by Bruce Feiler
“Are you going to be happy?”
“No man deserves to be as happy as I am doing my job. But I’ll be truly happy the day that I can take a trip with my wife and my two girls through the marshes. And that day is coming. I believe at least 30 percent of these wetlands can be reclaimed. I see communities of Marsh Arabs in green houses, with potable water and solar energy. If I could make that happen, and have my family here, I would be living the perfect life.”
“In Paradise,” I said.
“In Paradise. Well, working on Paradise.”
The next morning we set out in a southeasterly direction for Qurnah. The road was so rife with hooligans we could travel only between 9:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. Few portions were paved, and there was no shoulder. “Saddam wasted his money making problems with Iran and Kuwait,” Hikmat said. “So you see the roads.”
Still, this was the first stretch of countryside that struck me as genuinely beautiful. The sky was a brilliant cerulean blue. Some date palms had been decapitated (part of Saddam’s effort to flush out deserters from his many wars), but more bent in appealingly odd directions, like a prickly dance floor. Noah would have been busy here with all the cows, ducks, donkeys, sheep, goats, water buffalo, and black cattle. “It seems very biblical,” Gwendolen said. More like a desert oasis than a plush English garden, the scenery reminded me how much my image of Eden had been filtered through European art.
I pulled out my Bible. From the opening sentence of Genesis, water is everywhere. Water is the one thing God does not create; it’s just there, on day one, covered in darkness, when God begins creating heaven and earth. On day two, God creates an expanse in the midst of this water, separating water from water. Out of this water he draws land, a stunning reflection of what I now understood was the way lower Mesopotamia was born—earth emerging from rivers. Over the next three days, God creates time, then living creatures and birds. On the sixth day, he spawns human beings. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” God says, in a startling use of the plural. “They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth.”
When Creation ends, God plants a garden in Eden, to the east, and places man within it. The garden brims with trees, with the tree of life in the middle, along with the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is. The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
The first two rivers are unknown today, while the last two suggest Eden was meant to be in Mesopotamia.
With man in place, God commands him to eat from any tree except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. He then creates a woman. A serpent tells the woman that if she eats from the forbidden tree she will be divine. The woman eats, then feeds her husband. For the first time the two perceive they are naked and sew fig leaves to cover their bodies.
God, who is moving about the garden, soon discovers the disobedience. He curses the serpent to a lifetime of crawling, scourges the woman with painful childbirth and an eternity of being ruled by her husband, and sentences the man to a lifetime of toiling the soil and an afterlife of being buried in it. “From dust you are,” God says, “and to dust you shall return.” God then clothes the man and woman in skins, banishes them from the garden, and stations cherubim and an ever-turning fiery sword to the east of Eden to guard the entrance.
From antiquity, people have wondered about the location of Eden. A few prophets suggest the garden was on a mountain, which would make sense with the river flowing from it. “You resided on God’s holy mountain,” God says to the Israelites in Ezekiel. Some linked the garden with the Temple, which was also on a mountain and had water flowing eastward from it. The identification with Jerusalem was enhanced by the name of the second river, Gihon. Though its location seems to have been a mystery even in the first millennium B.C.E., the link with the spring underneath the City of David was not lost on biblical ears.
While some tried to identify the physical place, more understood that the garden would never be found—and maybe wasn’t intended to be. The Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, insisted the story was an allegory. “To think that it meant that God planted vines, or olive trees, or apple trees, or pomegranates, and any trees of such kinds, is mere incurable folly.”
Yet even as the story’s authenticity was being debunked, the power of the Garden of Eden as a story to influence world events was growing, exponentially. The prophets may have redefined history as religious allegory, but more striking is how religious allegory came to redefine history. Nowhere is that more true than with the Garden of Eden.
Just as early Jews—the prophets—looked to Eden for inspiration to help them withstand the power of Nebuchadnezzar II, early Christians looked to Eden for inspiration to help them withstand the power of the emperors. Abused by Rome, Christian commentators latched onto the line in Genesis that says every human was created by God in his image as a way to counter the abuse of the emperor. “I would ask you,” wrote Clement of Alexandria, “does it not seem to you monstrous that human beings who are God’s own handiwork should be subjected to another master, and, even worse, serve a tyrant instead of God, the true king?” At a time when three-quarters of Romans were either slaves or descendants of slaves, this argument held great appeal.
Over time, Christians echoed the biblical prophets and used the Garden of Eden to construct an entirely new vision of social order, one founded no longer on the divine claims of rulers but on the inherent rights of every human being. Gone was the kingdom of David; in its place was the kingdom of Adam. The divine gift does not appear “in any single person,” wrote Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, “but this power extends equally to the whole race.” Bishop John Chrysostom, nicknamed “golden mouth,” took this argument even further in a direct rebuke of imperial authority. “In the beginning, God honored our race with sovereignty,” he wrote in the fourth century. “The image of government is what is meant; as there is no one in the heavens superior to God, so there is no one on earth superior to humankind.” Since equality exists in all people, imperial rule is sin. Humans should rule themselves by “free choice and liberty.”
