Hey, just what is the "Garden of Eden"? You probably have heard this term from a Judaeo-Christian background of some kind, or in the Genesis account of the Bible or Torah. Not a whole lot is said about the Garden of Eden, or even what else happened around that time period or even before then. Some Biblical scholars claim the Earth was created some 6,000 years ago. But many scientistists today claim that the Earth has been around for millions of years, and there are mountains of evidence supporting these ideas.

However, there is one word in the book of Genesis, in the Bible, that may explain much of the confusion here. That is the word "firmament". Just what is a firmament? The Bible is rather vague about the word. It seems to imply that "firmament" is synonymous with "heavens". So why don't they just say heavens, instead, and why isn't this word used very much elsewhere in the Bible?

This remained a mystery to me until I learned what "firmament" really meant. I learned that the firmament consisted of two layers of crystaline-clear ice which covered the entire Earth. One layer was 15,000 feet above the Earth (the same altitude as the "snowcap" on mountains) and the other layer was about 30,000 feet above the Earth. Obviously these required a huge amount of water from the oceans, so the oceans were much smaller then, and so places like Atlantis were also not underwater then. However, the greatest benefit of the firmament was the fact that the atmosphere inside the firmament, all over the entire Earth, was always between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a tropical Paradise!

These were the days when the real Garden of Eden flourished, as humans could easily live a very simple and close-to-nature type of lifestyle, with a minimum of fuss just to survive. A milder climate meant a minimum of clothing and shelter were needed. However, there obviously was some very high technology around in those days in order to build the firmament, and to build structures like the Pyramids of Egypt, etcetera.

So what happened to the firmament? to make a long story short, there was a "battle in the heavens", to use Biblical terminology, but today we would call it a war, perhaps not too unlike the wars of today, in some respects. Warring groups of beings used high-tech jet-fighters or perhaps, spaceships, to bomb sections of their opponents area of the firmament. This caused certain areas of these crystalline structures of ice to collapse. These beings did not realize that destroying one section of the firmament would cause a "domino" effect, and then a chain reaction that eventually caused the entire firmament, over all the Earth to be destroyed!

Well the ice from the firmament melted and this is what caused the Great Flood, mentioned in the Bible. Because the devastation was so huge, it wiped out most human beings on earth, as well as all the advanced technology and virtually all traces of civilization. The few remaining human survivors had nothing left. For a very long time these people had to focus solely on their survival, and had to rely only on word of mouth to remember what happened, and what the world was like before the Great Flood. Without any forms of technology remaining, and with so few people remaining to re-create their technology, with only crude tools, they could not even effectively write down these cataclysmic events. Then it was finally written down (perhaps several generations passed before paper and written language were re-invented), and by then the oral stories of the past became quite inaccurate. Imagine trying to describe high-tech things to children who had never seen such things, with no paper, no dictionaries and no reason to even have written languages, if all you are doing is surviving!

So now you know a little more about the original Garden of Eden environment. The Bible was originally passed on by word of mouth. And now you know why the Bible has no history prior to 6,000 years ago. For more information on this subject go to: Planetary Activation Organization and order the book: Your First Contact, by Sheldan Nidle.