lesser to rule night; stars; moving creatures that have life from the waters; fowl to fly; whales; cattle; and creeping things.

Then comes verse 26:

And God said "Let us make man in our image and let them have dominion ... over all the earth...."

And verse 27

So God created man in his own image ... male and female created he them.

You'll have noticed that in verse 26 God said "Let us" in the plural. Who are these other creating beings besides God?

What I've done here is give you the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, because it's generally easily accessible and well known. It's a translation, of course, because the original text was not in English. KJV was published in 1611, the result of the work of about 30 professors from Oxford and Cambridge universities and a number of senior clerics, bishops, and so forth. It's quite poetic, and said to be generally fairly reliable.

To produce this translation these scholars and clerics had available various near eastern texts, The main one, in Hebrew, was the Masoretic text (masoreth in Hebrew means tradition). This text was apparently put together by Jewish scholars between the 500s and 800s AD, so it's not particularly old. The discovery in the early 20th century AD of the Dead Sea Scrolls dating from about the 1st century AD shows they are both generally in agreement where they have the same material.

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Another main source was the Septuagint, a version so called because about 70 scholars wrote it in Greek to make the text accessible to Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, in Egypt. This is said to have been somewhere about 300 BC.

Then there's the Peshitta version. It is in the Aramaic (Syrian) language. It was originated by Ptolemy, king of Egypt (285-247 BC) and a favourite dating of today's scholars is about 282 BC. The Peshitta in the British Museum said to date from 464 AD.

The usual way to say the text is accurate is if these three main sources agree in their wording, although no one would know whether all three were actually wrong if some earlier text from which they might have come was itself inaccurately copied. There must have been many misreadings and innocent errors in copying over the hundreds of copies made by hand and passed down through the centuries. Further, there's no guarantee that the best copyings are the ones that survived the accidents of war, time and fate.

I think we have an even more serious problem to contend with, and that is intentional misrepresentation. I am not a scholar of Hebrew, but I found that the word for God in Hebrew, in the singular person is said to be 'Eloah.' I also found that throughout Genesis chapter 1 the word for God in Hebrew is 'Elohim,' the plural word, meaning 'the Gods,' or 'Gods.' That explains why the translation of verse 26 says 'And God said "Let us make man in our image." ' It should, then, read 'And the Gods said "Let us make man in our image." (I discussed the question of the 'Royal we' used by scholars in their Biblical translations in my The Immortals, chapter 9, on my web site). I have looked at a variety of translations of Genesis into English, and every one of them follows the same scholarly convention - God in the singular instead of the plural Gods. The reason is that their spiritual belief - that there is one God - has overridden their scholarly integrity in translation. (There's a further significant example in my The Immortals, chapter 11, which shows how biblical translators have intentionally and systematically suppressed strong evidence that the Israelite God Yhwh had a female Immortal consort).

This means that we have a difficult task ahead of us to determine whether the original language is correct, which in itself is of late origin, and then to verify whether the translators are truthfully translating the words in front of them, or are substituting words based not on their training and knowledge of the near eastern languages - Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic - but following their religious beliefs.

Despite all these problems, the main purpose of Genesis chapter 1 seems to be to tell us how the Gods created everything we can see and have knowledge of in the universe, and that humans were a late part of that creation, on earth, made to resemble the creating Gods, and intended to 'have dominion' over other life on earth.

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CHAPTER 2

TWO CREATIONS

If we thought the creation story in Genesis 1 was the Bible's definitive statement on creation, and that it would now move on to what happened next, we'd be mistaken. It seems the first four verses of Genesis chapter 2 complete the scenario in chapter 1, ending halfway through verse 4:

These were the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,

In Genesis chapter 1 we've already had a description of the creation of various life forms on earth, culminating in the creation of man. But there is a significant change in Genesis chapter 2, verse 4. Instead of Elohim, the Gods, or Immortals, we have 'the Lord God.' That's Yhwh Elohim. Yhwh of the Immortals. Many Biblical scholars think that Genesis 1 was the beginning of a text, and that now we have a transition to another text. This happens frequently in the Bible. Instead of one text surviving, a number of texts have survived and are patched together, sometimes quite awkwardly, causing repetition. We've just come upon one such join. So, according to this theory, called the documentary theory (see Note 1 below), a theory which seems reasonable in the circumstances, we can see that the second text rounds off the first and then continues with its own story (verse 5).

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and (there was) not a man to till the ground.

We find in this version the ambiguous statement 'there was not a man to till the ground.' This could mean that there were no men on earth, and that might seem a logical assumption because as we shall next see, the text goes on to describe the making of man by Yhwh Elohim. The commentary in the Torah referenced here says 'the Lord God is pronounced Adonai Elohim'(Note 3, and see my The Obelisk chapter 5, for a discussion of use of the word Adonai). But there could be another interpretation: not that there was no man, but that there was no farmer (no man to till the ground). In other words, there were hunter gatherers but not yet agriculturalists. This would then be describing the advent of a farming society, which began it seems at about the time the last ice age was retreating: say, 10-12,000 years ago. Now let's continue with the Genesis 2 text, remembering that 'the Lord God' is really 'Yhwh of the Immortals':

6. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

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7. And the Lord God formed man (of) the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

11. The name of the first is Pison: that (is) it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where (there is) gold.

12. And the gold of that land (is) good: there (is) bdellium and the onyx stone.

13. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same (is) it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

14. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that (is) it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river (is) Euphrates.

15. And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

What follows is the story of the creation of Eve from Adam's rib; forbiddance to touch the trees of life and knowledge; Eve's surrender to temptation by the serpent; she involves Adam; they are both driven out of the garden of Eden by Yhwh; Cain and Abel are born to the couple; Cain kills Abel; and the history of the ancestors is under way.

I don't propose to involve us in reviewing any of these subsequent events. My primary objective is whether the Eden story is fact or fiction, and for that I suggest we need only consider the verses already quoted. If Eden was a real place, we may be able to determine its location. If that doesn't prove possible, it leaves the question of actuality of the story unsolved. Because these particular verses need to be considered carefully in this investigation I suggest we next consult a translation other than the KJV we've just

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used. But instead of using the modern Revised Standard Version, or the New American Bible, or The Complete Bible, or The Bible in Order, or The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, or the North American translation of the Torah, I propose to refer to the translation by James Moffatt, DD. D Litt. MA (Oxon). He appears to have been an independent scholar at Oxford and was courageous to have tackled this enormous task, full of academic pitfalls. His translation is just over 300 years later than the KJV.

Dr. Moffatt subscribes to the documentary theory, as shown in Note 1. Here we may say that in some forms it sees a J (Jahwist) or L (lay) old source, an E (Eloist) old source, and a somewhat later D (Deuteronomist) and finally a P (Priestly) source. Dr. Moffatt kindly provides markers in his text to identify which source(s) he thinks responsible for a particular verse or section. From this we find that the entire section we're interested in from Genesis 2 is by J.

Many scholars who accept the documentary theory think that Genesis chapter 1 is by P as are the first few verses of Genesis 2.

In his introduction Dr. Moffatt says:

One crucial instance of the difficulty offered by a Hebrew term lies in the prehistoric name given at the exodus by the Hebrews to their God. Strictly speaking this ought to be rendered "Yahweh" which is familiar to modern readers in the erroneous form of "Jehovah." Were this version intended for students of the original, there would be no hesitation whatever in printing "Yahweh." But almost at the last moment I have decided with some reluctance to follow the practice of the French scholars and of Matthew Arnold (though not exactly for his reasons), who translated this name by "the Eternal."

I see no reason why we should follow him in this, and therefore have restored the word Yhwh ( earlier form without vowels) for 'the Eternal' in his translation:

5b. For Yhwh had not sent rain on earth, and there was no one to till the soil -

6. though a mist used to rise from the earth and water all the surface of the ground.

7. Then Yhwh moulded man from the dust of the ground, breathing into his nostrils the breath of life; this was how man became a living being.

8. In the land of Eden, to the far east, Yhwh then planted a park, where he put the man whom he had moulded.

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9. And from the ground Yhwh made all sorts of trees to grow that were delightful to see and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree that yields knowledge of good and evil in the centre of the park.

