Do you think every single human from then on would be faithful forever? (Even angels didn't all remain on God's side)
Exactly, if the first two couldn't get it together, what are the odds of the next 5 billion not taking a nibble of the apple?
Garden of Eden
by Onager 21 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Landy
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David_Jay
Schnell,
Funny. Jackson County, Missouri to be exact, right?
Now as for the Garden of Eden, it might interest people to know that the Jews have never thought of it as a literal place on earth or in history.
The Jews placed their moral lessons and legendary retellings of their own history onto the paradigm of the cosmos that existed when they wrote it. Imagine that you lived back in the 1930s and wrote about living on the planet Mars. You might mention the "canals" people often thought they saw on the planet's surface when looking at red world through a telescope. It would not be until the 1970s when the NASA's Viking program sent back pictures verifying that the "canals" were an illusion. Since then the idea of the "canals" surfaced no more, in science or fiction. But prior to then the "canals" played a major part in describing Mars, and in a similar way the whole Garden of Eden thing is merely stuck in ancient ideas of the past.
Which brings us to the story of Adam and Eve. The setting is based on the cosmology of the ancient Mesopotamian culture of the time. They thought the cosmos was a giant ocean of water and that the sky was a literal dome holding this water back. The subsequent air pocket made by this firmament allowed the flat plate of the earth to stay dry and support life (an earth which, by the way, stood in place in the cosmic ocean waters by sitting on pedestals).
The idea of the Garden of Eden was shared by practically all who held to the same cosmology. Babylonian mythology was influenced by the same cosmology. It served as the backdrop for many of their stories, though the references to it are more vague and even more obscure as those found in Genesis.
In Jewish theology, the Garden of Eden is likely Heaven itself. The story is saying that humans had a sort of access to God and currently live as we do due to choosing to "go at it alone," so to speak. The trees therein are not literal, neither is the angel with a sword at the entrance (how do you have a single entrance to the Garden of Eden as described in Genesis?). The Church Fathers actually adopted this view themselves as seen in Roman Catholicism's view that the Tree of Life is fulfilled in the Cross Jesus was nailed upon, the fruit of life being his body and blood, and Jesus being the New Adam and Mary the New Eve, thus making the way back into Heaven by means of the Crucifixion.
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Crazyguy
People have thought the garden was in turkey based on a couple of verses in the Bible but older writings put it just south of Kuwait
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SonoftheTrinity
The Pseudipigrapha Books of Adam and Eve go into a lot more depth on this subject than Genesis. Considering that they are onlypreserved in the Ethiopic, my best guess is Ethiopia.
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sir82
Gosh, that's right! You'd almost think it was a plot device in a fable, wouldn't you?
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OUTLAW
Where is the garden of Eden?
The name is misspelled..
It`s supposed to be "Garden of Edgar"..
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It`s At Edgars House.. -
James Mixon
What happen to all the gold?? 'Genesis 2:11,12 "the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are here." Forget the tree of life, give me the gold.
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schnell
@David_Jay, my research corroborates what you say as well, and I am sure the story had more significance after the exile to Babylon. (Expulsion from paradise being the key detail.) I am aware that the tree of life, etc. were common in Mesopotamian lore, with roots back in ancient Egypt and Africa, but there is a theory that the particular telling in Genesis originated after 587 BCE.
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schnell
@David_Jay, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, "When a myth is mistaken for history, it is killed."