Where is Eden?

  • Thread starter Thread starter scameter18
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
With sin being separation from God, Adam and Eve certainly experienced the Presence of God in a way that wasn’t experienced again - until Christ, and now, the Eucharist - Heaven on Earth. Christ, the New Adam, through His Mother the New Eve, has restored that proximity and harmony, and eventually will completely renew the earth to reflect it, a process we can help now and which is most represented in Mass. 🙂
 
“16
At the crash of his fall I made the nations rock, when I cast him down to the nether world with those who go down into the pit. In the land below, all Eden’s trees were consoled, Lebanon’s choice and best, all that were fed by water.
17
They too have come down with him to the nether world, to those slain by the sword; those who dwelt in his shade are dispersed among the nations.
18
Which was your equal in glory or size among the trees of Eden? Yet you have been brought down with the trees of Eden to the land below. You shall lie with the uncircumcised, with those slain by the sword. Such are Pharaoh and all his hordes, says the Lord GOD.” Ezekiel 31

This suggests that Eden was destroyed.
 
Those verses seem to imply that Eden died, i.e. went to the “pit”, sheol, of death, rather than being “destroyed”. It is actually interesting that the specific Garden of Eden is not all of Eden, only a garden within it: “And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

It is a garden “in” Eden, but not all of Eden. Further, in Ezekiel it specifically says the “trees of Eden” in the verses you quoted, not all of Eden or the Garden, the latter being the only part guarded by cherubim and the flaming sword, not all of Eden: “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

Earlier in Ezekiel, it uses the entire garden of Eden in general (Ezekiel 28:13). But the trees mentioned later in Ezekiel are in the garden of Eden particularly, but are not the entire garden itself, as a human-run garden (Genesis 2:5,15) is the tilled ground itself:

Ezekiel 31:9 “I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches: so that all the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, envied him.”

Further: Ezekiel 36:35 “And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited.”

These differentiate between the trees of Eden, and the paradisical Eden itself. While the trees seemed to have died, i.e. gone into the “nether-world”, sheol, death, just as is said the Pharaoh will (Ezekiel 31:18), Eden continues to be used as an example of perfection, especially in other books (Isaiah 51:3). It should also be noted that Eden is sometimes used as a personal name. (2 Chronicles 29:12, 2 Chronicles 31:15, Ezekiel 27:23). Hence, I would think, the use of Eden in Amos 1:5.

What all of this means exactly for where Eden as a whole is today is difficult to discern. I would interpret it based on my last post, that Eden is a state of being in perfect physical and spiritual harmony with God, rather than a geographic placename, though the Edenic paradise Adam and Eve lived in would certainly have been a real-world place.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top