The Marcionite Gospel Began at Adumim (= the place of those of Adam/the Red Ones)

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I think this seals the original understanding (from Enoch and thus likely as early as the early Jewish sources at Qumran) that Eden was in the desert east of Jerusalem - viz. the exact location we see Jesus descend at the beginning of the Marcionite gospel. We are getting warmer:

In the Book of the Watchers, after Enoch crosses the Red Sea, he sees the “paradise of righteousness” ([א]טשק סדרפ ; ὁ παράδεισος τῆς δικαιοσύνης; gannataṣedq; 1 En. 32:2–3). This is Eden; itstates that this is where Adam and Eve disobeyed God (v. 6; cf. 25:4; 4 Ezra 8:52; L.A.E. 25:3). The Book of the Watchers does not envision Eden as in heaven but rather beyond the eastern fringes of the known world, separated from the human realm by a desert and a large body of water (cf. Apoc. Abr. 21:4–6).33 The journey of Enoch in the Book of the Watchers describes a geographical arrangment similar to that of the Aramaic Astronomical Book. Enoch starts at the center of the world (Jerusalem) and moves on to the desert and other areas. Having passed them, he approaches the paradise of righteousness, using the same phrase found in 4Q209239.34 Both compositions attest a geographical sequence that goes from where people live to deserts to paradise. Whereas the Book of the Watchers asserts explicitly that this paradise is the Eden of Adam and Eve, the Aramaic Astronomical Book does not. The former text is unambiguous that this paradise is in the East. The Aramaic Astronomical Book may assume this to be the case but never clearly makes this assertion. Genesis 2:8 is likely important for the view that Eden is in the East, since this verse situates it “in the East” (םדקמ; LXX: κατὰ ἀνατολάς).35 This tradition suggests that the author of the Book of Giants also understood the paradise of righteousness to be in the east, a position that does not accord with Milik's claim that the desert is in the North. 36 The account of Enoch's journey in the Book of the Watchers supports the assertion that in the Book of. Giants Mahaway leaves the inhabited world and then travels over a vast desert to reach paradise, the location of Enoch. 7. The Desert of Behemoth and Paradise in the Similitudes of Enoch The Similitudes of Enoch (1 En. 37–71), like the other Enochic texts that are under discussion, presents Enoch as dwelling in paradise, understood as beside a desert. 1 Enoch 60:8 asserts: “But the name of the male is Behemoth, who occupies with his his breast the trackless desert named Dundayn, on the East of the garden (ba-mešrāqa gannat) where the chosen and righteous dwell, where my great-grandfather (Enoch) was taken up” (cf. 61:5).37 The term Dundayn is an adaptation of Doudael from the Book of the Watchers, in which it is the name of the desert where the watchers are buried because of their misdeeds (10:4).38

https://books.google.com/books?id=E9M6D ... it&f=false

This identification might help explain why there is an allusion to Paradise when Zedekiah is captured in the same desert and the analogy is drawn in Jeremiah that the Israelites would no longer see Paradise (= Jerusalem).

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DeConnick confirms that in Enochic literature Jerusalem stands in the middle of the world where judgement will be delivered and Eden/paradise is 'to the east' of Jerusalem https://books.google.com/books?id=KUJ63 ... em&f=false

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On the etymology of the Greek name Doudael https://books.google.com/books?id=3eBGA ... el&f=false

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Ephrem:

When Adam sinned and was stripped of the glory in which he was clothed,he covered his nakedness with fig leaves. Our Saviour came and underwentsuffering in order to heal Adam’s wounds and to provide a garment of gloryfor his nakedness. He dried up the fig tree in order to show that there wouldno longer be any need for fig leaves to serve as Adam’s garment, since Adamhad returned to his former glory, and so no longer had any need of leaves or garments of skin (Ephrem, Commentary on the Diatessaron 16:10; Brock 1990: 69)

Armenian source cited by Stone

For at the same hour when the first (man) Adam transgressed and after the transgression stayed in the Garden of Eden, for the same (amount of) time Christ stayed on the cross to heal his (i.e., Adam's wounds

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Another curiosity that has always puzzled me. The Pentateuch begins in Paradise and ends with the Israelites on the other side of the Jordan across from Jericho. When Joshua finally crosses 'into the Promised Land' he goes across the Jordan into the land near Jericho:

Early in the morning Joshua and all the Israelites set out from Shittim and went to the Jordan, where they camped before crossing over. 2 After three days the officers went throughout the camp, 3 giving orders to the people: “When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. 4 Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about two thousand cubits[a] between you and the ark; do not go near it.”

5 Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”

6 Joshua said to the priests, “Take up the ark of the covenant and pass on ahead of the people.” So they took it up and went ahead of them.

