Weird Stuff in the Bible

Eden: God’s Cosmic Mountain
Ezekiel 28

Introduction
What exactly was Eden? I mean, we do know it was a garden, right?
Genesis 2:8 tells us
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.
So it was a place of lush growth. Trees. Fruit. Vegetation. Water. Life. We all get these visuals of a green paradise in our heads as we read the opening chapters of Genesis. I mean, other than the devil showing up later, this sounds like a place of absolute tranquility.
But then we get another vital piece of the puzzle when God is later condemning this devil in
Ezekiel 28:14
You were an anointed guardian cherub.
    I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
    in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
Wait, Eden was a mountain? What are these stones of fire? And what was Eden’s purpose?
I find all this to be weird, and I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Ezekiel 28, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]

Mountain gardens
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about the purpose and location of the Garden of Eden. I have been looking forward to sharing this episode ever since December of last year. This is a subject I’ve been studying all year long, and this episode is really going to be a great hub between the Book of Enoch series I did the first part of this year and the Tower of Babel series that I’ll be launching in a few months.
And “hub” is a key word today. A hub is a point of connection or transition, like a train station or an airport. A place between places. Keep that in mind as we press forward.
So, I love mountain imagery. I’ve got mountain art on my walls, a mountain cell phone case, and a mountain of theology books on my nightstand that I still haven’t read, even though I keep buying more.
And I’ve visited the mountains several times in my life. Smokey mountains. Ouchita mountains. I’ve been to the Rocky Mountains a handful of times. I get sick every time I go; I just have trouble adjusting to the altitude, and I usually finally start feeling comfortable right as it’s time to go back home. But I do think mountains are beautiful. It’s always a memorable experience when you can climb or visit a mountain and see the views from the top of one. And it’s possible to do that from many of them in the world. My family visited Pike’s Peak a couple years ago and rode a train to the top. It would be a very difficult climb to make on foot, especially with the wind and temperatures up there. My son and I had a lightsaber fight at the top of Pike’s Peak, but it was so blisteringly cold, we could only stand to be outside for a few minutes before we had to retreat indoors. So, a mountaintop would not be understood as a paradise, by any means. We have ways to visit many high mountains safely in modern times, but for ancient people, mountains were more inaccessible. Not impossible, but difficult.
To the ancient mind, the gods assembled at the tops of mountains. To be up high conveyed the idea of being near heaven. Just think of all the times in the Bible that the pagans went up in the quote-unquote “high places” for their rituals. And the ancients didn’t just believe that gods lived on cold, snow-peaked mountains, but that they lived on lush, beautiful, garden mountains. Your average high-altitude mountain would not be fertile ground for your shrubs and vegetable growth. But a garden mountain was a more mystical place. And to the ancient mind, this was the kind of environment where the gods liked to hang out.
Just like all ancient cultures have stories of a flood, and all ancient cultures have the stories of giants, and all ancient cultures have stories of the Tower of Babel, and all ancient cultures have a creation of the world story, so also all ancient cultures have stories of the mountain gardens where the gods reside. And just like with all of those ancient stories, the true version of it is found in the Bible.
So where do we see a garden mountain in the Bible? Well as I mentioned, this comes up in the condemnation of Satan in Ezekiel 28. Without going too in-depth, Ezekiel 28 features this lament against the King of Tyre. However, as Ezekiel is speaking this about the human king, he seems to start speaking about the ruling spirit over Tyre as well, which was Baal. The King of Tyre was Eth-baal the third. Eth-baal means “I’m with Baal.” And in case you didn’t know, Baal is an identity of Satan. So Ezekiel 28, starting at verse 11, starts speaking about Satan himself.
Ezekiel 28:11 reads
11 Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me: 12 “Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord God:
“You were the signet of perfection,
    full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;”
Now, within the Bible, who do we know that was in Eden? Well, We have Adam, Eve, God, and the devil. Were there other beings in Eden? Absolutely, as we’ll learn today. But within the Biblical narrative, we don’t have any other potential identities as to who this figure is who is addressed in Ezekiel 28.