10. From Eden a river flowed to water the park, which on leaving the park branched into four streams;

11. The name of the first is Pison (the one which flows all round the land of Havilah, where there is gold -

12. Fine gold in that land! - and pearls and beryls),

13. The name of the second is Gihon (the one which flows all round the land of Ethiopia),

14. The name of the third is Hiddekel (the one which flows west of Assyria), and the fourth river is the Euphrates.

15. Yhwh took man and put him in the park of Eden, to till it and to guard it.

What we need to do now is to consider these verses carefully, in both translations, and decide if we can whether this is fact or fiction. NOTE 1

Dr. Moffatt's translation (1926, Richard R. Smith, New York) has a rather lengthy introduction. Here are some excerpts which may help us, taken sequentially:

The old Testament is a collection of religious literature... none of the books in this collection is earlier than the 7th or 8th century BC... nearly all have been more or less edited after their original composition ... Here and there influences from Egypt, or from Assyria and the East, no less than from Greece, have been detected... This literary creativeness probably sprang up during Solomon's reign... the mutual desire to gather up the primitive traditions of the people prior to the monarchy, ...one Judahite (J) one for the northern realm (E)... Both narratives started from the beginning. The differences between the two are well marked ... both have survived... we have repeatedly two more or less parallel versions side by side, extracts from one being welded into the framework of the other.

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Nor was this the end... in the year 621 BC a religious reformation along prophetic lines was started... somehow connected with our present book of Deuteronomy...

Another production was the special priestly code enforced by Ezra on the Jewish community about 444 BC... It is fairly clear that out of such sources... there was compiled after the exile the composition known as the Pentateuch... under the Ptolemies in Egypt the Old Testament was first translated - into the Greek language, other versions were made... into Syriac for example... The Septuagint enables us often to reach a purer text than the late Hebrew masoretic tradition... sometimes its variations suggest that both are later ... editions of the earlier autograph... even from the Hebrew text we can infer that some books perished... Such is the literature here translated into English..

The traditional masoretic text though of primary value is often desperately corrupt….. broken or defective, though an English version usually conceals this.

EF comment: The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament of the Bible.

NOTE 2

Dr. Moffatt allocates all Genesis 1 to the P or priestly later source, and Genesis 2 to the J source described in Note 1.

NOTE 3

The edition of the Torah used here is the 1974 edition by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York: the English translation published 1967 by the Jewish Publication Society, with a modern Commentary by Dr. and Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation audio taped my hour long discussion with Rabbi Plaut, which was mainly concerned with textual problems in the chapters relating to the Exodus and my preparation of a two hour radio documentary on The Red Sea Crossing, now revised, updated, and posted elsewhere on this website.

CHAPTER 3

WHEN WAS IT?

James Ussher (1581 - 1656 AD) Bishop of Armagh, Ireland, in his own time was thought to be a scholar. He knew the dates for the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, second ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This king sacked Jerusalem twice, first in 597 BCE, the second time he destroyed it, in 588 BCE. These events and some of the Hebrew leaders involved, such as Daniel, are mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible.

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Bishop Ussher then used the dating in the Bible to fix the Creation in Genesis as in 4004 BCE.

The Jehovah's Witnesses may be ridiculed by some for their persistence in proselytizing, but they are indefatigable students of the Bible. Their Aids to Bible Understanding has 1696 pages packed with mostly useful information. On page 333 under Chronology, it says

From the creation of Adam, 4026 BCE

That's 'Before Common Era' or BCE. They have the reign of Nebuchadnezzar dated 624 BCE to 581 BCE, whereas my Encycopaedic Dictionary dates it as 605 BCE – 562 BCE. I suspect this difference is mainly responsible for the 22 year difference between the two dates we have for the Creation. But here we're not concerned with such small differences, so let's say that Genesis gives us a Creation date of about 4000 BCE.

Here's how this becomes possible, Genesis chapter 5:

3. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat (a son) in his own likeness, after his image, and called his name Seth.

4. And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

5. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

6. And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:

7. And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:

8. And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

9. And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:

and so on. Genesis chapter 4 had a genealogy for Cain described in the same way. I'd like us to compare some of the entries in these two lines of descent given in Genesis:

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CAIN LINE SETH LINE

Enoch Enos

Irad Jared

Mehujael Mahalaleel

Methusael Methusaleh

Lamech Lamech

Naameh (female) Noah

My suggestion is that here we have only one line of descent. The variations show how the different strands, or traditions, or versions or texts, from different areas gradually drifted apart, but came from one source originally. In this case it may be because religious scribes did not want mankind to have been descended from a murderer (Cain). Knowing how corrupt some of the text is which we have to work with, plus translation difficulties and biases, it is hazardous to date the Creation date in the Bible from the information in the Bible. There may well be omissions along the way, even if the actual ages given are accepted. But we cannot do more than use what we have, so let's say the Creation according to the Bible was about 4000 BCE. Next we need to see what archaeologists, pre-historians and historians tell us was going on in the area the Bible is involved with, the Middle East, at the time the Bible indicates the Creation took place.

CHAPTER 4 THE HISTORICAL RECORD Umm Dabaghiyah and Catal Huyuk

Dr. Cuyler Young was the Director of the Royal Ontario Museum, a professor at the University of Toronto and a prehistorian conversant with various sites in the Mesopotamian and Anatolian area of the Near East when we talked about two sites. Catal Huyuk is in Anatolia, which is a little north of Mesopotamia, in present Turkey, south of the capital Ankara and south of Konya. It's marked in blue:

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This next map shows the Tigris river on the right, the Euphrates river to the left. The area within the broken lines is present day Iraq territory, parts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the west, with Iran to the east ,and Turkey to the north. Umm Dabaghiyah is in the northerly part of the map, central, and underlined:

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I chose these sites for several reasons. First, I must admit, they fascinated me, next, because they are very well documented, and the other reason being that I felt they were specialized societies, quite advanced in their way. Therefore it is interesting, I believe, to see what was actually going on, through the eyes of prehistorians predating the chronology that we appear to have in the datings in the Bible for the Garden of Eden. The first site we talked about was Catal Huyuk:

Edward Furlong (EF) In Anatolia, in Asia Minor, Turkey today, I guess.

Dr.Cuyler Young (CY) Yes, Catal Huyuk

(CY pronounced it as Chattal Huyuk)

E F: C(h)atal Huyuk. No outside doors, they say, ladders to the roof, excellent plastered walls, pottery, cultivated wheat, domesticated cattle, and we're talking now of 6250-5400 BC, They had skulls of bulls attached to walls. Now, the suggestion is that the rooms were shrines with cult objects, but I think to myself, what about modern hunters in Canada with the head of the bull moose on the wall in the den of the house. Is that going to be a cult object in a sanctuary 5,000 years from now? And it rather reminds me of my father. He shot a tiger in India and he brought it back, all proud and so on, and when my mother saw it, the head was mounted and he had this tiger skin rug. She wouldn't have it in the house, she had it thrown out, and all I managed to rescue was the claws. And I think to myself I would never want to be an archaeologist because say 10,000 years from now, somewhere, some poor devil is going to dig up the tiger claws from under my house. And there's no tiger.

CY: Also he's going to be scratching the back of his head and wondering how this tiger got so far out of its natural habitat.

E F: Exactly. So those are my comments on this particular site that has skulls of bulls attached to the walls.

CY: I think in these particular cases, at Catal Huyuk, a religious interpretation of these things is quite reasonable actually. Now, one could, in extremis, make the argument that the hunter's trophy on the walls of his den are also a kind of a religious statement, a kind of cultic statement about him and his prowess as a hunter, and so forth and so on. I've done a bit of hunting myself, but it's never occurred to me to turn it into a semi-religious event and stuff it and put it on my wall, quite regardless of what my wife might have to say about that. But that point aside, I think in this particular case, we can accept that these bulls' heads and these very elaborate paintings on the walls which also often involve bulls have some kind of religious significance.

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My comment: Fortunately there's an article on Catal Huyuk by Ian Hodder, (a former professor at Cambridge, now a department head at Stanford), in Scientific American, January 2004 issue, page 76, complete with pictures, illustrations and a map. It says that Catal Huyuk began about 9,000 years ago, on the plains of central Turkey, and grew to about 8,000 people with 2,000 houses on 26 acres. I suggest that clearly a town of this size cannot feed itself by farming. It must act in some way as an administrative centre, collecting taxes or rents from elsewhere, and be a trading entrepôt where satellite villages provide food in exchange for manufactured goods. The manufacturing and processing performed there is discussed in the article: we're told that more information can be found at: www.catalhoyuk.org

Now let's consider Umm Dabaghiyah. Dr. Diana Kirkbride was probably one of the leading archaeologists in the earlier part of the 20th century. She had the Wainwright Fellowship at Oxford University and she was noted for the quality of her work and the exacting standards of her archaeological notations and recording of what she discovered. So I think her work is an excellent example to pick because we can really rely on the information we have available to us. I wanted to discuss this with Dr. Cuyler Young, I did have to go into some details, but please bear with it and then you'll see what happens in the end.

