Eden hypothesis according to David Rohl

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The Eden hypothesis according to David Rohl describes the attempt of the British Egyptologist David Rohl (* 1950) to localize the biblical Garden of Eden . To this end, he combines various elements from prehistory in the book of Genesis with processes at the transition from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age and follows the geographical information in Genesis 2 and other ancient oriental scriptures. Rohl considers the Garden of Eden to be a historically real place. His considerations are essentially twofold:

1. Cultural-historical classification: The biblical narratives are understood as expressions or reflections of the cultural development of a people in which the narrative motifs were developed and handed down. The Sumerians are said to have been that historically tangible culture .

2. Localization: With the help of biblical and ancient oriental geographical references, the possibilities are played through in the elimination process. The Garden of Eden is said to have been on the Tabriz plain in northern Iran .

In Judaism , Christianity and Islam, the Garden of Eden is considered the place of the paradisiacal original state before the fall of man , that is, before the entry of humanity into world events marked by suffering and death. Its meaning and its historicity are interpreted differently.

Rohl published his thesis in 1998 in the book Legend: The Genesis of Civilization . It represents one of the possible attempts to embed the Garden of Eden geographically and historically. Rohl's hypothesis has been criticized on various levels .

Interpretation of the expulsion from Eden

According to the biblical story of paradise, God drove man out of the garden of Eden after the fall of man: "And Yahweh Elohim sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the earth from which he was taken." ( Genesis 3 : 17-19, 23  ESV )

Rohl interprets this expulsion as a mythologizing retelling of the transition from the Epipalaeolithic to the Neolithic. This interpretation is not new, but corresponds to the widespread historical interpretation of the Eden stories. However, he connects them with the Neolithization of the Sumerians .

However, cultures that could be considered ancestors of the Bronze Age Sumerians only emerged with the Samarra culture in the 7th millennium BC. Chr. , Or the subsequent Obed culture in the early 6th millennium BC. In appearance. At that time, Neolithic cultures had been established elsewhere in the Ancient Near East for three thousand years.

Localization of the region of the Garden of Eden

Mesopotamia and surrounding areas according to Rohl

The area of ​​Tabriz, the capital of the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan , and the plain west of the city are designated as the Garden of Eden . In the west, the Urmiasee borders the plain. The Garden of Eden is interpreted as part of the ancient kingdom of Aratta , which should have included at least the plateau near Tabriz and the land of Hawila .

“And a river goes out from Eden to water the garden; and from there it is divided and becomes four heads. The name of the first is Pishon; which flows around the whole land of Hawila, where the gold is; and the gold of this land is good; there is Bedolach resin and the Schoham stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Kush. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that flows across from Assyria. And the fourth river, that is the Perat. " ( Gen 2: 10-14  ELB )

In the four heads ( Hebrew roschim ( Gen 2.10  ELB )) Rohl reads four sources. Because heads can also be translated as beginnings , so the four heads could be interpreted as four river beginnings, i.e. as four sources. Eden should therefore be located where the rivers Pishon , Gihon , Hiddekel and Perat arise. Rohl identifies the rivers of Eden as follows:

  • Pishon: The river "Qizil Uzan" ("Red long [river]", the upper reaches of the Sefid Rud ). When a word that begins with U ends up in a Semitic language, the U can become P. For example, the archaeological site with the Iranian name ' Uschteri' is called ' Pisdeli' in Arabic . The Hebrew name Pishon was derived from the old Iranian "Uzan". In addition, gold is still found in the river today (cf. Gen 2,11-12  ELB ).
  • Gihon: The Aras River . In the 7th century the macaw was still known under the name Gihun . In addition, a mountain in the vicinity is called Kuscha-Dagh ( mountain of Kush ). This suggests that the region on the Aras River was once known as Kush .
  • Hiddekel: The Tigris flowed near Assur .
  • Perat: The Hebrew name for the Euphrates .

Original river in Eden: In ancient times the Urmiasee could have been assumed to be the source of the four rivers. After all, the name means Urmia in Syriac about weighing the water . In addition, the Meidan Chay (Adji Chay) , the small river that Rohl believes flowed through the Garden of Eden, flows into this lake.

The regions immediately east of the Tabriz Plain are called Upper Nochdi and Lower Nochdi . Nochdi can be translated from Iranian as “at Noch”. Rohl relates this word to the biblical Nod : "So Cain went away from the face of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden." ( Gen 4:16  ELB )

Rohl assumes that the biblical story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is based on retelling of Mesopotamian myths, similar to the Flood story in the Gilgamesh epic , the Atraḫasis epic and the Etana myth. He therefore considers a Sumerian origin of the myth of the expulsion from paradise and follows the traditional origin of the Sumerians from a mountainous country Aratta. He tries to localize its location on the basis of two reports that describe a route from Susa through seven gates, meaning passes or gorges, to Aratta. The first is the early Sumerian poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta , completed by the account of a campaign by Sargon II to Urartu . Via Saqqez ( Surrikash in ancient times ), after passing the "seven gates" from the Nochdi area in the east, you reach the Plain of Tabriz, where Plain in Sumerian means Edin or Eden ('steppe' or 'outside the cultivated land').

criticism

Rohl's hypothesis is largely ignored by the academic world. It was most recently mentioned in a special issue of the German-language National Geographic , which was scientifically advised by theologian and biblical archaeologist Wolfgang Zwickel . There it is given as one of several conceivable locations. Other possibilities would be sunken islands in the Strait of Hormuz or the northern section of the Fertile Crescent , which is favored by Zwickel himself.

David Rohl further disregards the fact that the Sumerians also knew a certain landscape that they called Gu-an Eden - a name that is very reminiscent of the Hebrew Gan Eden ( Garden of Eden ). However, this landscape was not on Lake Urmia, but on the edge of southern Mesopotamia (see Eden (Mesopotamia) ).

In addition, it is controversial whether the kingdom of Aratta actually lay around Lake Urmia, as David Rohl assumes for his hypothesis. Other researchers locate it elsewhere in the Middle East . In recent times, people often think of sites in the city of Jiroft in south-east Iran .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ U. Magen: Epochs of Great Mesopotamia (middle chronology, dates BC) ( Memento from November 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 87 kB). Frankfurt 2001.
  2. ^ S. Jacomet: Chronology and Stratigraphies: Epipalaeolithic - Early Neolithic Middle East, including Cyprus and Greece . Basel 2009.
  3. ↑ Eden - Search for Paradise. Bible Earth, December 10, 2010, accessed November 2, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta. Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, December 19, 2006, accessed November 3, 2013 .
  5. ↑ The Garden of Eden In: National Geographic Special Edition - The Great Myths of the Bible (2009): pp. 8–35
  6. ↑ National Geographic Special Edition - The Great Myths of the Bible (2009): 4
  7. ^ Matthias Schulz: Forgotten Message. In: Der Spiegel 3 (2010): p. 105 f.

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