- Jan 25, 2009
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Found something recommended to me by one of my sisters in CHrist---and was very amazed at some of the conclusions made on the issue. For maps are powerful when it comes to how we see the world and how we look at one another---especially as it concerns the level of importance we place on groups coming from certain parts of the globe.
And on the issue, one of the resources I plan to use for my children really amazed when it came to discussing possible areas for where Eden used to be. It's entitled 583 - East is Eden: Adam and Eve's Chinese Garden ... - Big Think/ East is Eden: Adam and Eve's Chinese Garden | Strange Maps
As said there (for excerpt):
Imagine it’s a long, long time ago. As the legend on the map says: “Before the upheaval of Central Asia. Before the subsidence of the Pacific Continent. Before the change in the position of the Polar regions. Before the Deluge.”
Ah, the Deluge. That gives us a pretty specific time frame, albeit a rather narrow one. To Biblical literalists, sacred history comes with a very real chronology; the universe was created one weekend about six thousand years ago, the Great Flood is less than four and a half thousand years old . In contrast, those who prefer their world view seasoned with a generous helping of science, will be more inclined towards the hypothesis that it all started with a Big Bang, some 13 billion years ago.
There was actually a book I came across that had similar information in it, entitled Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden. It's interesting to see the history of what has occurred for Eden-Seekers, as they did a lot...and were just as obsessed with Noah as they were with Adam and Eve. For more maps, see: paradiselustbook.com/maps
And if the Garden of Eden was originally in Asia, it's amazing to consider the ways that the Lord greatly used the people in it to do much for Him..as the Gospel spread greatly in Asia and there's a strong move of God that has been going on there for sometime.
The resurgence of people seeing the ways the Bible connects with Asians is in many ways a rediscovery of what was always present throughout China and other parts of the East...except that many times it was ignored. A pity it was ignored by so many, in light of the Biblical example of Job:
__________________
Shalom
And on the issue, one of the resources I plan to use for my children really amazed when it came to discussing possible areas for where Eden used to be. It's entitled 583 - East is Eden: Adam and Eve's Chinese Garden ... - Big Think/ East is Eden: Adam and Eve's Chinese Garden | Strange Maps
As said there (for excerpt):
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:8-14).
Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:8-14).
Even without going into the whole Creationism versus Evolutionism debate , the massive imbalance in the size of their back stories seems to work in favour of the thesis with the bigger reserves of time. As witnessed by any commercial touting a product’s ‘traditional recipe’ as a positive quality, antiquity suggests validity. It’s much more difficult to argue with the vast aeons at the disposal of the Big Bangers than with the puny millennia of the Adam and Eve crowd.
But sacred history does have one big advantage over natural history - it has better stories. In the darwinist reading, the path from past to present was forged by impersonal forces: either big accidents (meteors, climate change) or slow evolutionary changes (frontal lobes, opposable thumbs). The ‘supernatural’ version in the Bible actually is the more ‘humanist’ one: it gives centre stage to Mr and Mrs Sapiens, and explains history as a consequence of the choices they face
For Darwinists, our dog-eat-dog world merely is the successor to a previous, dinosaur-eat-dinosaur incarnation. In science, there is no Garden of Eden. The idea of Eden - that once there was a perfect state of affairs, when truth and happiness were not opposed , and virtue as pure as the world was young - is a powerful and attractive one , explaining the continued popularity of the sacred version of history, in spite of some obvious logical problems.
So imagine it’s a long, long Biblical time ago. It’s the age of innocence, and life is good in the Garden of Eden. But where is this Garden? The hunt for the exact location of humanity’s original home is a fascinating quest, and a centuries-long cartographic conundrum. If they chose to include it on a map, cartographers usually picked a location in the Middle East, that cockpit of hallowed history.
These two maps, however, are quite extraordinarily different. Eden is placed far away from its more usual location in or near Mesopotamia - The Garden is moved East of Eden, to borrow Steinbeck’s title.
They are the work of Tse Tsan-tai (1872-1938), a Chinese revolutionary, newspaperman and Christian propagandist. Born in Sydney and baptised James Yee, Tse moved to Hong Kong whence he started agitating for the Qing dynasty on the mainland to be replaced by a democratic republic. The plot failed to come to fruition, and Tse had more success co-founding the South China Morning Post in 1903.
In 1914, Tse wrote The Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Origin of the Chinese, in which he attempted to prove, based on the geographical description in the Bible, that the Garden of Eden was located in China.
