Professor Andrew George's latest 2 volume work on the Epic of Gilgamesh is important for revealing to the scholarly world that the Babylonian word tseru or tseri, which he translates into English as "the wilderness" or "the wild," is sometimes rendered in that Epic as EDIN. He explains that the Babylonian scribes were fond of substituting Babylonian words with Sumerian words, this substitution being called a logogram in scholarly parlance. Only Professor Andrew's hardback two volume set preserves this tantalizing nugget of information, it does not appear in his abridged paperback edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. By 1898 Professor Morris Jastrow Junior of the Department of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, had proposed in a scholarly Professional Journal, that Enkidu and Shamhat (his Eabani and Ukhat) had been recast as Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. If one wants to read his article it is available on the internet. By using the Google search engine, key-in "Eabani, Ukhat, Jastrow" and his 1898 article will appear in the Journal in which it was published. Jastrow makes no observation about the existence of the Sumerian logogram EDIN appearing in the Epic of Gilgamesh. I am unaware of any scholar making the association of Enkidu's EDIN being what is behind EDEN in Genesis' Adam and Eve account.
Professor Andrew George's latest 2 volume work on the Epic of Gilgamesh is important for revealing to the scholarly world that the Babylonian word tseru or tseri, which he translates into English as "the wilderness" or "the wild," is sometimes rendered in that Epic as EDIN. He explains that the Babylonian scribes were fond of substituting Babylonian words with Sumerian words, this substitution being called a logogram in scholarly parlance. Only Professor Andrew's hardback two volume set preserves this tantalizing nugget of information, it does not appear in his abridged paperback edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. By 1898 Professor Morris Jastrow Junior of the Department of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, had proposed in a scholarly Professional Journal, that Enkidu and Shamhat (his Eabani and Ukhat) had been recast as Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. If one wants to read his article it is available on the internet. By using the Google search engine, key-in "Eabani, Ukhat, Jastrow" and his 1898 article will appear in the Journal in which it was published. Jastrow makes no observation about the existence of the Sumerian logogram EDIN appearing in the Epic of Gilgamesh. I am unaware of any scholar making the association of Enkidu's EDIN being what is behind EDEN in Genesis' Adam and Eve account.