EF: The site that really fascinates me, and I'd like us to talk about it, is Umm Dabaghiyah, which is Diana Kirkbride's. I find it's a fascinating site. Hardly any grain there, according to her husband, Hans Helbaek, and I think only one human skeleton.

CY: Yes.

EF: She hasn't really given us carbon 14 dates. I came across one by Kent Flannery: 5800 - 5300 B.C. And then she says, "They had all five domestic animals--cattle, dogs, sheep, pig, goat." But from the photographs I've seen of the place and the descriptions, there's really nothing there. Now it's a godforsaken, semi-arid plain or steppe, and at least today the rainfall is below 20 cm. a year, say about 8 inches a year. In Toronto we have what, 80 cm? Very small amount of rainfall there.

CY: Yes

EF: And they had to import everything--lumber, flint, obsidian, stone vessels, fine pottery, lentils and peas--even the food they had apparently to import. Only five or six houses at most there and set into the ground with a series of well shaped circular pits, about 2 metres deep, lined with clay. And they traced them for 50 metres or so at least, as far as they'd excavated, and then there were hearths for the houses and quite a number of kilns, with an open central space. And then the other three sides had two

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blocks of buildings. One was 25 metres long on one side and the other was L-shaped and about 40 metres long on one side, and the blocks were all the same width--6.45 metres. And they had cell-like structures in them, about 70, they first counted, and then up to about 80 or 90 of these things. And every 1.45 to 1.75 metres, there was a cell wall or part of an opposing interior buttress, she says, and the walls of the cells were strong and thick, about 50 cm. wide--20 inches wide, made from strongly tempered clay. And there were no doors on the exterior walls and hardly any on the courtyard side either. But if you look, and I've brought a diagram for us to look at here, and we can see that there is a corridor, it would appear, down the middle, on the main structure there:

Sandor Bokonyi analyzed the animal remains, and his report gives some remarkable results, and this is what he says, "478 onager," which is a sort of a half ass -- and I'd like to talk about that later on--

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"102 gazelle, 22 auroch, or wild cattle, 4 dogs, 7 pigs, 52 sheep or goat, 20 cattle, 1 hyena" -- I guess it lost its life when it got in there--"and 8 sheep or goats or gazelles"--I guess they couldn't sort them out. So we've got 84 percent onager and gazelle, plus a few domestic farm animals for the few people in houses. And what would be your comments on that?

CY: Well. All right, Umm Dabaghiyah is, from the architectural point of view, a very difficult site. Now, of course, Miss Kirkbride's interpretation of this whole phenomenon is that we are dealing with a very specialized economic activity, that these people are coming out on a seasonal basis to this site and they are specifically hunting onagers, and they are doing this presumably for the skins of the animals. Well, maybe. I had a very fine graduate student by the name of Ted Banning who did me a report on the problem of the seasonality of Umm Dabaghiyah some years ago and he is not at all sure that it's demonstrable that the site was occupied seasonally. There is perhaps just enough evidence in the animal bone and the plant materials to argue that the site might have been occupied year round. There is no question that as far as we can tell, the existence of the plant remains at the site, at least, clearly indicate that that plant material was imported to the site. So an effort, a clear economic effort was being made to sustain this phenomenon of Umm Dabaghiyah out in the desert. Now, broadly speaking, the site relates quite clearly to an early northern Mesopotamian prehistoric culture by the name of the Hassuna culture. Umm Dabaghiyah is essentially early Hassuna, so this is an outpost in the desert of the Hassuna culture. Now, coming to the architecture, it's very puzzling indeed what these little cells were. If you excavated them somewhere in Sussex or Kent and they dated to the 10th century, you would say, "Aha, a monastery," or something like that. These would be individual cells for human beings to live in. On the other hand, they're quite small, and if they were monks' cells, then they

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would be particularly religious monks, let's put it that way, who were willing to put up with a great deal of discomfort.

EF: Anchorites

Dr. Cuyler Young: Yes. One argument is that we're not looking at the actual buildings themselves, we're looking at substructures of a building, and that in fact this is only the basement, in other words, of the structure. And the argument then is that this kind of honeycomb shape to the structure is there in order to keep the basement dry. In other words, that whatever was above, on the first floor of this building, was something that needed to have air circulating underneath it in order to keep it dry. Now, we know that phenomenon from certain later sites in the Halaf period, where it clearly exists that we're dealing with a basement and that it is honeycombed, rather like this, and there's good evidence that what we're looking at is the substructure of a granary. Of course, you have to keep grain dry or it moulders, and then it's not edible any longer. Although I must confess myself I don't see the relationship between the massive numbers of onagers, the 478 individual onagers, at the site, I don't really see what the relationship between those onagers and these cell-like structures are. I don't know what the devil these buildings are and I don't think anybody in the profession has a sensible interpretation at this point in time as to what they are. They are there. Diana Kirkbride is a superb excavator. There's absolutely no question that this is what she found. There's nothing wrong with the basic information that we have on the architecture of the site, but what the devil it means is just beyond me and I think it's beyond anyone else. It's one of those mysteries to crack in the future.

EF: Right. Well, I have a little bit of a theory about all this.

CY: Good.

EF: I'm always full of theories.

CY: Good.

EF: One other thing I notice about it, there was a heavy use of gypsum and plaster in the domestic houses and level after level of ovens for burning gypsum, apparently. Of course, gypsum is fireproof. It's used for making plaster of paris and it can also be used as an agricultural fertilizer. And there were many large baked clay balls about 15 cm. In diameter. That would be pretty heavy.

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CY: Yes it would.

EF: And she wondered what they were for. Well, onagers have been clocked at 35 miles an hour. Not Mesopotamian onagers because they're extinct, of course, but the Indian ones. I've looked into this a little bit. As to their height, I find that they stand about 9 3/4 hands, and a hand is four inches, so we're looking at something not much more than about a metre high, which is quite small. As a matter of fact, a Shetland pony stands 10 ½ hands, and a regular horse 15 ½ to 17 ½ hands, so they are miniatures, very small. They are just a little bit bigger than a Great Dane, for example. But they're also fast if they can do 35 miles an hour. So a 20 mile an hour running man couldn't catch them by chase.

CY: Certainly not.

EF: And gazelles are very fast too, and these are the two animals that comprise 85 percent of the remains. So my proposal is that they were breeding them, that the cells were stalls. When I measured the cell up, measured the size of the animal, it fits in perfectly. We have the corridor down the middle. I think the walls were thick because if they kicked the walls, they wouldn't kick them down because they were 50cm. wide.

CY: Yes, in the neighbourhood of 50.

EF: We also have pregnant onagers on pots as part of the decorations, so that shows they were interested in the fertility of the onagers, and I'm not sure it would be of much interest to them if they were merely hunting them. Diana Kirkbride as you say has done really quite a marvellous job in giving us detail. She has a mural here:

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and she suggests on this mural that we're looking at onagers running, and maybe they're going to drive them into a wedge of a trap and catch them, but it seems to me that this is a corral. Certainly the one on the right here is standing and not running anywhere, I would say.

CY: No. Well, the fellow right in front of him isn't running either.

EF: Right, they're not really. And I think that they may not be pasturing either particularly, but they are standing, I would say, in a corral. I'd like to carry this a little further. I think the clay balls were used to hobble them. Somebody found at Jarmo some imprints I think of fine linen on a clay ball, and I think what they did was to put the clay balls in a kind of a sack, tie it around and hobble these fast animals when they let them out to pasture so they couldn't run away, and that's how they kept them where they wanted them. I suspect that they probably broke them in as pack animals there, and because they had to bring stuff in and move stuff out, everything they had came from outside, so I suspect here we are really looking at one of the steps in domestication. And I think it's right under our noses. I think they were breaking these animals in on that site.

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They were trading them, they were getting their supplies in exchange. They were probably trading gypsum as well, and maybe this is where the gypsum for the much larger site, the 30-something acre site at Catal Huyuk came from. They were more or less contemporaneous, it might have gone that far. We don't know how far they travelled. We know their obsidian came from several hundred kilometres away.

CY: Well, in fact some of the obsidian at Umm Dabaghiyah came from the neighbourhood of Catal Huyuk. We know that for a fact.

