EDEN is the most ancient and venerable name in geography, the name of the first district of the earth's surface of which human beings could have any knowledge. The word is found in the Arabic as well as in the Hebrew language. It is explained by Firuzabadi, in his celebrated Arabic Lexicon (Kami2s), as signifying delight, tenderness, loveli ness (see Morren, in Edict. Biblical Cabinet, vol. xi., pp. 49). Major Wilford and Professor Wilson find its elements in the Sanscrit. The Greek is next to identical with it in both sound and sense. It occurs in three places (Is. xxxvii. 12 ; Ezek. xxvii. 23 ; Amos i. 5) as the name of some eminently pleasant districts, but not the Eden of this article. Of them we have no certain knowledge, except that the latter instance points to the neighbourhood of Damascus. In these cases it is pointed with both syllables short ; but, when it is applied to the primitive seat of man, the first syllable is long. Those passages, in addi tion to Gen. ii., iii., iv. i6, are the few following, of which we transcribe the chief, because they cast light upon the primaeval term : ' He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of Jehovah.' Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God.' 'All the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, envied him.' This land which was desolate is become like the garden of Eden' (Is. li. 3 ; Ezek. xxviii. 13 ; xxxi. 9, 16, 18 ; xxxvi. 35; Joel ii. 3).
All this evidence goes to show that Eden was a tract of country; and that in the most eligible part of it was the Paradise, the garden of all delights, in which the Creator was pleased to place his new and pre-eminent creature, with the inferior beings for his sustenance and solace.
We now present the passage from the Hebrew Archives to which this disquisition belongs— Genesis ii. 8—` And Jehovah Elohim planted a garden in Eden, on the east ; and placed there the man whom he had formed. And Jehovah Elohim caused to grow out of the ground there every tree agreeable to the sight, and good for eating; and the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river proceeded from Eden, for the watering of the garden ; and from thence it was divided, and became into four heads. The name of the first, Pishon ; it surroundeth the whole country of Havi lah, where is the gold, and gold of that land is good ; there is the bea'olach and the stone shoham. And
the name of the second river, Gihon ; it surround eth the whole country of Cush. And the name of the third river, Hiddekel ; it is that which goeth easterly to Assyria. And the f -urth river, it is the Phrat.' Upon this description, we shall offer our senti meats in the shortest manner that we can.
I. It is given in that simple, artless, childlike style which characterises the whole of the primxval Hebrew Scriptures. This is the style which was alone adapted to the early stages of the human history. Our whole race had to pass through a long succession of trying and training circumstances. which formed truly the collective education of man kind. The communications of knowledge must have been made and recorded in such terms and phrases as the men of the age could at the first understand; and which yet should possess a suggestive and at tractive character, which would gradually capaci tate for higher and more spiritual disclosures. (See the observations on the modes of divine mani festation to the first human beings, in the article ADAM, vol. i. p. 6o.) If it were objected, that thus the revelation would be clothed in the imagery of gross and sensible objects, with the im perfections and misconceptions under which those objects appeared to men possessing only the rude ideas of a primxval state of society,' and this would of necessity produce a rude and imperfect language [ANTHROPOMORPHISM], we reply, that the spirit of the objection would require that the terms and style of the revelation should have been in the most pure and abstract kind of phrase that human diction could afford, the most nearly approaching to the spirituality of the divine nature and the majesty of eternal things ; and this would be equivalent to saying that it ought to have anticipated by many centuries the progress of man as an intellectual and social being ; that it ought to .have been written, not in the language of shepherds and herdsmen, but in that of moral philosophers and rhetoricians ; not in Hebrew, but in Greek or English. It would also follow, that a revelation so expressed would have been unintelligible to the ages and generations of primitive time, and to the generality of mankind in all times' (Pye Smith, On Scripture and Geology, p. 242).