“... 34. Rather than an Akkadian loan edinu, “steppe” (popularized by E. A. Speiser, Gen- esis [AB 1; New York: Doubleday, 1964] 16, 19), the BH word Eden (‘e¯den) means “fertility, abundance, luxuriance.” The root of the word “Eden” first appears in the Baal Cycle in reference to the storm-god, Baal-Hadad (J. C. Greenfield, “A Touch of Eden,” Acta Iranica deuxie`me se´rie, volume IX. Orientalia J. Duchesne-Guillemin Emerito-oblata [Leiden: Brill, 1984], 219–24; A. Millard, “The Meaning of Eden,” VT 34 [1984], 103–06; Ottoson, “Eden and the Land of Promise,” 177). It is the word that describes what his rains do for the earth; Baal fertilizes (‘dn//y‘dn [!]) the earth with his rain (mtfirh) in CAT 1.4 V 6–7. The word appears later, in line 4 of the Tell Fekheriyeh inscription (see A. Abou-Assaf, P. Bordreuil, and A. Millard, La Statue de Tell Fekherye et son inscription bilingue assyro-arame´enne [Etudes Assyriologiques 10; Paris: Recherche sur les civilizations, 1982], 23, 62). This text describes Hadad, that is Baal, as the god who makes the earth fertile (m‘dn). Eden may be thought then to be the terrestrial sacred mountain fertilized by the storm-god and in this sense a “garden.” For the date of the association of the divine mountain with Eden, see Wallace, The Eden Narrative, 85–86. ...”