Tse’s outlandish theory was an attempt at proving that at least some Biblical events had taken place in China - and that therefore Christianity was not alien to the Middle Kingdom. The book was meant to dispel the notion that Christianity in China was a tool of foreign powers, at a time when the countries sending the missionaries were the same ones bullying a weak China into granting them coastal concessions.
Tse’s outlandish theory was an attempt at proving that at least some Biblical events had taken place in China - and that therefore Christianity was not alien to the Middle Kingdom. The book was meant to dispel the notion that Christianity in China was a tool of foreign powers, at a time when the countries sending the missionaries were the same ones bullying a weak China into granting them coastal concessions.
The first map gives a global overview of the Bible-based world history as seen by Tse, and as opposed to others: two black dots represent the usual presumed location of Eden, in what appears to be either Iraq or southeastern Turkey. A red circle represents Tse’s hypothesis. It places Eden in the far west of China, in what was then known as Chinese Turkestan (and now as Xinjiang).
The location picked by Tse corresponds to the description in the Bible, referring to the course of four rivers near the Garden of Eden . Apparently unconnected to the Edenic claim are red lines on the map, that indicate ancient shorelines, and point to a giant sunken continent stretching from Papua New Guinea almost all the way to South America. It remains unexplained what this continent is, and which Bible verse it is based on; but it is reminiscent, shape- and location-wise, to the lost continent of Mu.
The map also shows an X in Tse's handwriting, marking a spot in Greenland that is supposed to have been the Antediluvian North Pole, Latitude 75˚, Longitude 40˚. Again, the Biblical foundation and any connection to Eden remain unexplained on the map.
Finally, the colour scheme on the map shows the world as peopled by Noah’s descendants. Biblical tradition holds that the world’s population descends from no more than three men - the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japhet, the forefathers of the Semites (in the Middle East, and on this map, much of Asia and all of America), the Hamites (Africa, Arabia, India) and Japhetites (Europe). The Semitic expansion into Asia provides blood links between China and the Bible.
The second map gives an indication of the geopositional shoehorning Tse applied to the geographical indications in Genesis, identifying India with Havilah . The result is the location of Eden in what appears to be a most unlikely place: an area between the Tarim River and the Kuen Lun Mountains better known today as the Taklamakan Desert. The area, now the world’s second-largest sand desert after the Empty Quarter in Arabia, is one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Whether or not others agree, just thought I'd place it out there for the sake of something fun to think about. From a scientific perspective, as it concerns how the planet shifts continents, what we think of with locations today may not have been what they used to be. As another noted, "The 'Lost Continent' is not so random as it appears: it seems to correspond roughly to Micronesia and Polynesia. Note also the smaller "lost continent" to the North, probably representing the Hawai'ian Islands"...But ruined cities buried beneath the sand seem to indicate that the Taklamakan may not always have been as unforgiving as it has been for the last few millennia. In fact, its very name may hold a clue to its climatological past. Often, and erroneously, translated as something like ‘Once you enter, you’ll never make it out’, or ‘Sea of Death’ a more recent etymology suggests the name might actually mean ‘Land of Poplars’ .
Could it be that today’s sand desert once really was a garden paradise?
Could it be that today’s sand desert once really was a garden paradise?
There was actually a book I came across that had similar information in it, entitled Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden. It's interesting to see the history of what has occurred for Eden-Seekers, as they did a lot...and were just as obsessed with Noah as they were with Adam and Eve. For more maps, see: paradiselustbook.com/maps
And if the Garden of Eden was originally in Asia, it's amazing to consider the ways that the Lord greatly used the people in it to do much for Him..as the Gospel spread greatly in Asia and there's a strong move of God that has been going on there for sometime.
The resurgence of people seeing the ways the Bible connects with Asians is in many ways a rediscovery of what was always present throughout China and other parts of the East...except that many times it was ignored. A pity it was ignored by so many, in light of the Biblical example of Job:
Job 1:3/Job 1
Prologue
1 In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. 2 He had seven sons and three daughters, 3 and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.
4 His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular custom.
and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.
There are some who note how Job himself was an Oriental/East Asian.....and for more, one can go online/look up the article entitled The Image of the Oriental: Western and Byzantine Perceptions and the other here at Cyclopaedia of biblical, theological, and ecclesiastical literature - Google Books Result (concerning how Job's tomb is still shown to many Oriental tourists). Also, in the event you (or others) may be interested, there are some excellent articles on the subject of Asian Jews...specifically, those who are Chinese Jews. For more info, one can go online and investigate under the following:Prologue
1 In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. 2 He had seven sons and three daughters, 3 and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.
4 His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular custom.
and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.
__________________
Shalom
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