The Garden of Eden and the Fall
P««l
Bauman, D.D.
F OR YEARS the record oi the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man has been the laughing dels. Yet there is no story in the Bible which has left its details more deeply Imprinted upon the traditions of the ancient nations than the ac count of man’s original home and his first disobedience. T hb G arden or E dik “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed" (Gen. 2:8). Various locations for the Garden of Eden have been Imagined, ranging from the heart of Africa to the North Pole. The testimony of archaeology and geology is now in almost uni versal agreement with the Bible in tracing the beginnings of man’s civilization to Mesopotamia. The great section of land that lay be tween the Tigris and Euphrates Riv ers certainly became the arena for the development of the world’s earli est civilizations. In the middle of this fertile valley and toward the south, not far from the Persian Gulf (in what today is known as Iraq) flour ished the earliest cities mentioned in the Bible. It is in this section that conditions best fit the description of the Garden of Eden (cf. Gen. 2:8-15). T he S umerian E pic of P aradise Until about a third of a century ago, archaeologists despaired of ever finding anything which might bear definitely upon the Fall of Man. Creation tablets and flood tablets had long been known, but no tablet of the Fall had appeared. However, in June 1914, Professor Langdon of Oxford published a translation of a fragment of a Flood tablet from the Nippur library, and a few weeks later Dr. Gordon, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, discovered among the thousands of fragments from the Nippur library the remain der of this tablet of which Dr. Lang don had published only a fragment. When these portions were translated and assembled by Professor Lang- P«8* Eifht««n
My brother, what of thee is iUt My pastures are distressed, My flocks are distressed, My mouth is distressed, My health is ill. Such is the Sumerian Epic. As Caiger well concludes: "It is the story of a Paradise on earth, a for bidden tree, of a happiness that was lost. But when we look for anything corresponding to the strong moral element underlying the Biblical nar rative, we look in vain.” * T he A dapa M yth More interesting in some details than the Sumerian Epic of Paradise, is the later Babylonian Legend of Adapa, *which finds its setting in the same part of the world. It seems that Adapa was a kind of semi-divine person who was a priest and sage of the temple of the god Ea at Eridu: He possessed intelligence . . . His command like the command of Anu . . . Wide intelligence he (Ea) made perfect for him, the destiny of the country to reveal. Unto him wisdom he gave; eter nal life he did not grant him.
don, the whole inscription proved to be not really an account of the Flood, but one of the Fall, to which the story of the Flood was merely appended. The discovery of the Sumerian Epic of Paradise revealed for the first time, apart from the Bible, a definite link between the Creation, the Fall of Man and the Flood. It is true that in the Sumerian Epic, as compared with the Biblical record, the stories are mixed, but the details are so similar that one cannot escape the conclusion that some relationship exists between the two accounts. The Sumerian story, like that of the Bible, describes an age of inno cence in a primitive paradise where all nature is one sweet harmony: That place woe pure, that place •woe clean, The lion slew not, The wolf plundered not the lands, The dog harried not the kids in repose, The birds forsook not their young, The doves were not put to flight, There was no disease or pain. Here the order of the Sumerian Epic differs from that of the Bible, for it next describes the gods’ dis pleasure with man, the sending of a great flood, after which we are con fronted with a solitary figure who is back in the Garden. Here he is given permission to eat of all the trees except one which will bring a curse upon him: My king, as to the fruit-bearing plants He shall pluck, he shall eat. But, like Adam, he partook of the forbidden fruit: My king the cassia plant ap proached; He plucked, he ate. Then Ninharsag in the name of Enki Uttered a curse: The face of Life until he dies, Shall he not see. And so, as a result of disobedience, death and disease entered man’s par adise:
stock of destructive critics and infi
Ruins of Nippur Library* where the Sume rian account of the flood was discovered.
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