Eden — the name suggests delight — is the garden God planted at the beginning, where the first humans lived in unbroken fellowship with him, tending the ground and walking with God in the cool of the day. Two trees stood at its centre, and a river watered it; it was the world as God intended, whole and good.
Eden is also the paradise lost, from which Adam and Eve were exiled after the fall, its gate guarded by cherubim. Yet the whole Bible is, in a sense, the story of the road back — and it ends not in a garden but in a garden-city, where the tree of life reappears and the curse is gone. What was lost in Eden is more than restored in the new creation.
The Garden of Eden in Scripture
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.