EF: I think the storage bins and spare cells would be used for winter feed and the clay-lined pits were for water storage for the animals and for the men. So there's my suggestion.

CY: Well, that's very reasonable. Now, there's a good way to test that. The first thing I would do, the next time I'm in Iraq, is I would tootle out to the existing remains of Umm Dabaghiyah and I would go into any number of these cells and I would scrape up soil from underneath the floor of the area and I'd bring it back and test it for uric acid.

EF: Very interesting.

CY: I think man has not yet figured out a way to stop a horse urinating in a stall.

My comment: I didn't hear back from Dr. Young on this, although we've met a number of times since. I think international politics made it difficult for him to continue work in the region, as it's in northern Iraq. I should add that the chariot with four onagers was found at Tel Agrab. I

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have no date for this find but it's obviously from a later period.

Those two sites are about 600 miles apart, yet they were trading together. Our dating for Catal Huyuk was from about 6250 BCE and for Umm Dabaghiyah from about 5800 BCE. That means on average they were about as far away in earlier times from the presumed origin of Eden in the book of Genesis as 1 AD is from us, so if Eden did exist it was certainly not the time and place of the original creation of humans. But how accurate are these historical datings? We'll discuss this in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5

HISTORICAL DATING METHODS

Accurate dating is very important. I went to Dr. John McAndrews, a curator of botany at the Royal Ontario Museum, and we discussed carbon 14 dating:

EF: Sometimes you get some very random dates, don't you?

Dr. John McAndrews(JMcA): The material to be radiocarbon dated, let's say a piece of charcoal, is burned and the carbon dioxide collected from the burning and put into a counting chamber. And the number of disintegrations of carbon 14 in this carbon dioxide are counted and compared with a modern standard. The proportion of the carbon 14 in the fossil is compared with the modern, and this is an index of the age of the sample.

Let's just take the most extreme, the worst case, if you like. The site was only occupied for 100 years, yet the radiocarbon dates indicate a life of perhaps 2,000 years. How can this come about? There's two examples I could give. The anomalously young dates could be caused by a tree growing on the site, the rootlets of this tree having modern carbon could have penetrated the archaeological charcoal. These rootlets weren't completely removed before the sample was radiocarbon dated, thus yielding an anomalously young date. Now let's take the anomalously older dates. The inhabitants of the site were probably, just for the sake of argument, burning wood. They could have chosen a tree for burning in their hearth that had been a thousand years old and they could have chosen the centre of the tree to burn in their hearth. That was the handiest wood. So that the radiocarbon dating of a bit of charcoal from the centre of this thousand-year-old tree that they had burned in the hearth would give them a radiocarbon date of a thousand years too old. These are ways of getting anomalously young dates and anomalously old dates.

My comment: This would be very significant I think for prehistorians who are concerned when they feel they have a difference of a hundred years in dating from one level of a site to another.

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But from our general point of view, when we are looking at the broader picture as to whether Eden at 4000 BCE is older or younger than, say, one of the sites that we've already discussed which is dated approximately 5700-6000 B.C., then perhaps that is not so significant for us. And, of course, there are other dating methods that are very accurate. There is varve analysis, which is based on lake levels of water, that's quite accurate and can be brought to the present. There are also datings using tree rings, dendrochronology, as it's called. By cutting across a tree you can read the rings because every season is different and leaves its own pattern on the tree. And then you can match that with an older tree, and that with a still older tree, so you can get back, in the case of Sequoia pines, Bristle cone pines, to 5,000 years ago, in fact even longer ago than that if you take trees that are already dead and match with them. You can match that with ancient wooden artifacts, which means you can get quite a way back.

We can go into the past beyond that again by the potassium argon method, which provides dating much earlier.

There are other things I find interesting, such as neutron activation analysis. You can take something like, for example, obsidian, or pottery, analyze it, and from its characteristics, something like a fingerprint, you can determine where the source was. That enables you to trace the trading patterns between these ancient sites because we can say, aha, this clay for this pottery came from X site, which is so many hundred miles away, and it was traded to such-and-such a site, which is somewhere else. This is how ancient trading patterns can be identified.

What I like about C14 dating is that it's not subjective, like the method of dating sites by pottery styles. A typical heading for a list of C14 dates is this:

Dates are quoted in standard form: years before 1950, 5568 half-life; calibration after Clark 1975. R. = Radiocarbon reference.

In case you think the two ancient sites we discussed in chapter 4 are a local phenomenon, let's consider more evidence. Here are some C14 datings for other sites in the Near East (the Levant is the eastern part of the Mediterranean area, its countries and adjacent islands):

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You'll have noticed that all the dates are BCE, and that the most recent is 7845. The spread of uncertainty is generally small, and has no effect on our discussion here. These are all sites with evidence of human habitation and activity.

And in the Palestine/Israel/Caananite region, where Jericho is, just north of the Dead Sea:

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we find that Jericho began as a village somewhere around 11,000 BCE and had become a town by about 8,000 BC with a stone wall and a 30 ft. tower with an internal staircase, which has been excavated. Here's the evidence to prove it:

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If you should think that this is still only the Near East, and what about the rest of the world, we're told by archaeologists of western Europe that by 8,300 BCE people were crossing into the area we now know as Britain, settling mostly in the east and south there. Around 6,500 BCE the English Channel is said to have been formed. While the earliest people were hunter-gatherers, by about 4,000 BCE farming had developed with large hill-top enclosures such as Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, England. To show you how extensive development had become in Western Europe, here's a map indicating various forms of activity:

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Domesticated goats are known to have been present at Jericho and Jarmo by 6,500 BCE. Jarmo dates back to about 7000 BCE. It's one of the oldest neolithic village sites to be excavated. Its location is in northern Iraq in the foothills of the Zagros mountains. There were approximately 100-150 people living there with 20 permanent houses which had mud walls, stone foundations, and reed bedding. They reaped grain with stone sickles, had domesticated sheep and dogs as well as goats. They grew emmer and einkorn wheat, barley and lentils. Many of their tools came from obsidian bedrock some 300 miles away.

Since Jericho and Jarmo are about 500 miles (850 km) apart, and both had domesticated goats, I rest my case that the historical record shows much human activity and development before 4,000 BCE across the expanse of the Near East, which means that the wording in Genesis chapter 2 about the second Creation and Eden cannot be taken at face value as we have it in English translation. With that conclusively settled we can now turn to the real purpose of this investigation, which is: was there an Eden, and if so where was it?

CHAPTER 6

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS

Now we're ready to reconsider what the translated wording tells us about the location of Eden, which we quoted in chapter 2. It doesn't really matter which version we choose, so let's stay with the King James version:

10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

11. The name of the first is Pison: that (is) it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where (there is) gold.

12. And the gold of that land (is) good: there (is) bdellium and the onyx stone.

13. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same (is) it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

14. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that (is) it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river (is) Euphrates.

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Let's consider what's being said here, verse by verse.

10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden

The first thing we notice is that Eden is not the name of the Garden, or Park. In fact the Garden or cultivated area is not even said to be in Eden, because the river goes out of Eden to water the Garden. All we know is that the Garden is said to be somewhere down stream from the land of Eden as water goes downhill.

11. The name of the first is Pison: that (is) it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where (there is) gold.

12. And the gold of that land (is) good: there (is) bdellium and the onyx stone.

We have a name for one of four rivers. Pison. Further, we're told it goes around the whole land of Havilah, where there is good gold, bdellium and onyx stone. The problems with this are;

1. No one knows the name Pison, or where this river was.

2. There is no gold in Mesopotamia, where most scholars think Eden should logically be. Nor is there naturally occurring gold in Israel, Palestine, or the land between it and Mesopotamia.

3. No one knows what bdellium is. Moffatt calls it 'pearls,' the Torah previously referred to calls it 'bdellium,' George Lamsa, using principally the Peshitta version calls it 'beryllium.' Beryllium is a very light hard white metallic element. A reference to it might be anachronistic as although emeralds and beryl were both known to early Egyptians it wasn't, as far as we know, until the end of the 18th c. AD that they were found to be of the same mineral, now called beryllium aluminum silicate. The element beryllium was first recognized in beryls and emeralds by M. L. Vauquilin in 1798 but not isolated until 1828 by F. Wohler and independently by A. B. Bussy. Another translation is 'bdellium gum,' The related Bible commentary says that bdellium gum is aromatic, was used as an adulterant for myrrh, and when hardened has the look and consistency of a pearl. It comes from a small spindly shrub which grew in Arabia and North West Africa.