But Chrysostom was on the wrong side of his time. When Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, the church shifted from being a persecuted community to being a hegemonic force. The most influential thinker of his age, Augustine, endorsed imperial rule, saying Eden proved humans were incapable of self-government. Freedom, he argued, was the basis of evil, because Adam, when faced with the choice of obeying God or following Eve, succumbed to his sexual instincts. He chose sin. “The soul, then, delighting in its own freedom to do wickedness, and scorning even to serve God, willfully deserted its higher master.” Adam’s sin was so grave, Augustine concluded, that humans should be subjected to tyrants to shield their lust for passion. Augustine’s reading became the foundation of Christianity’s suspicion of human sexuality and the basis for the church’s alliance with state power.
The Garden of Eden had become the dominant narrative at the heart of Western history.
Centuries later, when the American colonists went searching for a metaphor to express their frustration with British imperial rule, they looked back to the Bible, too. First they used the story of David to argue against the kind of tyranny that Augustine had supported. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine, the great poet of liberty, quotes Samuel’s rousing assault on kingship in I Samuel 8 and concludes, the Almighty “hath here entered his protest against monarchial government.” The colonists seized on an earlier biblical passage as divine justification for total equality. The stirring words of American Creation—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are e
ndowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—are a direct echo of the words of biblical Creation, “Let us make man in our image.”
The importance of the biblical Creation story only grew in American life. George Washington was fond of quoting a poignant evocation of Eden found in I Kings 5 and Micah 4. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of other inhabitants,” he wrote to the Jews of Rhode Island, “while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George H. W. Bush quoted this same verse. The preceding verse contains an even more famous vision of Paradise: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares / And their spears into pruning hooks.” This line is carved into the entrance of the United Nations. What began as Paradise had become a utopian model for world peace.
The legacy of the Garden of Eden is so long it stretches back to, well, the Garden of Eden. When George W. Bush cited, as one reason to invade Iraq, the dream of spreading liberty—“I believe freedom is not America’s gift to the world; I believe freedom is the almighty God’s gift to each man and woman in this world”—he echoed, intentionally or not, an idea that came from Iraq. Freedom is not alien to Mesopotamia. It is not new to this place.
It was born here.
Qurnah was a parking lot. We drove over a bridge and stared, disbelieving, at an endless morass of automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles. Three realities of Iraqi towns had converged to create the quagmire: the vegetable market, the looting market (where stolen goods were offered for sale), and a daylong line for petrol.
We navigated through the congestion, turned toward the one green neighborhood in town, and soon arrived at a majestic crossing—two wide, shimmering boulevards of water, vivid silver, like twin chrome fins from a 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille reflecting a cloud-blanched sky. The rivers approached each other at an eighty-degree angle, chugging at the stately pace of locomotives. Years earlier I had stood by the Euphrates near its fountainhead in eastern Turkey, where the turquoise rapids raced with glee. Here the darker waters seem grayed by their travels and slowed somewhat by age. A handful of fishermen paddled by in a wooden boat. The Tigris and the Euphrates, in their last lengths of independence, were emblems of a bygone time.
But in union they were infinite. At the spot on the horizon where the currents merged, the color seemed to vanish from the waters and the sky, as these two eternal gifts of creation gathered into each other’s arms. At the terminus of Mesopotamia, water unseparated from water, and the heavens rose from the deep. I had reached the earliest day. No more land was between the rivers.
Not far from the conflux, we approached a neighborhood. No people were around, no cars, only a few mud-brick houses. On the riverbank, a boy in a brown robe led a small huddle of goats. He was holding a staff and smoking a cigarette. Just above him was a small public park, about the size of a basketball court, surrounded by a shoulder-high stone fence. This was Janat Adan, the Garden of Eden. The park contained two live olive trees and one dead one, and was covered in concrete. Joni Mitchell was right: They paved Paradise. To one side was a shrine marking the spot where, according to a Muslim legend, Abraham met Sarah. The space was lifeless and devoid of color.
Within seconds, a gaggle of children arrived. They swarmed us, tugged at my clothes, and climbed Adam’s Tree, a leafless trunk with three blond branches reaching into the sky like twisted driftwood trumpets. The boys had bright blue sweatshirts, the girls pink and red dresses. For a moment the park glistened with joy, and for the first time since I arrived in Iraq, I felt the air well with hope.
It didn’t last. We were in the heart of concentric waves: the children, some curious teenagers behind them, and just beyond the walls, a few gruff men. Hikmat approached. “Those men are ali baba,” he said, using the Arabic term for “bandit.” “They flashed guns. They told me they intend to rob you.” I peered at him, distressed. “I must be honest,” he said. “I told them we would protect you, and they offered me a percentage of whatever they stole from you. I think we must go now.”
We gathered our belongings and hurried to the car. Events were unfolding so quickly, my head was spinning—a mix of awe, fear, and dark humor. We were being kicked out of the Garden of Eden! Not since Adam and Eve, I thought. Hah!
