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=> Re: (For Farid) "The Garden of BetNahrain"

Re: (For Farid) "The Garden of BetNahrain"
Posted by Maggie (Guest) - Sunday, January 21 2007, 19:24:48 (CET)
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It is too bad that Bet-Nahrain archives have been deleted, otherwise, I would have referred you to a 12-series program I did starting last October, 2006. I did a LOT of research on these very statements written in the Bible, and explained what all this means, in ASSYRIAN terms, NOT Hebrew terms. Suffice it to say, this is all about evolution, and the four rivers are really the four kingdoms, (mineral, vegetable, animal, and mankind) and how they came to be.


Ado-II wrote:
>The Garden Of BetNahrain
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>The following is taken from a series of art books called “The Arts of Mankind”, by Andre Parrot. This volume is titled “Sumer: The Dawn of Art”, published in 1961 by Golden Press, Inc., Rockefeller Center, New York 20, N.Y.
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>Chapter II, p. 37
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>“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food…And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first was Pison…And the name of the second river is Gihon…and the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. (Genesis ii, 8-14.)”
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>This commentary follows:
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>“In all Oriental literature there is, we believe, no passage that evokes so lucidly man´s first awakening to his unfinite possibilities of well-being in the highly favored land of Mesopotamia. Biblical tradition saw it as a vast garden, an oasis of shade and coolness watered by four rivers, two of them the Tigris (Hiddekel) and the Eurprates. But though reminiscences of these four waterways lingered on for centuries, as we shall see, in the iconography of the region, there is little hope of ever finding a depiction of the First Man, the Woman and the Serpent beside the Forbidden Tree.”
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>This quote from Genesis starts with the line, “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden”. No one knows for certain today just where Eden was, though the Hebrews seem to think, or wish, it was their own land. It says the Lord planted this garden eastward “in” Eden. Eastward of Judea was BetNahrain. God next placed man and woman in the garden plus all delightful food and trees etc. Then it says a river “went out of Eden to water the garden”. This river then split into four rivers. The first two “rivers”, Pison and Gihon, are more like springs than rivers. Even the mighty Jordan isn´t much of a river when compared to the Tigris or Euphrates. What´s confusing is that if God planted the garden in Eden, then why did he make a river to go “out of Eden and water the garden”? If the garden is in Eden to begin with, how can a river flowing out of there “water” it?
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>This could be nothing more than the usual attempt at face-saving one learns to love about the hapless Hebrews. Clearly they were trying to wrestle a little glory away from BetNahrain which, of all those regions, even abundant Egypt, was truly a garden to reckon with. “Eden” was BetNahrain, which is where the real rivers were.
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>The author then says that although the rivers are very important and so too, of course, is the story of the garden and the first people, the serpent and the tree, “there is little hope of ever finding a depiction of the First Man, the Woman and the Serpent beside the Forbidden Tree”.
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>And the very next sentence continues:
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>“The famous cylinder seal in the British Museum, which in the first flush of enthusiasm was promptly named, ´the seal of the Temptation´, certainly does not relate to the scene in Genesis. Nevertheless it conveys well enough the atmosphere of the Biblical Paradise (Genesis, iii), since the elements of its design are a god, a tree, a woman and a serpent side by side. The common modern view is that this is a mere coincidence…”
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>There is one thing we can be certain of… if this seal was discovered in Judea and showed Hebrews sitting under a tree it would not be spoken of as a “mere coincidence, but a “certainty”. How can the author be so sure that this seal, “certainly does not relate to the scene in Genesis”?
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>The story of the Flood also related to BetNahrain since neither the Jordan, nor any other “river” in Judea, could get anywhere near to flooding. We know too that the Arc and Utnapishtim came long before Noah. Since these Hebrew “borrowings” clearly derived from BetNahrain and were not “mere coincidence”, why can´t this seal also be the earliest, if not the only, depiction of the Garden of BetNahrain?
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>Look at the condition we Assyrians find ourselves in. A good number of Assyriologists are and have been Jews…certainly there were very few Assyrians among them, except for Rassam and now Zack Cherry. Needles to say the interest in Assyrian and related history can be a little motivated by a desire of the Jews to validate their own. While we´re busy extolling the likes of King David, who was a cutthroat, a highway robber, leader of a gang of extortionists, a murderer, an adulterer who betrayed his friends and sent his loyal general to his death in order to enjoy the man´s wife…we ignore our own rich history. Because we think of the ancient Assyrians as bloody and “damned pagans” who missed Salvation, we have little to no interest in standing up for them, or at the least making sure they get a fair hearing. But a ruffian like David commands our attention and respect because he is an ancestor of Jesus.



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