Eden
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Eden. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the garden of paradise. "It would be difficult," says a writer in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible" (i. 482), "in the whole history of opinion, to find any subject which has so invited, and at the same time so completely baffled conjecture, as the Garden of Eden. The three continents of the Old World have been subjected to the most rigorous search; from China to the Canary Isles, from the Mountains of the Moon to the coasts of the Baltic, no locality which in the slightest degree corresponded to the description of the first abode of the human race has been left unexamined." Philo Judæus (flourished about 20) first broached the allegorical theory of interpretation, teaching that paradise shadowed forth the governing faculty of the soul, and that the tree of life represented religion, the true means of immortality. Origen, adopting a somewhat similar view, regarded Eden as heaven, the trees as angels, and the rivers as wisdom; and Ambrosius considered the terrestrial paradise and the third heaven, mentioned by St. Paul (II Cor. xii: 2-4), as identical. Luther taught that Eden was guarded by angels from discovery and consequent profanation until the Deluge, when all traces were destroyed. Swedenborg, who regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as constituting a divine allegory, taught that Eden represented the state of innocence in which man was orginally created and from which he degenerated in consequence of the Fall.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
in the Hebrew Scriptures, the first home of mankind. We are told in Genesis that "God planted a garden eastward in Eden," and that he placed man in the garden to care for it. The description of Eden and of its situation, however, is obscure. All attempts to identify it from this description with any existing locality have proved failures. This fact has been variously explained. Luther taught that Eden was protected from discovery by angels until the time of the deluge, when all traces of it were destroyed. Others explain the narrative as an allegory, claiming that Eden represents a state of innocence. The Hebrew word Eden means pleasure or delight, and is of frequent occurrence in literature to designate figuratively some especially delightful region. In King Richard II , Shakespeare speaks of England as "this other Eden." They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. --Milton, Paradise Lost . Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. --Tennyson, Locksley Hall.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts frame Eden as a geographical puzzle that had "completely baffled conjecture," with the alternatives being a lost location or a pious allegory. Mainstream scholarship has since largely abandoned that framing: since the decipherment of Mesopotamian literature and the excavation of Ugarit from 1929, Genesis 2-3 is read alongside Babylonian and Sumerian material such as the Gilgamesh epic, the Adapa myth and the paradise-island of Dilmun, as one ancient Near Eastern garden-of-the-gods story among several. Aiton's confident etymology, that "the Hebrew word Eden means pleasure or delight," is now usually set beside a rival derivation from Sumerian edin, meaning plain or steppe, borrowed through Akkadian. Attempts to fix a site have not stopped entirely -- the archaeologist Juris Zarins argued in the 1980s for land now drowned beneath the head of the Persian Gulf -- but they are treated as speculation rather than the central question.
Written for this edition, 2026.