Eden
A place in the Bible
The garden that God planted in the beginning for the first man and the first woman. The Bible also calls it “paradise.”
What happened here
- The garden: God made all kinds of trees grow there, beautiful and good for food. In the middle were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
- Adam: God placed the man in the garden to cultivate and care for it.
- The rivers: a river flowed out of the garden and divided into four. Two of them are the Tigris and the Euphrates.
- Outside the garden: after the sin, God sent the man out of the garden, and he placed a cherub to guard the way to the tree of life.
Today
No one knows where it was. The Bible does not give a place that can be put on a map.
Where it appears in the Bible
Genesis 2:8; Genesis 2:15; Genesis 2:9; Genesis 2:10; Genesis 2:14; Genesis 3:23-24
What the Bible says
Genesis 2:8
And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed man whom he had formed.
Genesis 2:15
And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, and to keep it.
Genesis 2:9
And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat of: the tree of life also in the midst of paradise: and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Douay-Rheims Bible (Challoner revision), public domain.
Source: Genesis 2:8-15; Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897), “Eden”