This seems the most reasonable explanation, but it's obvious that no one knows what the word refers to, which means it's no help to us in locating the Garden.

Onyx is another problem. It's a variety of chalcedony (microcrystalline quartz) similar to agate. It can be chipped or scratched easily. Where it does not have layers of variegated colours, from ancient times it's been dyed to improve the colour. Today there is an onyx mine in Arizona, and another in Mexico. There's another in Australia. The nearest in the ancient Near East was in Cappadocia, now in Turkey. It's about 15 km.

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East of Nevsehir, which is south east of Ankara, the capital (see the map of Turkey in chapter 4). The Torah edition translates as lapis lazuli instead of onyx. This blue semi precious mineral was much prized, but it's no more help, as the nearest source for that was and is in Afghanistan.

The conclusion is that verses 11 and 12, supposedly identifying one of the four rivers mentioned, are of no help at all.

13. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same (is) it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is on another continent, Africa. The only rivers of any substantial size that flow north in Ethiopia are tributaries of the Blue and White Nile. The Pison cannot be connected with the Gihon unless both are in Africa. This explanation is virtually meaningless for a Garden near Eden, wherever that is, unless it is in Africa.

14. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that (is) it which goeth toward the east of Assyria.

Now we're back in the Near East, in Asia. We have a good historical knowledge as to where Assyria was. Assyria's two former vassals, the Babylonians and Medes, sacked Nineveh the capital in 612 BCE. In 609 BCE they razed Haran, crushing the last resistance to end the Assyrian Empire. Ctesias of Cnidus wrote "it was under (Sardenappalles) that the Empire (hegenomy) of the Assyrians fell to the Medes, after it had lasted more than 1,300 years." This takes us back to beyond 1900 BCE for its origins. We know historically it was flourishing by about 1100 BCE. It later became Persia, and more recently Iran. So the two nations Syria and Iran today represent in some way the former east and west of the Assyrian empire.

What does that tell us about the river Hiddekel? The Karkheh river runs through western Iran more or less north to south, and empties into the Persian Gulf, as do the Tigris and Euphrates. In fact on a 20th c. AD map all three seem to be joined in their deltas. So some scholars believe the Karkheh could be the Hiddekel. Apparently in Hebrew the name means active, vehement, rapid. It doesn't go towards the east of Assyria though, unless this means it's towards the east of where the writer is, and it's in Assyria. George Lamsa's translation has

And the name of the third river is Deklat (Tigris); it is the one which flows east of Assyria...

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Here’s a map of the area:

The Torah version has:

The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Asshur...

The map shows us the capital Ashur in small type just below 'MESOPOTAMIA.'

We can see it is just west of the Tigris river, and the Karkheh seems not to be shown. But the Diyâla is shown, and some scholars think this to be the Hiddekel. It certainly flows almost directly east, away from Assyria, so the description fits, if that is the river, but it's not a big river like the Tigris. Others think the Little Zab is the one because it's so close to Ashur. Some people have even suggested the Indus in India much further east, because it's comparable in size to the Tigris. So there is no consensus as to which river was the Hiddekel.

Verse 14 ends by saying 'and the fourth river is the Euphrates.' We have no problem with this statement. The Euphrates is shown on every map of the area for all to see. It also should mean that the text intends to locate Eden, and the Garden, somewhere relative to the banks of the Euphrates, between the territories of the former principalities of Uratu, Ashur, Akkad, Babylonia and possibly Elam, shown on the map.

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I suggest our conclusion has to be, with one river in Africa going around Ethiopia, and another in Asia Minor, (the Euphrates), the other two rivers unidentified, that whoever wrote this would have failed dismally any elementary test in geography, which means the information as we have it is a meaningless jumble. However, I have a solution to the problem which we'll discuss in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 7

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

How did it happen that such a mixed up geography of the rivers found its way into Genesis 2:11-14? I suggest the answer is very simple. The clue is the jump from 'Elohim' (the Gods, or the Immortals) in Genesis 1, to 'Yhwh Elohim' in Genesis 2, Yhwh Elohim meaning Yhwh of the Immortals. This tells us it's a different story or 'history' now being told. Those who say that Genesis 1 was probably composed by priestly scribes (P) (about the mid-400s BC after the Hebrews return to Jerusalem from having been prisoners in Babylon) and that Genesis 1 was tacked on in front of the older strand or version in Genesis 2, are also saying that P did not stop there, but continued making insertions into the text here and there in the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Old Testament of the Bible.

Insertions (now called glosses) are a perennial problem for those studying ancient texts. Scribes not only copied older texts, they often made marginal notes explaining what they knew or thought they knew that would amplify or clarify what was meant in former times. The next scribe copying that text might not have had room beside a precious previous note in its margin where he wished to make his own note. So he incorporated the former scribe's notes into the text in the appropriate places and put his own note in his margin. That's how we get one kind of corruption in our ancient texts, causing some to throw up their hands and say it's all myth. It was not until printing of texts became available that this pernicious practice of glosses stopped. In fact I like to call P not priestly but pernicious, because that's what it is to modern scholarship.

Here's a 20th c. representation of what was understood of world geography by Near Eastern people in the time of Herodotus, the ancient famous historian who lived in the 400s BCE, which was contemporaneous with the P strand in Genesis: (If this representation is at all close to being correct, we can see that P had no excuse for putting one of the four rivers in Ethiopia, because even in those days it was known to be in a different land on a different continent. Aethiopia is shown at the lower left of the map. The Hebrews in particular should have known better because in their past history they had spent about four hundred years in Egypt, and later generations spent about two hundred years as captives in Babylon. P, then, probably intended deliberate

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exaggeration in his locations for the four rivers to make the history more majestic and God-like).

I suggest that at least some of P's contemporaries knew far more about geography than the map shown here credits them with. Here's my reasoning:

1. In my 'Where Did Odysseus Go?' elsewhere on this site, I faced an obvious and exaggerated later gloss on 'Homer's' ancient Greek text which as a former navigating officer (navy) I could easily identify. It arose because the scribe did not know what a chart was for and as a result inserted a whole unnecessary section in the text to create a totally unwarranted voyage back east across the Mediterranean and then back west again to the original point.

Before 1600 AD very few people had sailed around the world. Magellan (c1470 - 1521 AD) died en route, only one of his ships reached home. Drake, (c1540 - 1596) actually 'circumnavigated the globe' (1577 - 1581) and returned safely. I suggest Odysseus was another such sailor, which is why he was a hero in ancient times. He sailed, I

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suggested, out of the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe looking for gold, tin and amber, all of which were there and valuable. I virtually proved this by getting a planetarium director to precess it back to 1200 BCE. Then I tested the star positions against the directions and star information given in the text. They fitted perfectly where I had concluded he went, but they failed completely if he had stayed in the Mediterranean.

2. I found errors in glosses and mis-translations, discussed in my 'The Red Sea Crossing' chapter 2 (also on this site). For example, all translations into English say there were 600,000 men in the Exodus. This is translating the word 'elef' as 'thousand' when it can mean 'unit' or 'squad' or 'troop' or platoon'; so there were in fact said to be only 600 units of men in the Exodus.

3. The Phoenicians in ancient times were adventurous seafaring people. Here's a map showing their colonization, starting from Sidon and Tyre:

Sidon has evidence it was perhaps inhabited as early as the neolithic period (6000 - 4000 BCE) and was used for dwellings from about 4000 BCE. Tyre was founded early in the 2000s BCE. The Phoenician period began in the 1100s BCE. Carthage, a colony, was founded in the 800s BCE. We can see that the map shows clearly the Phoenicians went beyond the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. They, too, traded with Western Europe but are said to have kept secret their routes, charts of prevailing winds, tides, and currents. By this means they maintained a monopoly and high prices for their goods.

For these reasons I think the poor geography of P is more intentional exaggeration than ignorance. My suggested solution is to remove the obvious P glosses and see what the

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text previously said. Here's the result, with numbered verses, using the KJV text:

8. And Yhwh Elohim planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.

10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became four heads.

