my escape from eden

In so many ways it’s odd that the Garden of Eden has become so ubiquitous of a creation story that billions of people believe in Eden as the point of our “fall” from grace. It’s weird because – and I won’t go into it here – but the ancient account is closer to other myths circulating around at the time. The reality is the Jewish writer(s) of Genesis were likely trying to offer their own metaphysic and working with what was “known” about the world at the time.

Eridu Genesis, the Sumerian creation myth (or what we can draw from it) that Genesis likely draws heavily from, is an incomplete fragment from the Sumerian city of Nippur. Though parts of it are missing, other parts speak of humanity being birthed by the gods (specifically Nintur) who calls humans vagrants who are nomadic and who need to come to cities. There’s another missing passage and the story resumes with the gods establishing kings and offices in these cities.

It’s interesting because Eridu Genesis is far closer to what happened than the Genesis account. Archeologists and DNA experts now believe that humans had at least 1-2 attempts at settling with agriculture before finding permanent success at the beginning of the Holocene period. This is certainly closer to reality than the idea that we came from one Garden. And it makes sense – the Eridu story is older than the Gensis story. We know that oral histories can expand centuries with relative accuracy, with some hints that they can even last millennia while maintaining a kernel of truth. It’s not beyond reason that Eridu was propaganda created to force the hunter gatherers of Mesopotamia to join the civilization – in fact, Eridu Genesis lets us into the insight of the Sumerian “out” group. The hunter gatherers were disobeying the gods, they were not civilized.

This is, of course, different from the account in Genesis. For one, the most generous dating of the Gensis account in the Bible would place it about 200 years after Eridu Genesis. Genesis 1-2 contain the creation records. Yes, records, plural, because there’s two accounts. While Christian apologists try to say that Chapter 1 is more the overview and preamble and Chapter 2 is meant to be the specific explanation, this just doesn’t make sense when looking at the textual history. Without going into detail (since that’s not the scope here), there’s sufficient evidence to show that Genesis 2, starting in verse 4, is an older text than Genesis 1. If you’re really interested in this, you can pick up The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures by Coogan and Chapman for further explanation.

The writing styles and manuscript evidence is that the original creation account of Gensis, which has the Garden of Eden, begins in Genesis 2:4. This is often called the Jahwist source and is dated to the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. In Genesis 2 we see that no shrub, no grass, and no animals existed. Then God created man and put man in a Garden. Verse 18 – one of the passages that contradict the Priestly Narrative (Genesis 1) – says it “was not good” that man live alone. And so God made a suitable helper from Adam’s side (we say “rib,” but the Hebrew word likely means his entire side, or at least a huge chunk of it). Gensis 3 then goes on to explain the fall, that Eve ate the forbidden fruit and Adam followed, leading both and subsequently humanity to be ousted from the Garden. It’s such a pivotal moment for Christians that they base their entire idea of redemption on “getting back to the Garden.” While that’s an oversimplification, the Gospel story is about making right what went wrong in the Garden. Amazing how in 2025 we’re still influenced by Babylonian and Sumerian cosmology from 3,000 years ago.

Why were they kicked from the land? Well, in ancient Mesopotamian cosmology, in its various forms from what we can tell, the gods controlled the land itself. Evil, when committed, would seep into the land and cause the land to become evil. In the various Mesopotamian religions – of which early Judaism is a part of that tradition, and has survived into the modern world – they held a metaphysical view of the world that evil would bring bad “energy” to a land. Droughts, floods, storms, earthquakes, and such were thus the land itself being punished by the gods for the evil and disobedience committed by the humans. This is not unique to Judaism. We can tell from the various myths from Egypt to Babylon to Assyria that most people in this region believed that the earth existed on a firmament that separated the disc of the earth from the water below (this is seen in Genesis, even, but not exclusively in Genesis; there’s extensive writing about the firmament in Egyptian and other Canaanite texts). It is through this firmament that gods would interact with the world. Oddly enough, some Canaanite writings have Baal as the god in charge of the firmament, showing that the conflict between the Canaanites and Israelites was very much a religious conflict of competing deities. This is even seen in the anti-Baal writings in the Bible.

Thus, because of their iniquity they were not allowed into the land because they would corrupt it. This is why later in the Old Testament, especially in the first five books, there’s so much focus on “the land.” The land of Israel was believed to be the domain of Yahweh, the chief god for the early Jews in the council of gods (“let us” doesn’t allow for a royal “we” since such phrasing didn’t exist, and it’s absurd to think this is predicting the Trinity, which is a philosophical construct based on trying to merge different texts and ideas about Jesus into a codified theory of divinity). Disobeying God would lead to the evil to seep into the soil, forcing God to judge the land and make it barren and cast them out for their iniquity.

You can see how if the prevailing myth at the time, prior to the early Jewish faith, was that we were called by gods to settle in cities, but if we violated the gods they’d make the land below the cities bad and bring calamity, forcing the people to once again become nomads, vagrants, part of the out group.  The reason we don’t see the “very good” and more monotheistic account of creation until the 6th century is because that’s during Israel’s troubles and exile. They needed a way to make them distinct from their captors. It’s in the Babylonian exile that most of the priestly laws that dictate everyday life for the average person come about, and was done as a way to refuse assimilation into Babylon. What emerged from that, after the Persian conquest of Babylon, was a shift in their metaphysic toward a more monotheistic view (likely adapted after contact with Zoroastrianism in the East). But in Genesis 2, which still had this Mesopotamian cosmology, being ousted from civilization, the Garden of Eden, was the worst punishment imaginable and fit their view of the cosmos.

Despite this, despite all our technical knowledge and beliefs, so many people still believe in a literal Garden of Eden even though they don’t hold the same cosmology as humans did thousands of years ago. Thus, the story has been reinterpreted and readapted for our modern views even if inconsistent. But we ultimately view it as a fall, as a fault, as something that harmed us. We’re trying to correct it and live holy lives so that maybe, one day we can get back to the Garden. This belief in eternity and paradise was at the core of so many of my beliefs – of course I can put off x, y, and z since I know my reward will be later. This belief in a literal fall shaped my view of humanity, viewing humans as fallen, incomplete, and without Christ, completely hopeless in their condition.

This, of course, is not the proper view of humanity. Humans evolved over millions of years, with modern humans arriving on the scene likely 200,000-300,000 years ago. For the vast majority of our history we were hunter gatherers using flint and bone for tools, finding shelter where we could, moving about with the herds. Then, once the Holocene period kicked off about 10,000-12,000 years ago, we began to form settlements and eventually cities. Anatolia is littered with the remains of cities that are 3,000-9,000 years old. As we moved into these cities our morals and views had to change. As technology changed, our morals and views had to change. This has been the case throughout all of human history and the reality is, we’ve actually gotten better and more cooperative as a species (modern tensions and the chance of nuclear war notwithstanding).

In other words, if you study human history the idea that humans “fell” doesn’t make sense. We’ve actually been becoming more moral, more tolerant, more cooperative as we’ve gone on. Even with the threat of losing the last thousand years of human progress remains due to climate change, political changes, or nuclear war, the fact is we’re operating on scales that would have collapsed previous empires. And while this is partially thanks to our technology, it’s also thanks to our social evolution as a species.

As I began to leave my fundamentalist view of the world and begin to study human history, I began to realize that I needed to leave the Garden of Eden behind. Not out of shame, not because I had sinned, but because it created a terrible view of humanity. It’s not paradise, it’s a trap meant to get you to act and behave a certain way out of fear or longing, but it is not consistent with who we are as a species.