Now, we know it’s not God, because God is the one speaking. Some translators have tried to say it’s Adam, but I think there’s very little evidence this was Adam. And also, it would be hard to explain why Adam is getting singled out for condemnation right here in Ezekiel. Or Eve for that matter. So that really only leaves the devil.
So let’s read what we learn about the devil in these verses, even though this is not really a lesson about the devil, but about the Garden of Eden. To condense things, verse 13 speaks about how Satan was originally created as a very beautiful and wise creature. And we learn what kind of creature he was right here in
Verse 14:
You were an anointed guardian cherub.
[this is the word “c-h-e-r-u-b.” Pronounced “kerub.” Ezekiel sees these creatures and describes them in chapters 1 and 10 of his book. These are guardian angels.
Verse 14 continues
    I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
    in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
So earlier it said Eden, the garden of God. Here it says “the holy mountain of God.” So Eden was not just a garden; it was a mountain. It was one of these garden mountains where ancient peoples believed that the gods resided.
Well who are the quote-unquote “gods” in the Bible? If you’re new to this podcast, you might think that lowercase-g gods are imaginary beings. Or perhaps that they are demons who are masquerading as gods. But that would be biblically inaccurate. There may be some imaginary gods out there, but that’s the exception, not the rule. The lowercase-g gods are the members of the Divine Council, which are described in Psalm 82. The gods are the principality spirits who assist the capital-G creator God in ruling the world. And that is what is meant by the next part of verse 14, where it says: “in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.”
The phrase “stones of fire” is a euphemism or descriptive term for the members of the Divine Council. Michael Heiser has done a lot of research to demonstrate this in the Unseen Realm and on his podcasts and writings, including looking at the Book of Enoch.
Also, Derek Gilbert summarizes Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 this way in his book The Great Inception: The stones of fire in Eden were the sons of God that the nachash wanted to rule from his own "mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north."
So here is what we can gather about Eden so far.
1- it was a garden
2- it was a mountain
3- it had spiritual beings present, including the divine council
Now let’s talk about the location of Eden.

Eden’s Address
The next two verses in Ezekiel 28—talking about the devil still—show that Eden is something different from earth.
Ezekiel 28:16-17
16 In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub,
    from the midst of the stones of fire.
17 Your heart was proud because of your beauty;
    you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
We covered this a couple of weeks ago: Satan is an earthly realm spirit. As part of his curse that was pronounced on him in Genesis 3, he was banished to the earthly realm from where he was before. And before, he had access to the heavenly realm. So he was downgraded, hence why it said “you’ll crawl on your belly in the dust.” And that’s what’s in view as well right here in Ezekiel 28: “I cast you to the ground.” So right here, it kinda sounds like Eden is not something on planet earth.
But turn with me back to Genesis 2 now. When I was a little kid, I used to think that the Garden of Eden just meant the whole world. I said this because I thought Eden was where Adam and Eve lived with all the animals, and I remember telling my mom when I was a kid that Eden must have covered the whole planet because how else could the Polar Bears have lived alongside the chameleons and Weiner dogs? Therefore, Eden must have covered everything if it had all the animals.
Well, turns out I was wrong. If you read Genesis 2 and 3 carefully, Eden is a more specific place than the earth in general. Let me show you. We don’t read about Eden until chapter 2, after God has already created everything and given man the dominion mandate of the earth.
Genesis 2:8
8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Well if Eden is in the east, then it can’t be the whole earth; it must be east of something. So east of what?
Verses 9 and 10
9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
If Eden is also a mountain, then it makes perfect sense that it would have a river or rivers flowing out of it. That’s common with mountains. Mount Hermon is the source of the Jordan River in Israel, for example.
Genesis 2 tells us about four rivers that flowed from the mountain of Eden, which are the Tigris, Euphrates, Pishon and Gihon. Well, I won’t push this too far because there was a whole worldwide flood since then, and we have no idea how much the flood may have rearranged the geography of the earth. And we don’t even know what the Pishon and Gihon are. So we could speculate and come up with theories but I’ll just say, I don’t know. If you look at a map of where the Tigris and Euphrates are, there are a couple of candidates for where those two rivers could have the same source. One is at the northern-most point of the fertile crescent near Mount Ararat. The other is at the eastern-most point of the fertile crescent near the Persian gulf in Iraq.