15. And Yhwh Elohim took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

I suggest it flows perfectly and makes good sense. But there are two more important facts to consider. All the translations say 'eastward in Eden.' 'Mikkedem,' is the word translated as 'eastward.' It could also mean 'in ancient times' or 'long ago' or 'in antiquity' or 'in the beginning'. I suggest that meaning is the proper sense to be used here. I believe translators have used 'eastward' because of their religious belief that it all took place east of Jerusalem, somewhere in Mesopotamia. I submit that is allowing belief to supplant scholarship. So let's revise the sentence in verse 8, which then reads:

8. And in ancient times Yhwh Elohim planted a garden in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.

But there's a second problem: the word 'Eden.' The phrase used is 'gan b'eden.' It comes from a Sumerian word 'edin.' 'Edin' meant the open country around the cities. It was not part of the area which the cities cultivated. It was the open area where the wild animals were, where the earth had never been broken up by a digging stick or plough. It was the natural unchanged habitat beyond the cities. So we have a second revision to verse 8, which I suggest should read:

8. And in ancient times Yhwh Elohim planted a garden in a plain; and there he put the man he had formed.

There's one more problem. I suggest that the Immortal who planted the garden described in Genesis 2 was probably not Yhwh. For an explanation see my The Immortals (on this site) Chapter 9 third section 'dividing up territory,' and Chapter 5, 'The Immortals in the Bible.' Yhwh was clearly a younger generation Immortal, probably of the same generation as Apollo, or perhaps the next after that. Elyon, the old Caananite Immortal, allocated the patrimony to the various young Immortals and Yhwh's allotment was the House of Jacob. As Jacob probably lived somewhere around the 1700s BCE, the chronology in Genesis itself which leads to an age of about 4000 BCE for the 'Eden' story, gives a much earlier time than Yhwh's allotment.

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Why, then, is Yhwh inserted here? I suggest it's another P insertion, under the influence of Ezra desiring to establish a tradition that concentrated on Yhwh as the god of the Israelites. At the same time, the consort of Yhwh, who was Asherah, was systematically downgraded and excluded from the text to create a monotheistic religion. This was aided by modern translators into English where the few remaining references to Asherah became a 'pole' or a 'grove.' ( see The Immortals, chapter 11). To remove these later changes to the story, I propose to eliminate Yhwh from the Genesis 2 text as an anachronistic insertion by P.

After making these adjustments here's the text, before the suggested additions by P. Eloah, a single god, the word probably used before P, is translated as 'an Immortal' :

8. In ancient times an Immortal planted a garden in a plain; and there he put the man he had formed.

10. And a river went out of the plain to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became four heads.

15. And the Immortal took the man, and put him into the garden to dress it and to keep it.

Now we have a sensible and straightforward piece of ancient history to work with. Whether it enables us to find 'Eden', if it existed, remains for us to investigate, and that we'll attempt in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 8

THE PARTICIPANTS

So far we've found:

1. There was no such place as 'Eden,' there was just a plain somewhere.

2. It was not 'eastward,' it was in antiquity, or long ago.

3. The great river mentioned, Euphrates, and other unknown rivers, are later additions. There was just a river somewhere that had four branches.

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4. An Immortal who was almost certainly not Yhwh planted a garden with an orchard somewhere in or next to the plain.

5. The Immortal formed a man, then took him and put him into the garden to cultivate it and guard it, for the benefit of the Immortal, not the man.

We need to consider three aspects of this event, assuming it occurred: the Immortal, the human, and the location. Because there is constant interaction between Immortal and humans in this story, we'll have to consider the first two elements more or less together.

First, the Immortal. He must have been one of the last of their generations on this planet, if the dating for the event in Genesis is even close to accurate, at about 4000 BCE. We've seen that by then the Mesopotamian cultures were well underway, having begun probably as far back as 8000 BCE. They were firmly established by 6000 BCEE and the land was filling up with villages, towns and even cities by 4000 BCE. Before 3000 BCE the first cities were created, mainly along the branches of the lower Euphrates. Erech, 50 miles up river from Ur, is said to have had a population estimated at 50,000 by 3000 BCE. Even Genesis accepts this fact because Cain, the eldest son of Adam and Eve, left the land of 'Eden,' found a wife elsewhere, had a son, called him Enoch (or Enos), and built a city named after his son. This was not possible if Adam, Eve, and Cain were the only humans on earth. The explanation is that this was not a creation of humans. It was what modern scholars tell us had been going on; the transition from hunter gatherers to settled agriculturalists. The Immortal was setting up a new agricultural community.

The Immortal would have had to find a place outside the Mesopotamian area to start a new colony of people to do the work of producing food for him, to obey him and become his subject people. The place he chose would have needed a reasonably moderate climate, with fertile soil, capable of producing cereals, fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables. It would also need to be able to support livestock: cattle, sheep and goats. Next, it needed a good water supply, either a passing river or if necessary, an irrigation system devolving from a river. The four heads mentioned in Genesis may be four irrigation channels, or possibly tributaries of a larger river conjoining somewhere, which would entail less work for the Immortal in setting up the place.

Not all humans could be easily converted into agriculturalists. The Immortal in the 'Eden' story found this to be true. Adam and Eve did not follow instructions, and both of them were dismissed from the garden and physical barriers set up to prevent their re-entry. The project was a failure.

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If you look at the map of western Europe in Chapter 5, I suggest you'll see a real life example of this. The neolithic activity is crowded along the coast lines. I believe this occurred because the incoming flow of agriculturalists from the east pushed the earlier inhabitants westward, as the farmers moved into their territory. These earlier humans were hunter-gatherers who needed much more space and were a thinned out population. But they often dined on such food as pheasant, oysters, and venison, all highly priced edibles for wealthy folk today. These earlier people had a greater proportion of red-haired and RH negative blood grouping. Their descendants, I suggest, are Basques, Bretons, Irish, Welsh, Hebrideans, highland Scots, Orkney and Faeroe islanders. Bereft of their hunting grounds they turned to the deep sea as fishermen, hunters of the sea. Cod remains prove that to us, as cod is a deep sea fish. These people traded up and down the west coast of Europe creating what modern scholars have called the Megalithic route. They could not easily change from hunter gatherers to farmers.

Genesis 4 describes all this in simple terms. Eve gives birth first to Cain, and then Abel. Gen 4b

And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

All is not well between these two brothers. In Gen 4 we have a microcosm of the plot in many a US 20th c. movie: the struggle between ranchers who were cattlemen and settlers who were homesteaders - farmers:

Gen 4:3 - 5

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto Yhwh And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And Yhwh had respect unto Abel and his offering But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

Lamsa's Peshitta translation has 'was pleased' instead of 'had respect.'

Moffat's translation says 'And Cain was furious and downcast."

Gen. 8b:

and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.

The Immortal had to be of flesh and blood or something similar to need the fruits of the ground and firstlings of the flock to eat, and therefore he had to be a real physical being.

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This is confirmed by the events in Gen 3:8 - 9 (Torah translation)

They heard the sound of the Lord God (Yhwh Elohim) moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day; and the man and his wife hid from the Lord God (Yhwh Elohim) among the trees of the garden.

The Lord God (Yhwh Elohim) called out to the man and said to him, "where are you?"

When the Immortal found that Cain had killed his brother the Immortal cursed Cain saying he would be a fugitive and a vagabond. Cain replied this is more than I can bear, you are driving me from you, and everyone who finds me will try to kill me. This is further evidence that Adam, Eve, and Cain were not the only three on earth, and shows us the writer(s) of the Genesis text knew it. The Immortal 'set a mark upon Cain.' The Torah, Moffatt and Lamsa all use this phrase. I suggest this was probably some form of what we would now call a tattoo. That would identify Cain, but not his offspring.

17. And Cain went out from the presence of (the Immortal) and dwelt in the land of Nod...

No one has ever been able to identify this land, and I suggest we have no need to attempt it here.

This is not the only hunter-gatherer-to-agriculturalist transitional failure. In other ancient literature we're told that the Immortals made various attempts to create suitable humans from what they found pre-existing, before they established a suitable, compliant, subject breed.

Here's the beginning of tablet 6 of the Enuma Elis, an Akkadian literary work dating, it's said, to about 1800 BCE in its original written form:

When Marduk hears the words of the gods,...

Opening his mouth, he addresses Ea

To impart the plan he had conceived in his heart:

"Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.

I will establish a savage, 'man' shall be his name.

Verily, savage-man I will create.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods

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That they might be at ease!..."

Ea was a creator Immortal of the Akkadians. Marduk was his son, another great Immortal who became the god of the city of Babylon. This is much too late to be the creation of man, it has to be the creation of a suitable pliant, obedient human which is what the Immortals needed. But back to Genesis.

