Endnote 5 – Eden

Moreover, it is not clear in this etymology where the first letter in the Hebrew Eden, an ayin, comes from. There is no ayin in the Sumerian edin or in the Sumerian language, as far as we know. Finally, there is a problem in how a word in Sumerian, a non-Semitic language used in the third millennium B.C., could find its way into a West Semitic language of the first millennium B.C. True, the Sumerian word is found alongside the Akkadian edinu in a lexical list used by scribes to learn how to read and write these languages (Lexical Series, Syllabary B I 90f., published in Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon III). But the Akkadian word only occurs in this one instance. It never appears in any Akkadian literary text or anywhere else in the language. It is unlikely that such a rare word in Akkadian should find its way into Aramaic or Hebrew (see Millard, “The Etymology of Eden,” Vetus Testamentum 34 [1984], pp. 103–104). For these reasons, scholars have sought the origin of Eden elsewhere. The noun appears in the plural in Hebrew. In Jeremiah 51:34 and Psalm 36:8, it can be translated “delights.” A similarly spelled word appears in the 13th-century B.C. Baal myth in Ugaritic. Its interpretation there has been disputed, however. The context allows for a variety of possibilities.