7 And the Lord said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel, so they may know that I am with you as I was with Moses. 8 Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’”

9 Joshua said to the Israelites, “Come here and listen to the words of the Lord your God. 10 This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites. 11 See, the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth will go into the Jordan ahead of you. 12 Now then, choose twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. 13 And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the Lord—the Lord of all the earth—set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap.”

14 So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant went ahead of them. 15 Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, 16 the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. 17 The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.

Of course the Jews say that Jerusalem is the second Eden and the Samaritans say that Eden was on top of Mount Gerizim. But it is a curious place for someone to cross if Gerizim was really the ultimate goal of the Israelites:



One would expect the crossing to have been made across from Samaria if Gerizim was indeed the object of the Israelites.

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The implication seems to be that even the place where all the Patriarch were buried (i.e. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph) i.e. Gerizim was not the Promised Land, was not Eden. Eden was the place where Joshua crossed into. Yes Joshua does eventually make his way to Gerizim. But the crossing into the area that Enochian literature describes as Eden can't be accidental either. Genesis begins at Eden and the Pentateuch ends with the Israelites across from this same place. Joshua has the Israelites cross at this point and then move on to Gerizim but I wonder whether this was a later development. There must have been some religious significance to Eden.

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Joan Taylor on the Jericho region and Eden:

GENESIS
In Genesis, the area that we know as the Dead Sea was the site of a cataclysm
affecting five cities. In Genesis 10: 19 we are told that the land of Canaan
spread from west to east from Gerar near Gaza to ‘Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah
and Zeboim, near Lesha’. In addition, there was Bela or Zoar (see Gen. 14: 3),
all located in the Valley of Siddim, where there were ‘bitumen wells’ (Gen. 14:
10). The story goes that Chedor-Laomer and his allies vanquished the kings of
these cities (the kings of Sodom and Gomorra). Falling into the ‘bitumen wells’
as they retreat, their cities are taken. Lot, Abram’s brother, is captured, but the
victors then are themselves defeated by Abram, who rescues Lot and his
household and possessions, and refuses to take war booty as payment (Gen.
14: 13–24).
It is clear from this account that the Valley of Siddim in which the cities lay
was understood to have once been a plain (Gen. 13: 12; 19: 25), a flat valley
between the hills of the east and the mountains of the west, filled with useful
‘bitumen wells’, as if bitumen could be found like oil at the bottom of a deep
pit. Genesis 19: 24–9 goes on to tell us that this lucrative valley was incinerated
after God hailed down fire and brimstone. Abraham saw ‘smoke rising up
from the ground, like smoke from a furnace’ (Gen. 19: 28): the ground in
which the bitumen was sealed beneath thus broke open. Only Zoar, where Lot
fled, was spared destruction.
Essentially this is recognizable as an aetiological myth that accounts for the
peculiarities of the environment. It was necessary to explain the geography:
from the perfect template of the earth as made by God, there needed to be an
explanation for the odd characteristics of the Dead Sea.
In this perfect creation, water is the primary substance (Gen. 1: 1–2), and
the earth is formed after God separates out the waters: ‘Let there be a barrier
through the middle of the waters to divide the waters into two parts. And it
was so. God made the barrier, and it divided the waters under the barrier from
the waters above the barrier. God called the barrier “sky”’ (Gen. 1: 6–7). The
waters are then gathered into one place and called ‘seas’, dry land appears, ‘and
God saw that it was good’ (Gen. 1: 10). God commands, ‘Let the waters swarm
with swarms of life forms... and God created great sea-creatures, and every
life form that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind ... and
God saw that it was good and God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and
multiply, and fill the waters in the seas...”’ (Gen. 1: 20–2). With this kind of
basic template established of ‘good’ seas filled with aquatic creatures, the Dead
Sea was a glaring anomaly.
The ‘good’ Valley of Siddim then became the ‘bad’ Salt Sea (Gen. 14: 3;
Num. 34: 3, 12; Deut. 3: 17; Josh. 3: 16, 12: 3, 15: 5), also called the Sea of
Arabah (Gen. 15: 2, 5; 18: 19; Deut. 3: 17; 4: 49; Josh. 3: 16; 2 Kings 14: 25) and
the Eastern Sea (Joel 2: 20; Ezek. 47: 18; Zech. 14: 8), or just ‘the sea’ (2 Chron.
20: 2). The ‘Sea of Arabah’ is really a very poignant term: hbr( simply means
‘desert’, the assumption being it is an area of lifelessness, the very opposite of
the seas created in Genesis 1. A paradox was built into its very name: ‘the
Desertified Sea’. It was ‘bad’ as a result of a cataclysm caused by the bad
behaviour of the people of Sodom, in particular because of their request to
rape Lot’s guests (Gen. 13: 11; 19: 1–26).
Not all the aetiological components to account for the characteristics of the
Dead Sea are explicitly stated in this narrative, but they are nevertheless
implied. The River Jordan originally flowed throughout the ‘valley of the
Jordan’, which was ‘well watered everywhere ... like the Garden of YHWH,
like the land of Egypt coming into Zoar’ (Gen. 13: 10). ‘The land of Egypt
coming into Zoar’ is actually the continuation of the valley south around the
oasis area of Zoar, on the road to Egypt, and indicates Judaean knowledge of
this vicinity. It is one of the zones of lush fertility, paralleled in the north in the
area of Jericho, where the land is fed by sweet aquifers and springs. The
understanding appears to have been that the plain in between these two sites
of Zoar and Jericho was once even lusher, like the Garden of Eden. The
contrast between Jericho—as the ‘city of palm trees’ (Deut. 34: 3; Judges 1:
16, 3: 13; 2 Chron. 28: 15)—and the barren region of the salty lake was clearly
an anomaly.
The Genesis legend indicates that the perfect creation of the Plain was
inverted as a divine punishment for the social inversion of the customs of
hospitality: the desire to rape (and murder) guests being the antithesis of
divine will.3 God therefore destroyed the towns and the fertile land all around
them by hailing down fire and brimstone, and by the breaking up of the
surface of the earth also. The water of the Jordan filled up the Plain, stopped up
somehow in its southern part to create a great basin where the bitumen
continued to be belched out from beneath, contaminating the waters and
creating conditions where there was no life in this particular ‘sea’. The
judgement on the towns continues into the present of the narrative, the
‘now’, by revealing this odd circumstance at the bottom of the lake: where
the towns were located, the ground still remains unstable, the bitumen once
mined by their kings is now haemorrhaging into the water. This ‘now’ of the
legend reflects two things: that there is a resource of valuable bitumen and that
it is the prerogative of royal rulers to ‘mine’ it.
Likewise, the salt of the vicinity is introduced in the legend as a kind of
curse. In fleeing Sodom, Lot’s unnamed wife disobeys God by looking back at
the destruction of the city, and is turned into a ‘pillar of salt’ (Gen. 19: 26).
In Genesis too there is another resource that would feature in descriptions
of the region of the Dead Sea: balsam. This ‘Balsam of Gilead’ appears in Gen.
37: 25. The sons of the patriarch Israel, who have just thrown their brother
Joseph down a pit, are approached by ‘a caravan of Ishmaelites... coming
from Gilead, with their camels bearing t)kn, yrc and +l, going towards
Egypt’. All of these words indicate some types of resins, gums, or saps, but yrc
is usually identified as the sap from Commiphora gileadensis (Linneaus),4 an
aromatic, medium-sized evergreen tree or shrub 2–5 m high, Pliny’s
opobalsam.
When Israel asks his sons to go to Egypt for food, once Joseph has risen to a
great and powerful position, he tells them to take the ‘best produce of the land’,
the very products the merchants that took Joseph to Egypt were trading,
including the resins: t)kn, yrc and +l (Gen. 43: 11). The ‘balsam in Gilead’
mentioned in Jer. 8: 22, d(lgb yrc, is clearly indicated as having healing and
pain-killing properties (cf. Jer. 51: 5) and is prized by the Egyptians (Jer. 46:
11). It is noted as an important trade item in Ezekiel 27: 17. However, the
growing of balsam within Judaea itself is not evidenced in any biblical literature;
it is consistently located as coming from Gilead. This long region of
Moab (Deut. 1: 5; 32: 49) lay on the eastern side of the Jordan Valley and the
Dead Sea, stretching from the River Yarmuk in the north to the Wadi Numeira
and beyond, though where exactly it ended in the south seems variable.5 The
opobalsam plant requires high temperatures to thrive, and can only have been
grown in the heat of the area adjacent to the lower Jordan Valley and Dead
Sea. Not even En Gedi is said to be a place for growing balsam; En Gedi has
palm trees (Wisdom of Solomon 24: 14) and henna (Song of Songs 1:14), but
balsam is never mentioned.
In terms of the possible zones for the propagation of balsam in Gilead, there
are even now only a few areas where the combination of intense heat, fertile
soil, and fresh water exists: the region to the east of the lower Jordan River
(north of the Dead Sea), the Wadi Zarqa Main, a small zone around Callirhoe,
and the eastern part of the Lisan near Bab edh-Dhra, if Gilead stretched that
far south. https://www.baytagoodah.com/uploads/9/5 ... p-2012.pdf

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The question now before us is how did the earliest Israelites read the Pentateuch? Did they understand that there was a continuous narrative centered around 'Eden'? In other words, against our way of reading the text (undoubtedly in no small part owing to our geographical ignorance) where the narrative 'jumps' from Eden to northern Israel to Egypt to the region beyond the Jordan. Is it now possible that there was some notion that Adam was created to the east of Jerusalem near Jericho and that it was to this land that Abraham and his brother eventually settled and that the fate of this region was a constant reminder of God's destructive relationship with humanity?