Next we need to trace Cain's line of descent to see if we have a later fit into historical times, in case this may help us in our search for the 'garden.' We have a long way to go, with the early descendants lasting hundreds of years:

Enoch, Irad, Mehajael, Methusael, Lamech, Jubal.

But then Genesis switches to Adam and Eve bearing another son, Seth. The line descends:

Seth, Enos, Caanan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah who had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Shem's line continues:

Arphaxad, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah,

Gen 11:26 And Terah lived seventy years and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

11:28 And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.

Ur is second lowest city on the map:

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At last we have reached historical times with Abram and the city of Ur. It was a wealthy city. When 20th c AD archaeologists dug some of it up they found 14 room private houses with paved courtyards and patios. Abram was a wealthy man:

Gen 13:2 And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.

Abram had 318 retainers 'born in his own house.' He armed them to rescue Lot his nephew from Lot's captors. By night Abram 'smote them' and 'brought back all the goods, his brother Lot, and his goods and the women also and the people.'

Abram is thought to have lived in about 1900 -1800 BCE and was possibly a contemporary of Hammurabi ( 18th c BCE). When Abram and his family lived in Ur they were subjects of the powerful Immortal Nanna (Sin) the moon god. But in Gen, 11:31 we're told:

And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.

You'll find Haran on the map of Turkey in Chapter 4. It's in the extreme south and west, just north of Syria. In Haran they would have been subjects of the same Immortal, Nanna. Then a change occurs, Gen 12:1 - 2a:

Now Yhwh had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee.

And I will make of thee a great nation...

Gen 12: 5:

And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.

The next verse tells us that the Canaanites were already there. Historically, it seems they had apparently been there a long time and were descended from the Amorites.

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(This territory is mostly held by Israel and Jordan today. Amman is the principal city in Jordan, with about one third of the total population). But back to the past:

Then there was a famine, and Abram 'went down into Egypt' where he met and apparently stayed with the Pharaoh. Let's get some idea of the distances Abram travelled, with all his retinue and possessions:

Ur to Haran 600 miles

Haran to Canaan 500 miles

Canaan to Egypt 200 miles

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TOTAL 1300 miles

With all that he took with him, Abram would be lucky to travel 10 miles a day. Experienced trade caravans, with camels, travelled 12 to 20 miles a day. (For more discussion on this see my The Red Sea Crossing Chapter 2, the quotation preceding the last paragraph).

A significant change occurs in Gen 17: 1b, 2b, and 5:

...the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; ...

2b: And I will make my covenant between me and thee...

5: Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham...

The words translated as 'the Almighty God' are actually El-Shadday, = El the one of the mountain. (See my The Immortals Chapter 5 for more discussion on these other Immortals in the Bible). El was the patriarch of the Immortals of the land of Canaan. We have evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that Yhwh was one of El's sons (The Immortals Ch 9). Abram has a name change because he is now living in the territory of El and is now a subject of El.

My purpose in discussing the journey of Abram-Abraham is to show the considerable distances the Hebrews could and did travel, and to show that they did not confine themselves to the southern part of the near East. Further, it shows us that Yhwh was not the Immortal involved in the "Eden' story, however translators may manipulate the text. Now we need to consider the evidence for a specific location, and we'll do that in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 9

A POSSIBLE SOLUTION

Although it seemed hopeless to try to find a site for the 'garden,' I thought it worthwhile to study the territory on the outskirts of Mesopotamia, since by about 4000 BC the area itself was becoming rather crowded for setting up a new agricultural community. Further east, Iran has today about 8% arable land and a negligible percentage of permanent

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crop land. Only 2% is irrigated. Further south, Saudi Arabia has today 1% arable land, a negligible percentage of permanent crops, and negligible irrigated land. To the west of Mesopotamia is Syria. It has 28% arable land, only 3% permanent crops, only 3% irrigated, 46% meadows and pasture. Syria then is a possibility, but we need four rivers, which Syria lacks. The Euphrates passes through Syria from north to south, but it seems to be the only river shown on a map except for a small apparently solitary river in the south west. And west of Syria is the Mediterranean sea. That leaves the north, which makes sense because as the ice age retreated, humans, flora and fauna expanded in a northward direction.

The Bosporus is a narrow water channel which divides the Aegean sea in the west from the Black sea to the north and east. Not far north and west of the Bosporus I found a city named Edirne. More than that, the river Maritza passes through Edirne, and at about that site two tributaries join the river, creating three rivers at Edirne and one leaving it, a total of four at Edirne. This was the only place I found that could arguably be said to have four rivers:

Edirne is northwest of Istanbul near the border with Bulgaria and Greece.

Here's another map of the area:

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On this map which shows the Hebros (Maritza) more clearly, Edirne is where the Hebros meets two other rivers and turns due south.

Then I thought, if this has any relationship to the 'Eden' story, and Cain was driven away from the suzerainty of the Immortal who founded the 'garden,' where would Cain go? I surmised he would probably walk beside the river going downstream. Somewhere downstream he would have acquired a wife and founded a city he called Enoch, or perhaps Enos, as there seems to be only one line of descent. I had previously checked with a professor of Assyriology to be sure there was no such place name in Mesopotamia, and he assured me there was not. So I followed on a map the course of the Maritza (or Maritsa) down to the Aegean sea, only about 90 miles. And there was the city of Enez, formerly Ainos (you can see Ainos marked on the river map above). This was a remarkable coincidence. The next step was to find out whether the area was fertile enough and sufficiently lacking in population in about 4000 BCE to be suitable for starting a new agricultural community.

Edirne now has a population of about 115,000. Today the Jewish population in Turkey is about 2% but in Edirne it's about 15%. A French tour guide shows a map of Edirne with about a quarter section of the city marked off as Israelite. These are presumably descendants of the Hebrews, who descended from Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. Edirne

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is the commercial centre for a farm region where grain, fruits, wine grapes, roses, opium, and tobacco are grown, and cattle and sheep are raised. It has several bridges over water, including a long one with 6 spans. It's the junction of the rivers Tunca and Maritza (Turkish, Meric) It's 7 km from the border with Greece and 18 km from the border with Bulgaria. It was named Edirne by a Sultan in 1412 AD, who made it his effective capital for the Ottoman Empire. In my edition (English translation) of the Koran, chapter 18, we have this phrase:

...for them (are prepared) gardens of eternal abode º, which shall be watered by rivers...

º Footnote: literally of Eden

The world of Islam was far more cultured than that of Europe in the 1400s AD. We should also remember that the original Sumerian word 'edin' came from Mesopotamia. The more northern Hittites and Hurrians were all part of the Mesopotamian area and related to its culture with the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians. They fought one another, traded together, and intermarried from time to time. So I conclude the Sultan who chose the name Edirne for his conquered city might well have recognized its similarity to the Eden of the Biblical story.

Edirne had been captured by the Ottoman Sultan Murad 1 in 1361. Previously it had been rebuilt by the Roman emperor Hadrian in c 125 AD who renamed it Hadrianopolis, later to become Adrianople. In about 350 BC the Macedonians took control of it and called it Oresteia. Earlier it had been an area inhabited by Thracian tribes and called Uskudama.

Alcaeus called the Hebrus (Maritza) which flows about 300 miles from source to the sea 'the most beautiful of rivers.' 'It is increased by many tributaries: the Tonzus, Artiscus, and Agrianes, which is joined by the Contadesdus augmented by the Tearus, so much admired by Darius for the purity of its water' (quoted by Herodotus iv, 89, 92). The Hebrus in ancient Greek times was even called the Holy Hebrus. It was said that on its banks Orpheus was torn to pieces by Thracian women. The Thracians were hunter gatherers more than settlers, and were famous for their horses which were large and fast. The Thracians were said to have been 'bold and ferocious tribes, subdivided into many tribes which were migratory and predatory hordes.' The Thracians were famous in ancient times for tattooing themselves, which reminds us of the mark upon Cain.

The Edirne area has megalithic standing stones:

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Presumably they are neolithic, and if as old as Stonehenge in Britain they would have been constructed by about 2600 BCE.

Enos, I'm told by a professor of Semitic languages, is an Amorite word. Amorites, as we know, later became Canaanites. The gulf at Enos was said to abound in fish, with shallows near the shore. No gold or silver deposits are known today within easy reach of Enos though gold is said by Pliny (the Elder AD 23-79) to have been 'washed in the sands of the Hebrus' a process known to have gone on during the 16th c AD on a small scale. Enos is said to be 'at the entrance to the natural and easiest route to the rich corn lands, the ranches, the timber and fruit producing region of eastern and central Thrace. The Hebros ... flows in a broad fertile valley through central Thrace until it reaches Edirne where it swings sharply southward in a yet wider valley, ... the lowlands... were famous in antiquity, as now, for the speed with which their corn ripened, and for the heavy yield of the crop.'