But to me, it’s almost pointless to speculate because we don’t know how the flood may have changed things. But here is what I want to get to. Eden seemed to be almost heavenly or above the earth, yet it also connected to the earth and even fed it some rivers. So what exactly is going on here? Is Eden a physical place on earth, or is it a mystical heavenly place?

The Cosmic Mountain
Eden was something that is popularly called today a Cosmic Mountain. A Cosmic Mountain is like a hub between the realms. I will try to give you three concepts today to help you understand Eden. Three main ideas. So here is the first illustration I want you to imagine in your head.
Have you ever seen a Venn diagram? This is two circles that slightly overlap. Venn diagrams are used to communicate where two different things can have something in common. I can’t really show you a Venn diagram because this is an audio podcast, but I’m hoping you are familiar with the concept. If not, Google it.
So imagine a Venn diagram. One circle is the spiritual realm, which has God, angels, divine council… The other side is the physical realm, which has Adam, Eve, the animals, and the world. And then there’s the overlapping space in the middle.
Well, Eden is that overlapping space. A paradise between the realms, a place where both realms can come together. So Eden had a location on earth. It would have been a mountain you could see and go visit. It had a physical address. However, once you started to climb this mountain, you entered into another realm. It wasn’t technically heaven; it was a hub between heaven and earth. A place between the places.
In his book The Unseen Battle, Joel Muddamalle says: Eden was not merely a garden located on the plains, but it existed on a mountain that was home to the headwaters of several large rivers. This presents a vital connection to other ANE myths in which the gods established their homes on mountains as a residence and "meeting place" that connected the earth and heavens. (Page 3)
So Eden had a location on earth, but you weren’t really just on earth anymore once you stepped foot there. I like the description that Timothy Alberino gives in Birthright: The terrestrial address provided by the writer of Genesis designates the location of the stargate through which Eden is accessed on the cosmic mountain. (Much like the gate at the beginning of a long driveway leading to a sprawling mansion, the gate, rather than the mansion itself, supplies the address point.) (page 113)
If that wasn’t clear, let me explain. When I was growing up, I lived in the sticks. I actually mean that very literally. I grew up in a log cabin on a farm in the middle of the woods. I was homeschooled. Our driveway was 3/4 of a mile long. Other than my cousins, I didn’t see another human being outside of church until I was 12. OK, that last part was a joke. But for real, I was off the grid. No cell phone service. I did not live in a town. I was equidistant between three different towns. And so it was complicated anytime somebody asked me where I lived because I was like, “My address says one town, but I don’t even know how to find that town from my house.” So I couldn’t even tell anyone where I lived. The best I could do was give someone our address, but that takes you to our mailbox at the end of our driveway. It doesn’t take you to our actual house. And if you start down that driveway through the woods, you’re goin off grid.
Well, Eden was like that. There was a place you could go on planet earth to access Eden. But once you entered—or started climbing—the mountain of Eden, you were going off-grid. You are no longer just on earth. You’re in the hub. A place between the physical and the spiritual realms. Perhaps kind of like the wood between the worlds in the Chronicles of Narnia.

The Axis Mundi
Now, here’s the second concept I want you to remember about Eden today. It was not just a place between places, or a place of transition. It was THE place of God’s court and the Divine Council. It was not just a hub like an airport; it was THE destination where God assembled with His heavenly beings of the Divine Council and His earthly beings of Adam and Eve.
So it’s not like a train station in that sense. Because a train is just what you go through to get to your destination. Well Eden is not like that. Eden IS the destination. It’s the place where beings from these different realms could come together and have a staff meeting or hash out plans or do whatever God wants them to do.
So that’s the second concept you need to understand. Eden is a hub, but it’s not just a hub. Eden is a convergence point or a nexus.
