Yahweh God planted an orchard in Eden, in the east, and there he put the human he had formed.
The orchard, Hebrew gan, is more commonly known as the “garden of Eden.” I’m translating it as orchard here because the English word garden, at least in my neck of the woods, seems to imply someone growing tomatoes and lettuce in his backward. Yet the only plants mentioned as growing the gan of Genesis 2-3 are fruit trees.
Eden. There are mentions of an Eden outside of the creation story. 2 Kings 19:12 / Isaiah 37:12 — Have the gods of the nations delivered those whom my fathers destroyed: Gozan, Haran, and Rezeph, and the people of Eden who were in Telassar? Ezekiel 27:23 — Haran, and Kanneh, and Eden, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur, Kilmad, were your merchants.
Whether these Edens have anything to with the location of the garden of Eden, I cannot say.
in the east. Dillmann interprets this as referring to “the east” from the perspective of the Holy Land. That is, the garden in Eden is located somewhere off Mesopotamia-way. The KJV translates gan be-Eden miqqedem as eastward in Eden, on which interpretation Eden was a region and the garden is planted somewhere in its eastern parts. The Septuagint has a reading that is either like that of the KJV or like Dillmann’s — I don’t know the Greek to tell which, and the English translation of the NETS does not to my mind settle which is intended.
The Vulgate, on the other, goes way off in a different direction. It takes Eden as a common noun for pleasure and miqqedem as meaning not eastward but rather from the beginning. “And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed man whom he had formed” (Douay).