Some people say there is a physical resemblance between the Hebrews and the Armenians in the eastern part of Anatolia. This area of Turkey is where Genesis says Noah's ark grounded, on Mount Ararat, in eastern Turkey. When Isaac and Jacob took their wives, these came from the northern area, this same area, also. I think it's interesting that the world "Semitic" itself comes from "Shem", one of the sons of Noah. The three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, are supposed to have been responsible for linguistic groupings. Japheth, as mentioned elsewhere is really Iapetos, who is one of the Greek Titans. And when you look at some of his descendants, Dodanim, which is really the Dodecanese islands; Kittim, which is really Kriti, which is Crete; and Javan, which is really the Aegean; and Ashkenaz: the Ashkenazi Jews are known even to this day, they're the ones that come from Europe. I think all this can bring us into the

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Thracian area for the 'garden.'

We then, looking at the references to Abraham in the Bible, and establishing ourselves with Anatolia, might well expect that earlier on there had been borrowings from Anatolian culture into Thrace. And in order to try to determine whether that approach was justified, I talked to Professor Ruth Tringham, a prehistorian who was an associate professor at Harvard, and then a professor at Berkeley in California. She's a specialist in the area which includes Thrace, and what would seem logical when starting up an agricultural community would be a need for animals, basically sheep, and they would need cereals, basically wheat. So we began by talking about sheep.

Prof.Ruth Tringham (RT): I personally think the evidence shows us that there is no real domestication of sheep, not even a real presence of sheep north of Greece before they were introduced from the outside from places where they are native, for example Greece or Anatolia. But I think it's as likely that it was a generalized colonization of Europe from either Anatolia through, for example, what is now Edirne, or from Greece.

Edward Furlong (EF): Apparently they used to pan for gold in that area. In fact, I read somewhere that this was still being done all the way up to the 17th Century A.D. So if that's the case, the gold must have been probably placer gold, I think it's called, and must have come from further upstream somewhere. Can you offer any comment on that?

RT: Well, the Maritsa starts, or at least some of its tributaries start in gold-rich country, and gold is still found in the mountains, as is copper, and other minerals, so it's very likely that gold could be carried down from those areas.

EF: Would you comment on the age of the sites in the Edirne area.

RT: There's nothing like any sort of agricultural or settled village in the Maritsa basin as old as Jericho or any of those early settlements in the Levantine coast. It's an interesting area. It doesn't go back as early as the earliest levels of Karanovo or other sites further up the Maritsa. The sites lower down the Maritsa tend to start later, but at least it goes back to the later part of the 4th millennium. Now we're talking about sort of 3400 to 3500 B.C. It's interesting that we don't have the very early neolithic dates down there, but I think that's probably just the result of people not being able to excavate in the right levels. The Maritsa has poured down these huge deposits of alluvium all through the millennia all the time, especially down there in the lower basin. So the sites get covered up.

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My comment: I think that is reasonable evidence to confirm the age of the Edirne sites so far discovered is close to the dating we can derive from the chronology in the Bible as to the age of the Eden story. After Adam and Eve have been evicted from the Garden of Eden by the Immortal, Genesis 3:21

Unto Adam and also unto his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them.

That could be fur coats, but Mesopotamia is one of the hottest places on earth. In summer, it's said to be over 140º (F). In winter It's about 50º (F) or more. But Edirne is colder, it's colder now, but I think it was colder in about 4000 BCE.

EF: Post holes. Now, you and some other scholars say, "Oh the post holes in that area were deep," and I realize that all you have left may just be what, a stain in the ground, or something like that? But you don't say how deep, so I'd like to ask you, how deep is deep?

RT: I excavated a whole row of post holes which represented one whole wall of a house which were dug from their surface, from the surface of the house, all the way down, were about 2 metres and 20 centimetres deep.

EF: Ah, very interesting, because that's what I suspected. You see, here in Canada, we have to get down about 4 or 5 feet, almost a couple of metres, to get below the frost line, and if you don't do that, the posts would heave, the building would heave. So you have to get your foundations down below the frost line.

RT: Right. That's a very good point. Thank you, Mr. Furlong. I'll put it in my next book.

EF: Now, I'm not quite through, I've got things to add to that. We have construction almost identical, it seems to me, nowadays in Canada with what you are describing in your book in one of the sketches. The centres for those posts look to me to be about 16 inch centres. That's 16 inches apart, centre to centre. In Canada the standard is 16-inch centres for studs (96 inch 2x4s). And so you either had a wood frame construction with studs, with those centres, or you had a post and beam construction. It seems to me that going back 8000 years, they then had wood frame construction, and they had post and beam construction.

RT: We've done a lot of work on the early architecture of this period, and we've been especially looking at another part of the architectural materials that get preserved apart from the post holes, and that is this mass of clay. And the clay was burned and so it was

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really very well preserved, and this is the clay superstructure and the floor. So that what we can see is that probably in the earliest period of pioneering agriculturalists, if you like, these earliest levels in the tells in Maritsa, that they may have started off with a wooden construction, but that basically, especially down there in Bulgaria, from very early on, they were building with a construction of wooden posts and a sort of wattling in between and a very thick layer of clay slapped on to at least the outside of this wooden frame, possibly not on the inside, although in certain cases that seems to be so. And then with a big clay floor, very thick, solid clay floor.

EF: Well, this again supports my suggestion that in the Eden story we're dealing I think with cold temperatures in winter because I suspect that thick clay with wattle and daub would give you some protection against cold, which I also think is the reason for a semi-basement. They dug into the ground, and again, this would give them protection from cold in the winter.

RT: There seems to be plenty of data to show us that at that time the climate wasn't that different from what it is now. If anything, it might have been slightly warmer in winter, and it might have been slightly wetter. It might have been slightly less continental than it is today, but these are very, very slight differences. But apart from that, I think though that your idea of cold, frosty winters with snow is perfectly reasonable. I would agree with you.

My comment: Edirne was a very fertile area, the Maritsa area, and it was, interestingly enough, an area that did not develop into large cities. And, of course, Eden itself quite clearly, since everyone was driven out, didn't develop into a large city either. So I discussed the early agricultural history of that area with Professor Tringham:

EF: I have a large-scale map of the Edirne area, and I see, around the city, there seem to be quite a number of islands and waterways. It looks as though there is considerable distribution of the water into a fairly wide area, around Edirne.

RT: Right.

EF: It's a very fertile area. It was called the "market garden of the Near East" at one time.

RT: I can believe that, it's extremely fertile, even now. What's interesting is that we can see the villages developing over a thousand years, 2,000 years, getting larger and larger, and they're nothing -- it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't evolve into a city. It's your "Eden" all right, but it's very small, small scale. I think what you have to think of is a

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"small is beautiful" place.

EF: Eden was no urban culture, Cain went away somewhere else to build a city, so maybe this was really more likely a place where Eden could have been.

RT: I think that's a lovely idea.

My comment: I don't think any historians, prehistorians or scientists today are going to commit themselves to a particular location as the site of 'Eden,' particularly since they would be relying on the wording of the text provided in the Bible or Torah. Even after our careful analysis and restoration of the probable earliest version of the text, I wouldn't want to define a specific location in hard, tangible terms myself after a lapse of 6,000 years. I think there is evidence here, but it's not incontrovertible evidence, though we do have reasonable arguments put forward which justify considering this particular location fairly seriously: a place named Edirne; another nearby named Ainos; gold; a collection of rivers; great fertility; and appropriate known archaeological dating. Further, the ancient Israelites were known as Hebrews (ancient Egyptian Habiru) and the Maritza river was formerly called the Hebros. In the early days before vowels they are all the same: Hbr. The word Hebrew itself does not appear to be older than the exile to Babylon, as 'Hebrew' was 'ibri' 'one from the other side (of the river).'

The beauty of our modern day and age is that each of us is entitled to his or her own opinion. And what I am trying to do basically is to get people out of a rut, to stir their minds up a little bit, get them to look at things in a different way. They may not agree with me. Fine. But I think at least we can now, from our present perspective in this scientific technological age we live in, look at some of these ancient problems in a different way and not necessarily, for example, just abandon them as myth. Maybe we can reinterpret them in a more practical way in line with the civilization in which we find ourselves.

END