How Can the Garden of Eden Story Be True?
A fellow blogger once printed an interesting post in his blog, and this post was my response to his statement. I wish I could link my readers to the original article, but it’s since been removed from the site. Still, I think these points are worth noting.
Eden, wherever it was, would have been destroyed in the Noachic Flood—a flood which also changed the atmospheric conditions and climate of Earth. Remember that we are told that the waters below the earth and the waters above were part of the Flood? Many scientists believe that the earth was once surrounded by a vapour canopy which created a sort of greenhouse atmosphere on earth; such a canopy would certainly ensure that all of the land was covered in lush vegetation—a “garden.”
Before the Flood, all of the continents were in one solid mass; again, many scientists believe in the Pangaea or Gondwanaland theory. According to the Bible, it was during Peleg’s lifetime that “the earth was divided.” Such divison and the ensuing continental drift would further change the climates of the various pieces of the land mass, destroying whatever “garden” remained after the Flood. And such a catastrophic splitting of the land would explain the proximity of modern-day Iraq and modern-day Ethiopia, assuming that the Ethiopia mentioned in the passage is the same one we have today.
That the inhabitants of the identified region were Mesopotamians, not Hebrews, is irrelevant. There is no mention of Hebrew, Jew, Israel, or any other such identifier in the creation story. In fact, it is not until the Egyptian slavery that the people descended from Abraham are identified, first as the children of Israel / Israelites, and then as the Hebrews / Jews. The Jewish people who wrote down the stories of their fathers were descended from Shem, son of Noah, who survived the worldwide flood. There was no Semitic people before the birth of Shem, and there are actually two main groups of Semitic peoples—the Jews and the Arabs. You know the story, Abraham’s first son was born to a concubine slave named Hagar. That son, Ishmael, was a half-blood: half-Egyptian, half-Shemite (Semitic). Abraham’s second son, Isaac, was born to Abraham of his half-sister and wife, Sarah. Isaac was full-blooded Shemite.
As far as the name of the garden is concerned, translation issues do not affect the reality of a place. How many different “names” has the primary city of China had in English? I remember the transition from Peking to Beijing. It’s the same city, and it still exists, even though the translators have changed their minds about what it’s called and how it should be translated. And what of all the cities that have changed names over the years: St. Petersburg to Leningrad and back again. Constantinople from Byzantium…..
It’s funny to think that 3000 years of oral relation would cause the story to lose validity. Many of the sacred writings of various religions, and much of our literature, lived and was passed along as oral tradition long before it was ever put into print or translated. There are some cultures in which certain members are chosen as the keepers of the traditions, and they are required to learn, word-perfect, the ancient traditions handed down through the peoples. There is no reason to assume that this could not be the case with the Biblical narratives. Furthermore, nearly every native culture has some form of creation story—the details vary somewhat, but all of them have a focal point of a supernatural being, a God, if you will, who decided, for one reason or another, to make something. These varied creation legends might lend credence to your theory that the oral tradition might have corrupted. After the Tower of Babel incident, it would certainly make sense. (Comparing the similarities of the various creation-legends and deducing a “parent story” might make an excellent doctoral thesis for a dedicated student of literature.)
As the story was written down, we read that, some years after the Flood, the people all spoke the same language. However, in an act of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, the people attempted to challenge God. He, therefore, “confounded” the languages. Thus were born the parent languages that we are familiar with today: Indo-European, Sanskrit, and such (I’m not home with my reference materials, so bear with me.)
The Dubrin language being ancient and long-dead is not a factor. Latin is an ancient and long-dead language.Yet we do not dispute the validity of Caesar’s Gallic War, or of Cicero’s tirades against Catiline, or of Herodotus’s history. Certainly, there will be some name-changes and other translation issues with rendering the Latin into other languages, but the validity of the stories is not affected.
Now, one main point, I think, was this: “…the timeline as presented in the bible would place the appearance of mankind on earth at approximately 5000 years. We now know this to be untrue. Modern man appeared on this planet some 50,000 years ago with some credibility attached to his appearance as far back as 80,000 years. Further, other forms of man existed prior to that.”
Unfortunately, there is no scientific proof of any age-related claim, either for the earth to be 5000 years old, or for it to be several million years old. Science demands observability and replicability; unfortunately, there is no way that we can either observe or replicate the origin of the earth. The dating methods used to try to pinpoint an age are riddled with circular reasoning, contradictions, and false-dates of known artifacts. The other evidences pile up on both sides of the earth-age question. As for Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, and the other forms of Homo erectus which predate Homo sapiens, is it not possible that these are artifacts from either pre-flood times, in which the greenhouse atmosphere would have encouraged varied and sometimes exaggerated growth, or that they are of species similar, and perhaps related to, man? Or, perhaps, that they are relics of persons who were injured, deformed, or in some other way atypical of the common person of early times?
Finally, the question is asked, “How can the story of creation and the Garden of Eden possibly be reconciled against this discovery” [of an earth-dwelling sentient being vaguely related to man]
I am puzzled as to why the two must be exclusive. It seems logical to me that one might have several different species within the genus Homo, some of which survived and some of which died out. We can see this kind of natural selection played out in the world around us, as we struggle to keep various members of the animal and plant kingdoms from lapsing into extinction due to environmental or interaction issues. There are many different varietals of the dog—yet all are of the genus Canis. And the creation story clearly states that God made mankind (people of both genders), then He planted a garden and made one special man to live there. It need not be assumed that this was the only man on the planet—only a few chapters after the Eden story, we learn that there is more than one race of people inhabiting the world.
I just don’t see any reason not to believe the story of creation as told in the Bible.