Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies. And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So verse 8, then the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden,

and there he put the man he formed. This is easy to gloss over. But first of all, God creates Eden, and it is in a particular place in relation to the rest of the world

eden is not the whole world right

eden is a particular garden in a particular place

god creates the garden, right, in that particular place.

Now, the other name for it is that I don't think.

That's a shame.

It doesn't look like the Orthodox study Bible.

They actually used the Greek word paradise,

which is literally the Greek word that's here.

And I use the term Greek word kind of loosely

because it's actually a loan word from Persian.

And so what a paradise was was it was a particular type of walled garden.

It was very popular in Persia, both the old Persian and the later Persian empires.

And if you want to see an example of a paradise that is still standing today, it is the Taj Mahal, not the hotel casino, the original one, right?

Which was built in the Persian style.

And as we'll see in a minute here, if you actually look at an aerial photo of the Taj Mahal.

Everybody just thinks of the building, right, not the garden. That's the walled garden that's behind it right but that's the actual paradise is the walled garden that's behind it you have the building that represents sort of the mountain of god that behind that you have the walled garden and in it it's transected by four waterways that radiate out from a center point.

We're going to see Eden is described exactly the same way.

But again, the description of it as a walled garden again means this is a particular locale that is separated from the rest of the world.

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