This Week In Eden

There’s no better way to convey the variety of interpretations of Gen. 2:10-14 than via the time-honored mad lib.  In tribute to the form’s inventor, Leonard B. Stern, who died this week,  a new version of the Bible’s geographical description of the Garden of Eden. Now I have to figure out how to get Gen. 2:10-14 included in this collection of other Bible Mad Libs.

A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four [plural noun]. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that [verb] [preposition] the [type of place] of Havilah, where there is [valuable substance]; and the [valuable substance] of that land is [adjective]; [natural resource] and [valuable substance] are there. The name of the second [body of water] is Gihon; it is the one that [verb] [preposition] the [type of place] of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which [verb] [preposition] of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

At the heart of Paradise Lust is a small town in southern Iraq, located at the former junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, called Qurna.  They have a small park there which contains a tree supposed to be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Usually Qurna stays out of the spotlight, but recently there’ve been some quiet, positive stories come out of this beautiful but much beleaguered place.  Firstly, the Kuwait Times reports that river boats along the Shatt Al Arab which had once been used for smuggling were being reclaimed for a much more civilized purpose: floating cafes where Iraqis can unwind by smoking shisha and listening to music. And in other news, Austrian Airlines has announced that beginning June 8th, they will offer direct flights from Vienna to Baghdad, for the first time in 21 years.  I’m hoping that by the time my book is published, people will be able to visit The Garden of Eden for themselves.

Okay, so the beginning of the world—that’s the Garden of Eden, of course—might seem to have little to do with its end.  Not so.  In writing Paradise Lust, I became accidentally familiar with several other false prophecies of the end times, much like the one which, as you know unless you’ve been living under a rock, is occurring today.  My favorite of these is of course, the Great Disappointment of 1844.  Disappointing, because the world did NOT end. Nobody tells it better than Stephen Prothero, here. So many people believed Baptist end-times preacher William Miller, and so many people were ready to go, that when the prediction did not come true, practically a whole religious generation was thrown into a tizzy of doubt and unbelief, which ended up spawning several new religions, most notably, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were big on the end of the world; still are.  When the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ellen White, who claimed to be a prophet but was also/really an epileptic, began to show signs of fraudulence, a faction of early Jehovah’s Witnesses split off from the group, and eventually oversaw the writing of the Urantia Book, which has its own unique plan for the Garden of Eden, on a sunken island in the Mediterranean.  You’ll have to buy the book to find out how that story goes.  But meanwhile: be on the lookout for what happens after today, when, presumably, the world still exists.  Let’s hope (pray?) that the “disappointment” of those believers who, NPR is fond of telling us, have no “plan B,” spawns some creative solutions, rather than desperation. Stay tuned…

Tse Tsan Tai would have been 139 today, had he not died long ago. Among the line-up of Eden-seekers I follow in Paradise Lust—preachers, archaeologists, hucksters—I confess he’s my favorite. Tse, a Hong Kong businessman and Chinese nationalist revolutionary, wrote a book in 1914 called The Location of the Garden of Eden and the Origin of the Chinese… in which he insisted, quite without the usual pseudo-scientific hemming and hawing, that the Garden of Eden, birthplace of mankind, must have been located in China, NOT Iraq. (“Why would the Lord Almighty have created man in such a place?”) I admire his brazenness, which makes that much more sense now that I realize he is a Taurus.  But I also admire his motivations: it was tough to be both Christian and Chinese during World War I, and Tse was all about bringing his two identities together.  He thought if he could prove that life began in China, all the nations of the world might unite in world peace.  Can’t blame him for trying.

Good news! Today we celebrate the anniversary of the enlightenment of mankind! I always heard Friday the 13th was just a particular unlucky iteration of the number 13, which was unlucky because of the number of attendees at the Last Supper, etc, but it turns out there’s other intriguing mythology around the date.  People who think about these things, of which there are many, have determined that Friday the 13th was the date that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit! Or maybe the day that God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden—which, if I think about it, must have been the same day after all.  It’s not like God gave his only children “time out” to think about what they’d done before cursing them to live off the land forever.  But wait—was it really a curse?  If the forbidden fruit represents the entry into an independent, sexually awakened, and otherwise intelligent human life, then maybe it’s something to celebrate? I’m taking suggestions for how to commemorate Temptation and Expulsion….