Back to the Garden: Part 1

Many people believe the entrance to the Garden of Eden is somewhere in the Middle East. I believe that it is near Amarillo, Texas.

Why Amarillo?

The Bible says this about the garden:

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. (Genesis 2:10 KJV)

There are four tributaries currently flowing to the east from Amarillo: the Canadian River, the North Fork of the Red River, the Salt Fork of the Red River, and the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

The name of the first (river) is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. (Genesis 2:11 KVJ)

The name Amarillo is derived from the Spanish word for yellow and is symbolic of the gold described in this passage. The names of the four rivers listed in scripture do suggest another location, but that may be misleading. The flood of Noah’s time destroyed everything not on the ark and rearranged the landscape. Noah could have started his journey is what is now Texas and have landed in what is now Kurdistan / modern-day Turkey. Without a point of reference between the beginning and the end of his journey, how can we tell where they were?

Amarillo is in Potter County, Texas, and the potter is symbolic of God forming Adam from the clay of the earth as a potter would form a clay vessel. Much of the soil of the region is red (hence the name Red River), and in Hebrew the name Adam means “red earth”. [Interestingly, both Patrick Henry and Francis Scott Key lived on plantations named Red Hill and Terra Rubra, respectively, to symbolize their similarity to the Garden of Eden.]

The bois d’arc tree is found in the Red River basin, and its “hedge apple” is symbolic of the “bitter fruit” of the Garden of Eden. [The oldest bois d'arc tree in America is planted on Patrick Henry's plantation, sent there from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.]

But the thing about Amarillo that most suggests that it is near the entrance to the garden is that it is the only place in the world where helium comes up out of the ground in quantity. The significance of this fact is implied by the following scriptures describing God casting Adam and Eve from the garden:

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3:23-24 KJV)

The "flaming sword" of this passage is suggestive (to me) of the energy released by nuclear fusion, and in this universe fusion of hydrogen is the only phenomenon that yields helium. If the Earth has been around for a long time, any primordial source of helium should have worked its way to the surface by now and have escaped into the atmosphere. Any on-going subterranean source of helium suggests on-going fusion, which is consistent with the source being the flaming sword. [Also interestingly, maps of the underground distribution of the helium deposits show that it follows the beds of the rivers listed above, further suggesting that Amarillo and the flaming sword are its source.]

There is something else near Amarillo found nowhere else on this continent, and which is further suggestive of Amarillo being near the entrance to the garden. Care to guess what it is?

The answer will be revealed in my next post.