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The contrast with the Dead Sea is important to remember in Strabo's description of Jericho and the region:

Jericho is a plain encompassed by a mountainous district, which slopes towards it somewhat in the manner of a theatre. Here is the Phœnicon (or palm plantation), which contains various other trees of the cultivated kind, and producing excellent fruit; but its chief production is the palm tree. It is 100 stadia in length; the whole is watered with streams, and filled with dwellings. Here also is a palace and the garden of the balsamum.109 The latter is a shrub with an aromatic smell, resembling the cytisus110 and the terminthus.111 Incisions are made in the bark, and vessels are placed beneath to receive the sap, which is like oily milk. After it is collected in vessels, it becomes solid. It is an excellent remedy for headache, incipient suffusion of the eyes, and dimness of sight. It bears therefore a high price, especially as it is produced in no other place.112 This is the case also with the Phœnicon, which alone contains the caryotes113 palm, if we except the Babylonian plain, and the country above it towards the east: a large revenue is derived from the palms and balsamum; xylobalsamum114 is also used as a perfume. [42]

The Lake Sirbonis (this time Strabo means the Dead Sea) is of great extent. Some say that it is 1000 stadia in circumference. It stretches along the coast, to the distance of a little more than 200 stadia. It is deep, and the water is exceedingly heavy, so that no person can dive into it; if any one wades into it up to the waist, and attempts to move forward, he is immediately lifted out of the water116 It abounds with asphaltus, which rises, not however at any regular seasons, in bubbles, like boiling water, from the middle of the deepest part. The surface is convex, and presents the appearance of a hillock. Together with the asphaltus, there ascends a great quantity of sooty vapour, not perceptible to the eye, which tarnishes copper, silver, and everything bright—even gold. The neighbouring people know by the tarnishing of their vessels that the asphaltus is beginning to rise, and they prepare to collect it by means of rafts composed of reeds. The asphaltus is a clod of earth, liquefied by heat; the air forces it to the surface, where it spreads itself. It is again changed into so firm and solid a mass by cold water, such as the water of the lake, that it requires cutting or chopping (for use). It floats upon the water, which, as I have described, does not admit of diving or immersion, but lifts up the person who goes into it. Those who go on rafts for the asphaltus cut it in pieces, and take away as much as they are able to carry. [43]

Such are the phenomena. But Posidonius says, that the people being addicted to magic, and practising incantations, (by these means) consolidate the asphaltus, pouring upon it urine and other fetid fluids, and then cut it into pieces. (Incantations cannot be the cause), but perhaps urine may have some peculiar power (in effecting the consolidation) in the same manner that chrysocolla117 is formed in the bladders of persons who labour under the disease of the stone, and in the urine of children.

It is natural for these phenomena to take place in the middle of the lake, because the source of the fire is in the centre, and the greater part of the asphaltus comes from thence. The bubbling up, however, of the asphaltus is irregular, because the motion of fire, like that of many other vapours, has no order perceptible to observers. There are also phenomena of this kind at Apollonia in Epirus. [44]

Many other proofs are produced to show that this country is full of fire. Near Moasada (= Masada) are to be seen rugged rocks, bearing the marks of fire; fissures in many places; a soil like ashes; pitch falling in drops from the rocks; rivers boiling up, and emitting a fetid odour to a great distance; dwellings in every direction overthrown; whence we are inclined to believe the common tradition of the natives, that thirteen cities119 once existed there, the capital of which was Sodom, but that a circuit of about 60 stadia around it escaped uninjured; shocks of earthquakes, however, eruptions of flames and hot springs, containing asphaltus and sulphur, caused the lake to burst its bounds, and the rocks took fire; some of the cities were swallowed up, others were abandoned by such of the inhabitants as were able to make their escape.

But Eratosthenes asserts, on the contrary, that the country was once a lake, and that the greater part of it was uncovered by the water discharging itself through a breach, as was the case in Thessaly.120

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The number of returning exiles to Jericho (in Ezra 2:34) is clearly a mystical reference "the men of Jericho, 345." Hmmm.