“Adamu” is the name in Sumerian mythology for the first man, created by “Enki”, the creator god and inventor of civilization.
Adam is Hebrew for “man”, and
adamah is a Hebrew word signifying dust and earth, and in Aramaic signifying blood.
Havva — Hebrew for “Eve” — in Hebrew signifies life.
In the Sumerian myth, magical food is the source of immortality, not the source of its downfall, and Adamu is tricked to
not eat it (the gods tell him it is poisonous), and thereby remains mortal. The Hebrew biblical account also describes such a life-giving magical food — the food of the “tree of life”, distinct from the forbidden “tree of knowledge of good and evil” — and it is chiefly to deprive them of the immortality bestowed by the fruit of the tree of life, that God exiles Adam and Eve from the garden. The tale of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-16) parallels tales in Sumerian mythology of rivalries between farmer and herder gods.
Genesis 11:26-31 and 17:5-8 teach that Abraham himself, vaunted father of nations, is a native of the Sumerian city Ur (southeast Iraq, near the ancient mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates) under Chaldean suzerainty, growing up there some time in the second millenium BCE, and departing for Canaan (Israel and environs). Abraham's father Terah adhered to the Sumerian mythology, and was a maker and seller of idols, but Abraham rejected polytheism and his father's idols, and managed a remarkable escape from the Chaldean king's sentence of death for his heresy. Joshua 24:2 records the break: “And Joshua said unto all the people, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods.” In any case, the similarity of the Torah's cosmogony to the Sumerian epic may be evidence that the biblical tales of Abraham are at least partially historical.
Monotheism was first consolidated in the nation of Judah by King Josiah (reigned
ca. 641-609 BCE). But soon thereafter, the Chaldeans sacked Jerusalem and forced the Hebrews into exile in Babylon (597-538 BCE), under king
Nebuchadrezzar II (605-562 BCE) and his successors. This captivity culminated in the
syncretion of proto-Judaism with the Zoroastrianism of their Persian liberator, and the commitment of the Torah to writing. Zoroastrianism, founded
ca. 750 BCE, is incidentally but one representative of the descendents of a common prehistoric Indo-European religion; among the other representative mythologies are Hindu, Norse, Greek, and Roman. Zoroastrianism contributes to the Eden myth the very word “paradise”, deriving from the Avestan (Old Persian)
pairidaēza. This was the term used in Zoroastrian Persia to refer to the king's enclosed garden parks. The Hebrew in Genesis 2:8 for “garden of Eden” is
gan-be'Eden —
gan signifies not just a garden, but a walled garden, and
Eden is not just a proper name, but a Hebrew term for “delight”. The garden motif even draws direct inspiration from Nebuchadrezzar II, who (according to legend) built “
hanging gardens” in Babylon to please his homesick wife Amyitis, daughter of Median king Cyaxares (625-585 BCE). The
Medes commanded a vast and verdant pre-Persian, partly Zoroastrian
empire east of Chaldea, and the marriage cemented an alliance of the two empires. In fact the Old Persian
pairidaēza is believed to have its root in the Mede language, which was in any case quite similar to Old Persian and the other Indo-Iranian languages of the region.
It seems inescapable that, to arrive at the creation mythology articulated by the postexilic authors of Genesis, the Hebrews conflated their ancestral Sumerian cosmogony and cultural inheritance, tales of the Zoroastrian king's idyllic garden in the east, and the Zoroastrian doctrine that the world created by
Ahura Mazda was a paradise, spoiled by the evil
Ahriman, but to be restored to its paradisiacal condition in the
eschaton, as prophesied by Zoroaster. Before this syncretion, neither Satan nor the divine messiah (nor a great many other key doctrines) existed in the Judaic canon — all supernatural acts and promises were attributed directly to the covenant god Yahweh (or, before Josiah's monotheistic edicts, to any number of gods in a heterodox pantheon).
Cyrus the GreatThe Hebrews were surely inclined to sympathy with the Zoroastrian worldview, because it was the Zoroastrian king Cyrus the Great (reigned
ca. 546 to 529 BCE), imperial uniter of the Medes and Persians, who delivered them from their Chaldean captivity, and instigated construction of the second Temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah 44:28-45:1 records a sympathy so great it smacks of open kinship: “That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him”. In 538 BCE, Cyrus commissioned the Judaic prince Sheshbazzar to lead the return to Jerusalem, and carry back the sacred vessels confiscated by the Chaldean empire at the start of the exile. As told in the first chapter of the Book of Ezra, the universal god of the Israelites and the universal god of Cyrus are the same god: “Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD [“Yahweh”] God [“Elohim”] of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.” Under the patronage of the ardently Zoroastrian king Darius (reigned 521 to 485 BCE), Zorobabel (also transliterated Zerubbabel, as in the Book of Haggai) in
ca. 520 BCE led another company of Babylonian Hebrews back to Jerusalem, assumed governorship of the city under royal dispensation, and completed the second Temple. Zorobabel is mentioned in Matthew 1:12-13 as a 29[SIZE=-1]th[/SIZE] generation lineal descendent of Abraham, and a tenth generation lineal ancestor of Joseph (husband of Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth), though this account is immediately suspect because it requires fifty year generations between Zorobabel and Joseph. In any case, in the immediate postexilic period, there is no clear boundary, either political or religious, between the Zoroastrian establishment and the tribes of Israel. It was during this period that the Torah was committed to writing. Moreover, the “wise men from the east” of Matthew 2:1, the pilgrims come to Israel to pay homage to the infant Jesus, are in fact emissaries of the Zoroastrian court of Persia (
magi), come to honor the child they believe is the Zoroastrian messiah. Regardless of the historicity, this account continues the biblical pattern that considers messianic Judaism and Zoroastrianism to be the same religion. While it might be coincidental, the
Star of David, now the centerpiece of the national flag of Israel, was an important symbol in Zoroastrian astrology.
At
its mythological root paradise was almost certainly believed to be in the celestial heavens, coming to prehistoric earth only through narrative modification. The
words for heaven and for paradise are the same in a great many euroasiatic languages, including the Indo-European languages, Hebrew, and Korean.
As Islamic scholars understand it, the Qur'an places Eden itself in heaven, so that it can only be reached through death (particularly, by martyrdom). Correspondingly, Islamic doctrine holds that the forbidden fruit of Eden was in fact ineffectual, and it was the devil who tempted a mortal Adam to eat it, telling him falsely that it would give him immortality, whereas his betrayal of god simply led god to eject him from paradise.
Thus there are three principal permutations of the myth. In the first, the Sumerian version, a mortal Adam is in an earthly Eden, and a life-giving fruit is not eaten, due to divine trickery. In the Judeo-Christian version, an immortal Adam is in an earthly Eden with two fruit trees, one giving the immortal life of a god, the other a forbidden one giving the vision of a god, eaten at the instigation of a diabolical serpent (divine trickery). In the Islamic version, a mortal Adam is in an ethereal Eden, and a false fruit is eaten at the instigation of the devil. The confusion of earthly and heavenly paradise recurs within and between the extant religious canons (including the Indic canons), facilitating acceptance of the Edenic movement's promise of earthly paradise. For example, in America, some radicalized Muslims are explicit Edenists (this is the
Taliyah movement, broached below in the
Keeping Eden Green chapter). Though for utopians frank introspection and circumspection is generally alien, they stand to learn a great deal about their movement from an appreciation that in most of the world, for most of history, paradise has been associated with death, and in particular, with the end of life.
