In today’s page of Talmud the rabbis seek to explain the meaning of the verse found in Isaiah (64:3)
וּמֵעוֹלָם לֹא־שָׁמְעוּ לֹא הֶאֱזִינוּ עַיִן לֹא־רָאָתָה אֱלֹהִים זוּלָתְךָ יַעֲשֶׂה לִמְחַכֵּה־לוֹ׃
Such things had never been heard or noted. No eye has seen [them], O God, but You, Who act for those who trust in You.
According to Rabbi Yochanan this refers to the reward that God has in store for those who are completely (and not just mostly) righteous. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi gave a more alcohol suffused explanation. It refers to wine that has been preserved in its grapes since the six days of creation, and which, apparently, no eye has ever seen. And then comes this third explanation, which explained the verse geographically.
ברכות לד, ב
. רַבִּי שְׁמוּאֵל בַּר נַחְמָנִי אָמַר: זֶה עֵדֶן, שֶׁלֹּא שָׁלְטָה בּוֹ עֵין כׇּל בְּרִיָּה. שֶׁמָּא תֹּאמַר: אָדָם הָרִאשׁוֹן הֵיכָן הָיָה? בַּגָּן. שֶׁמָּא תֹּאמַר: אָדָם הָרִאשׁוֹן הֵיכָן הָיָה? בַּגָּן. וְשֶׁמָּא תֹּאמַר: הוּא גַּן, הוּא עֵדֶן, תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר: ״וְנָהָר יוֹצֵא מֵעֵדֶן לְהַשְׁקוֹת אֶת הַגָּן״, גַּן לְחוּד וְעֵדֶן לְחוּד
Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani said: That is Eden, which no creature’s eye has ever surveyed. Lest you will say: Where was Adam the first man? Wasn’t he there and didn’t he survey Eden? The Gemara responds: Adam was only in the Garden of Eden, not in Eden itself. And lest you will say: It is the Garden and it is Eden; two names describing the same place. That is not the case, as the verse states: “And a river went out from Eden to water the Garden” (Genesis 2:10). Obviously, the Garden exists on its own and Eden exists on its own.
So according to Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani, the Garden of Eden was actually two places, one called the Garden, and one called Eden. And no one has seen either.
John Calvin’s Hunt for the Location of the Garden of Eden
It wasn’t only Jews who wondered where the Garden of Eden was, (and for now let’s just assume they are one and the same, geographically). The great Church reformer John Calvin (d. 1564) opined on the question too.
Moses says that one river flowed to water the garden, which afterwards would divide itself into four heads. It is sufficiently agreed among all, that two of these heads are the Euphrates and the Tigris; for no one disputes that . . . (Hiddekel) is the Tigris. But there is a great controversy respecting the other two. Many think, that Pison and Gihon are the Ganges and the Nile; the error, however, of these men is abundantly refuted by the distance of the positions of these rivers. Persons are not wanting who fly across even to the Danube; as if indeed the habitation of one man stretched itself from the most remote part of Asia to the extremity of Europe. But since many other celebrated rivers flow by the region of which we are speaking, there is greater probability in the opinion of those who believe that two of these rivers are pointed out, although their names are now obsolete. Be this as it may, the difficulty is not yet solved. For Moses divides the one river which flowed by the garden into four heads. Yet it appears, that the fountains of the Euphrates and the Tigris were far distant from each other…
What Calvin is getting at is that the Bible suggests that the location of the Garden of Eden is at a point where four large rivers in the levant flow into one, and there is no such place. Perhaps, Calvin goes on to suggest, the geography changed as a result of the Great Flood.
And the Hunt of the Ben Ish Chai
One famous rabbi spent some time pondering the same question that so consumed Calvin. This rabbi was Joseph Hayyim (1834–1909) who was born in Baghdad, and at the age of twenty-five succeeded his father as leader of the Jewish community there. He authored a work that is widely read by Sephardic Jews to this day called Ben Ish Chai (The Son of Man Lives), and by which Hayyim came to be called. The book is a collection of halakhah and ethical discourses based on the weekly portion read from the Torah. In addition, he published three volumes of responsa between 1901 and 1905 called Rav Pe’alim (Many Acts); a fourth volume was posthumously published in 1912.