Of course this wasn’t the actual garden. A biblical flood in 1954 rerouted the Euphrates, so the two rivers have met in Qurnah for only half a century, not the fifty-eight centuries of Jewish tradition. Still, the experience of touching this garden left me oddly uplifted. The legacy of Genesis 1:26—“Let us make man in our image”—links each of us to God and empowers us to read the story for ourselves.
And at the moment, I read Eden as a story of longing, loss, and renewal. At the start of Genesis, God yearns for a human partner as much as humans long for God. God has the idea to create humans in his image and to bid them to rule the world in his stead. He gives Adam the right to name the animals, an act of using words as a form of creation that suggests God is re-creating himself in man. Eve, meanwhile, uses her God-given freedoms to try to become like God. She eats the fruit so she and Adam “can be like divine beings.” Each side—humans and God—aches to be the other.
That’s where Eden comes in. From the moment it appears, the Garden of Eden represents a physical place where the created and the creator can find spiritual union. Adam and Eve wander the garden without shame; God moves about the garden “at the breezy time of day.” They are one. The problem with this fragile harmony is that humans don’t know the difference between good and bad. Later, when the fruit provides this knowledge, God promptly boots them from Paradise. “Now that the man has become like one of us,” God says, “knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” God hides himself behind protective leaves, just as humans earlier did.
For generations to come, humans continue to drift away from God. But God, through beneficence, loneliness, or both, refuses to abandon them. He still longs for humans, and they still long for him. By the time of the prophets, God finally realizes that humans are no threat to usurping his power. They clearly have difficulty decoding the difference between right and wrong. And so he reopens the gates to Paradise that have been closed since Adam and Eve. He removes his leafy protection and makes himself vulnerable again.
He invites us back to Eden.
Standing in this seemingly godforsaken place, I felt God’s beckoning more than ever. I felt it in Azzam and his irrational desire to overturn the degradation and reclaim the natural flow of these rivers. I felt it in the text. “For the Lord shall comfort Zion,” extols the King James Version of Isaiah 51:3. “He will comfort all her waste places, and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.” I felt it in my heart. Never had I appreciated the awesome challenge of freedom more than I had since coming to Iraq.
And I felt it in the place. Just as we began piling into the car, a young girl pushed through the crowd of onlookers and handed me a gift, a token that seemed to embody the ability of life to poke up through the ruins and offer a vision of hope: an olive branch.
Humans might blight the garden, but Eden never dies.
. 2 .
COME, LET US
BUILD US A CITY
Ur leaps from the pages of history. It winds through the annals of archaeology with legends of golden jewelry and a gilded harp. It hosts the palace intrigue of some of the more colorful autocrats of antiquity—Sargon, Ur-Nammu, A-anniepadda. It lingers in the background of some of the most enduring tales of Mesopotamia: the epic of Gilgamesh, the deluge of Noah, the birth of Abraham. It is the setting of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
And not long after the fall of Saddam, it welcomed Iraq’s first Pizza Hut, built for the U.S. Air Force 407th Air Expeditionary Group at Tallil Air Base. The franchise caused an uproar because Army ba
ses, unlike Air Force ones, are barred from having fast-food restaurants, and soldiers stationed nearby said the exclusion caused morale problems.
Late one morning we approached Tell Muqayyar, the ruined city of Ur, capital of ancient Sumer, just outside of modern-day Nasiriyah. The site lies on the grounds of Tallil Air Base, which Saddam built here hoping his enemies would not attack and risk having a stray bomb destroy one of the more famous archaeological sites in the world. Dozens of tractor-trailers, armored personnel carriers, and tanks lined the road. At the guard booth, a U.S. airman was surprised to see us. “We don’t usually get civilians here,” he said.
Down a narrow road, brown grass spread from the pavement in an open expanse. The ground was sandy and flat, part of the floodplain of the Euphrates. The perimeter was lined with coiled barbed wire. A camel strolled by.
As we approached the tell, I began to notice a hulking structure emerging on the horizon, a cross between a giant sand castle and a UFO. The 150-foot-wide building was the color of mud and seemed to grow ineffably out of the soil, civilization emerging from the sands. The building was made from two tiers of mud bricks, each tier about 30 feet high. The tiers were stacked one on top of the other, with the upper story set inward from the bottom. In front, a giant staircase invited visitors to the summit. On the sides, two ramps did the same. On top, where a third tier should have been, was nothing. Time had decapitated the signature of Mesopotamia. It had erased the summit of the ziggurat of Ur.
But it did little to diminish its power.
I stepped from the car and for a second couldn’t breathe. When I had dreamed of Iraq, I had dreamed of standing here. My eyes welled. The building emitted a raw, primordial power, like a giant footprint of the gods. The tension that had gripped my chest for days suddenly lifted, replaced by a surge of blood to my head like a rush of sugar after a day of fasting. I was struck that a structure so heavy could make me feel so light-headed. I threw off my body armor and began racing up the huge stairway, counting the steps aloud like a little boy.