Remember a couple of weeks ago how I told you that in the spiritual realm, the gatekeeper spirit is the one in charge. That’s a little different or us because we don’t think of the gatekeeper as the owner of the house; he’s a guy who works for the owner of the house. But in the spiritual realm, the gatekeeper is the owner.
That’s how you should think of Eden as well. It was not just a gateway into the spiritual realm. It was the intended destination of beings in both the earthly and spiritual realm. And this was where God brought them together.
And now that brings me to the third concept I want to leave you with today on the Cosmic Mountain. And we’re going to go back to the Venn diagram now. Because that illustration I gave you earlier with the Venn diagram was accurate, but it was incomplete.
The Cosmic Mountain was not just a convergence of two realms. The Cosmic Mountain was a convergence of three realms: Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld.
So here’s how I want you to understand this. Imagine your Venn diagram, but not just with two circles. This time I want you to imagine three circles. Each one independent, but with a point of overlap in the middle. This is called a triple Venn diagram. Again, I wish I could show you, but this is an audio-only podcast, so you’ll have to Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about. So imagine three circles. Heaven, earth, and the Underworld. And that point where they overlap in the middle: that was Eden. It was a garden mountain.
From any of these three realms, you could visit the Garden Mountain of Eden and you were in the paradise of God. And all of the beings God created needed to visit this realm.
Genesis 2:9 said
The tree of life was in the midst of the garden…
If you recall from a couple months ago, an episode called Can Angels Die?, we established there that only God is immortal. All beings—physical or spiritual—require the Tree of Life for their sustenance. Not just humans—even the heavenly beings and the members of the Divine Council. So Eden was a place where all of the beings desired to coexist.
And Adam had a job in the garden: cultivate it. This is different from the dominion mandate of Genesis 1. The earth needed subdued. Eden just needed managed. Of course, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden after they sinned, along with the serpent.
Genesis 3:22-24
22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
The cherubim blocked the way, and the access point to Eden was removed. And I’m not sure what happened to the Garden of Eden after that. At some point, its presence was withdrawn from this realm entirely—perhaps in the flood—perhaps sooner. I honestly don’t know on that. As far as I know, the Bible leaves that a mystery.

Next Time & Closing Thoughts
And I better stop there for today so that I don’t overwhelm you with too much information. I hope you found this interesting and that it tied together a few ideas from the Bible. I’ll tie together a few more in my closing thoughts and let you know where we’re heading next time.
Quick mailbag response I wanted to share: Meg, who commented on the recent episode about Creation and the waters that covered the earth, which I described as like a sea of atoms that hadn’t been formed into anything yet. Meg gives this acronym for ATOMS: All The Other Miscellaneous Stuff. A-T-O-M-S. All the other miscellaneous stuff. Thank you for that, Meg, I thought that was too good not to share.
By the way, I’m not saying that the quote-unquote “seas” in Genesis 1 were literally just atoms in a scientific sense. These code words in Genesis 1 are there because it’s the best metaphor or analogy God can use to explain these spiritual realities to us, kind of like Jesus’ parables or the poetic language in the prophets. Our human three-dimensional understanding of the world can only get us so far. I think even our modern science can only get us so far; there’s still so much about the universe we don’t know.
And a shoutout to a few listeners I’ve connected with the past few weeks: Jonathan and Amanda who have been longtime listeners- Jonathan reached out to me recently.
And also Kalan (K + Allen) and Amanda—a different Amanda—who listen from right here in Missouri where I live. Also a what’s-up to Gene and to Tim. I go to church with Tim, and he told me recently he’d been listening to my podcast. So, the listener-shoutout segment was starting to get really long a few months back, and I kind of trimmed it and haven’t done one lately because I was concerned that it was, well, getting too long. But if anyone out there ever becomes an official weirdo—that means you’ve listened to at least 25 episodes of the podcast—shoot me an email and let me know, and I’d love to let the world know about your new weirdo status.
I’ve probably caused a lot of people to stop listening at 24 episodes because they wanted to avoid weirdo status. But don’t worry, I don’t know that you’re a weirdo unless you tell me. And I want you to tell me.
