Where is the Garden of Eden?
Nobody knows. Genesis gives an address of sorts, four rivers flowing out of one, and two of those four can still be found on a map today. The other two have been lost for so long that no one can say with confidence which rivers they were. The garden itself has never been found, and nothing on this page will pretend otherwise.
By Hannah Whitford, Childhood Bible Stories · Last updated September 2026 · Data as of August 2026
What the Bible actually says
10A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted, and became the source of four rivers.
11The name of the first is Pishon: it flows through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
12and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are also there.
13The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the same river that flows through the whole land of Cush.
14The name of the third river is Hiddekel. This is the one which flows in front of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
Genesis 2:10-14, World English Bible (public domain)
That is the whole of the geography. Four names, two lands, and one river that splits. Everything else written about the location of Eden, on this page and everywhere else, is an attempt to reason outward from those five verses.
Two we can find, two we cannot
Pishon
Genesis 2:11No river of this name is known today.
Genesis places it in a land called Havilah, where there is gold. Nobody has matched that description to a river anyone can visit.
Gihon
Genesis 2:13No river of this name is known today.
It is said to run through the land of Cush, a name used elsewhere in Scripture for the region south of Egypt. That has not been enough to identify it.
Hiddekel
Genesis 2:14Known today as the Tigris.
Most modern translations print Tigris where the World English Bible keeps Hiddekel, the name the Hebrew text uses. It still runs through Iraq.
Euphrates
Genesis 2:14Still called the Euphrates.
It rises in eastern Turkey and joins the Tigris in southern Iraq. The two of them frame the region historians call Mesopotamia.
The part of the world the two named rivers run through
Coordinates from OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding, licensed CC BY 4.0. A river is a long thing and a single point cannot represent it, so treat each dot as "somewhere along here" rather than a location.
Four answers, none of them proven
These are the readings that come up most often. We are not endorsing any of them. They are listed so that when your child hears one of them somewhere else, you already know which one it was.
Southern Iraq, where the two rivers meet
The oldest and most common suggestion. The Tigris and Euphrates join before reaching the Persian Gulf, and this is the part of the world where the earliest cities appear.
Eastern Turkey, near the headwaters
Both named rivers rise in the highlands of eastern Turkey. Readers who take the four rivers as flowing out from one source have often looked here instead.
Under the Persian Gulf
One proposal puts the garden on land that is now sea floor, drowned when sea levels rose after the last ice age, with two dry riverbeds standing in for the two missing rivers.
Nowhere you could visit
Many readers hold that the flood reshaped the land so thoroughly that the rivers Genesis names are not the rivers we could stand beside now, even where the names survived. On that reading the question has no map answer at all.
Eden is where two of our stories begin
Free printables for the stories that start here
Coloring pages, a reading plan and verse cards, sent as one pack. Free, and yours to print as often as you like.
Questions about the Garden of Eden
Where is the Garden of Eden?
No one knows. Genesis 2:10-14 says a river flowed out of Eden and split into four, and names them Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and the Euphrates. Two of those four can still be found on a map, the Hiddekel being the river we now call the Tigris. The other two have never been identified, and no site has ever been shown to be the garden.
Is the Garden of Eden a real place?
Genesis describes it as a real place with real rivers, real trees and a real geography. Christians read the account in different ways, and this page does not settle that. What can be said plainly is that the location has never been identified, and that anyone claiming to have found it has gone further than the evidence goes.
What are the four rivers of Eden?
Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and the Euphrates, named in that order in Genesis 2:11-14. Hiddekel is the name the Hebrew text uses for the river we call the Tigris. The Euphrates still carries its name. Pishon and Gihon are not known today.
Has anyone found the Garden of Eden?
No. Several locations have been proposed over the centuries, from southern Iraq to eastern Turkey to the floor of the Persian Gulf, but none of them rests on more than an argument about where two unnamed rivers might have run. There is no archaeological find that identifies a site as Eden.
What should I tell a child who asks where Eden was?
Tell them the truth, which is more interesting than a guess: the Bible gives four rivers as an address, we can still find two of them, and the other two are lost. It is one of the places where the honest answer is that nobody knows, and children take that far better than adults expect.
Methodology and sources
The quotation is Genesis 2:10-14 from the World English Bible, checked word for word against the text. The two dots on the map are published coordinates for the Tigris and the Euphrates. Nothing on this page marks a location for Eden, because there is nothing to mark.
Coordinates for the Tigris and the Euphrates
OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding, with Theographic Bible Metadata as fallback. View the source.
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (OpenBible.info). Fallback rows are CC BY-SA 4.0 (Theographic Bible Metadata). · Source file dated August 2026 · Pulled September 2026
OpenBible.info records no coordinates at all for Eden or for the Pishon, which is itself part of the answer to the question this page asks. Its entry for Assyria is rooted at Nineveh, on the Tigris, so plotting it would have added a dot on top of a dot.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible, which is public domain. This site uses it throughout. About us.
By Hannah Whitford, Childhood Bible Stories · Last updated September 2026 · Data as of August 2026
The garden is lost. The story is not.
Read Creation and Adam and Eve tonight, then follow the whole thread from Genesis to Easter in order.