In an undated question, the Ben Ish Chai was asked about the location of the Garden of Eden. In one tradition, the garden was located “on the other side of the world,” somewhere below the equator in the southern hemisphere. However, the questioner continued, the world has been circumnavigated, and the Garden of Eden has not been identified. Where then is it located?
He began his answer by pointing out that the sages of the Talmud did not travel far and had certainly never explored the entire globe. He quoted from the eighteenth century work Sefer Haberit, which seems to have been the only text from which the Ben Ish Chai drew his scientific information, and claimed that although the evidence suggested that the world was indeed a globe, the matter was still disputed. It was on this supposed dispute that Ben Ish Chai built his criticism of the scientific method. “Everything is built on conjecture,” he claimed, and scientific explanations were constantly being overturned or revised. He appealed to an argument that had been made by several other skeptics of the Copernican idea that the Earth did not lie the center of the universe.
Even when [a scientific idea seems] persuasive, it is likely to be rejected and overturned, because later enlightened people will come to understand something that arises from the natural world that had not been understood by those earlier. [These earlier people] had invented their own system based on their understanding. When an objection to an earlier system arises, the entire system is destroyed, because when a foundation is destroyed the whole house crumbles. This is very common, and we see generation after generation adding to the understanding of the natural world. It is like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant, and later generations see further than those who came earlier. Over the last two thousand years a number of systems have been developed and overridden in the fields of natural sciences and astronomy. One builds and another destroys, like the building of [the Egyptian cities of] Pitom and Ramses.
There were grounds therefore to be deeply skeptical of scientific claims about the world. Part of this may be due to the limitations of the human senses, but it was the very way in which science progressed - or the way in which he thought that it progressed, that led to skepticism of the Ben Ish Chai. He then turned to the question of the geocentric Earth and claimed that there was a continuing scientific controversy about whether the Earth or the Sun was stationary. Because the proofs, such as there were, were based on conjecture, the matter remained unsolved. The Ben Ish Chai was also unimpressed by the ability of astronomers to predict the precise times of future solar eclipses. He subscribed to a widely held myth that all science originated with the Jews, and claimed that any predictive ability demonstrated by astronomers was a result of Jewish knowledge of the stars and planets having been passed from Adam down to Noah and Abraham and then out into the world at large. This would explain why astronomers could accurately predict many events, but it in no way proved that their theoretical models were correct. In fact, the Ben Ish Chai remained deeply suspicious not only of the assertion that the Earth revolved around the stationary Sun, but of all the scientific statements made by astronomers.
So where did the Ben Ish Chai think the Garden of Eden was located?
In his long responsum, the Ben Ish Chai eventually returned to answer the original question about the location of the Garden of Eden and noted that, although it may be located on the Earth itself, it existed on a different spiritual plane and would therefore not be perceived by the human senses. Of course, this was all that needed to be said for the original question to have been addressed. The rest of the responsum, criticizing the truth claims of science, was irrelevant, but he had used the opportunity to explain his thoughts on the matter. As a result of his skepticism, he remained in doubt as to which model of the universe was correct, and he implied that the reader should adopt a similarly skeptical approach to science. Interestingly, the Ben Ish Chai did not address any of the nineteenth-century scientific demonstrations that supported the Copernican model, like Foucault’s pendulum or Bessel’s demonstration of stellar parallax, and there is no evidence that he knew of them.
Unfortunately, the Ben Ish Chai had a conception of scientific progress that was not accurate. Although scientific explanations do indeed change, it is only rarely the case that this happens in the drastic way he described: “like an edifice that comes crashing down because of its weak foundation.” Much more often, new scientific theories or explanations modify those that already exist, so that they better fit experimental data or observations. Such modifications do not destroy the earlier theories, as the Ben Ish Chai would have us believe, but allows them to have greater explanatory power.
And as for that elusive search for the Garden of Eden? Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani seems to have been correct all along. So far as we know, no human eyes have seen it.
[Mostly taken from this book, where you can read a lot more about Copernicus and Jewish thought.]