Alright, so let’s get into some closing thoughts today and tie a few things together. As I said before, the ancients believed that the gods resided in a garden mountain, which—I believe—was literally true in the case of Eden. What was so special about a garden-mountain?
Let’s put ourselves in their mindset. Life on earth was hard back then. I mean, sometimes we think this world sucks. But we have electricity, we have toilets that flush, we have dentists for our toothaches, we have 5 Toy Story movies—and that’s two more than we even needed. Compared to ancient times, we have it so much better.
If you want a cheeseburger, most of us can drive down to McDonald’s and get yourself a cheeseburger within 15 minutes. If you want a taco, you can go to taco bell. If you want anything else, you can go find it at Walmart and have it for supper tonight. Food is not hard to come by. The privilege of being able to eat whatever you want is a modern miracle; in ancient times, getting to eat whatever you want was called “eating like a king.” Ancient kings and Pharaohs couldn’t even do what we do. King Solomon—who probably had the most glorified lifestyle and riches of anyone in the whole Bible—never flushed a toilet. Never ate a taco. Never saw a Toy Story movie.
We eat like kings. We eat better than kings. Because for ancient people, the idea of having constant access to food and water would have been paradise. And that’s what living in a garden would be like: a place of limitless sustenance. That’s what a place like the Garden of Eden represented. Unlimited food. There were rivers, so it had unlimited fresh water. A relaxing atmosphere. And it was probably self-sustaining. All you had to do was exist there, and you could live in peace.
But not only was it a garden—it was a mountain. That speaks of living high-up, near the heavens. Looking down on everyone else. Just like the rich people in New York City—they won’t live in the slums. They’re gonna live in a penthouse at the top of a skyscraper, where they look down on everyone else, because that’s a symbol and reality of their status.
And so that is what a mountain garden represented to the ancient people. They didn’t have skyscrapers. They didn’t have a Beverly Hills. A garden in the mountains was about as glorious of a concept as you could get—and that idea came from Eden, which means it came from God.
There’s a spiritual significance to the idea of a garden-mountain as well. The mountain aspect of it speaks to reaching the heavens, of being close to the heavenly realm. Well that makes sense.
But surprisingly, the garden speaks of reaching down into the underworld, because a garden springs up from the earth. Next week we’ll discuss the garden aspect. I’ll say something that’s gonna sound really weird, but I’ll demonstrate this in next weeks’ episode: gardens were thought of in bible times as gateways to the underworld. If you want to know more about that, make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it.
And so a garden-mountain was not just a paradise, not just a status symbol, but a garden-mountain was a cosmic mountain, because it was a point of connection between Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld.
A lot of what I taught today started with the idea of what the ancient people believed about gardens and mountains. And learning this helps makes sense of some of the biblical imagery we see about Eden. We see similarities there between the Bible and those ancient cultures. But as we close, I want to point out one area where the Bible is different.
To the ancient mind, a garden mountain was the abode of the gods. And the ancient gods always saw themselves as above humanity. So their home was a utopian environment, separate from those dirty, stinky humans. They were detached from all that. No regular people allowed.
But that was not God’s intention with His mountain garden. His desire from the beginning was that we would dwell there, too. That we would live with Him among the elohim.
The Biblical God of the universe is more powerful than any of the ancient gods; more pure and good than any of the ancient gods; and further above humanity than any of the ancient gods. And yet God doesn’t desire to live detached from us. He created a cosmic mountain where we could dwell together with him. We broke that fellowship, and from Genesis to Revelation, it’s a story of God trying to connect us with Him once again. The last two chapters of Revelation describe the eternal state, and they include these words in
Revelation 21:3
Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
God is not just restoring the plan of Eden to have a pretty garden mountain. God is restoring our fellowship with Him. Eden was God’s home on earth. And He wants us in His home. Isn’t that amazing?
The Bible is not weird. WE are weird, because we don’t know about cosmic garden mountains—and that Eden was one of them. But now we do. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible.