The idea of unbounded fertility and abundance point us to a golden age previous to the fall of humanity; a paradisiacal state whose psychological and perceptual underpinnings we approached briefly on the threshold (0.21). Of course, if this idea is legitimate it should also appear in the template from which the Jewish people took a good deal of the myths that appear in the biblical Genesis: Sumerian and Babylonian mythology.¹

This influence on the account presented in the book of Genesis is particularly evident in a Sumerian poem titled Enki and Ninhursag which takes place in Dilmun, a mythical paradise conceived and inhabited by the gods; a locus both peaceful and free of disease:

In Dilmun […] The lion kills not,

The wolf snatches not the lamb,

Unknown is the kid-­devouring wild dog, 

Unknown is the grain­ devouring - - - -²

Note the similarity between these lines and the verse in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue “and the cattle will not fear huge lions” (0.2) and Isaiah 11:1-6. In a nutshell, in Dilmun there are no wild, menacing animals; it is as if everything has already been domesticated. The poem continues saying:

The sick-eyed says not

“I am sick­-eyed,”

The sick­-headed says not

“I am sick­-headed,”

The old woman says not “I am an old woman,”

The old man says not “I am an old man,”³

The Sumerian paradise of Dilmun is a place free from sickness where nobody grows old: a place out of time (4.11, 5.15). However, according to Enki—one of the protagonists of the poem and Sumerian water-god—something is missing from this locus amoenus: fresh water. Thus, he “orders Utu, the sun-­god, to fill it with fresh water brought up from the earth. Dilmun is thus turned into a divine garden green with fruit­-laden fields and meadows.”⁴.

Indeed, the biblical account coincides with the presence of water in the Sumerian paradise which, as we have seen, is fundamental both to the Hebrew definition of Edén and the Greek and Persian definition of paradeisos. In Genesis 2:4-6 we find:

When the Lord God made the heavens and the earth, no grass or plants were growing anywhere. God had not yet sent any rain, and there was no one to work the land. But streams came up from the ground and watered the earth (Contemporary English Version). 

These verses are followed by a description of the geography of Earthly Paradise (2:10-14):

From Eden a river flowed out to water the garden, then it divided into four rivers. The first one is the Pishon River that flows through the land of Havilah, where pure gold, rare perfumes, and precious stones are found. The second is the Gihon River that winds through Ethiopia. The Tigris River that flows east of Assyria is the third, and the fourth is the Euphrates River (Ibid).

These indications point towards one particular conclusion: that the Garden of Eden “may have been originally identical with Dilmun, the Sumerian paradise-land.”⁵. Dilmun-Eden is probably the oldest pleasant place, the prototype of this locus in the Middle-East. But as we all know, there was a snake in the garden.

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1. In this regard, the Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer warns that “Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians had deeply influenced the Canaanites who preceded the Hebrews in the land that later came to be Known as Palestine… (Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, 142).↩︎
2. Kramer, History Begins in Sumer, 146. ↩︎
3. Ibíd. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 142. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 143. ↩︎