Short answers, pulled from the story.
Genesis 2:10-14 describes the Garden of Eden as the source of four rivers: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. The text places the garden "eastward in Eden" but does not specify a modern country or region. Scholars have proposed locations including the head of the Persian Gulf in southern Mesopotamia, the Armenian Highlands, Lebanon, and Iran near Tabriz.
The name Eden derives from the Akkadian edinnu, itself from a Sumerian word edin. It is also related to an Aramaic root and to a Hebrew word for pleasure. The Vulgate Latin Bible reads paradisum voluptatis in Genesis 2:8, which the Douay-Rheims Bible translates as "a paradise of pleasure."
The word paradise entered English through French paradis, from Latin paradisus, from Greek parádeisos, which was borrowed from an Old Iranian root meaning "walled enclosure." By the 6th-5th century BCE the Old Iranian word had entered Akkadian as pardesu meaning "domain," and it subsequently described the expansive walled gardens of the First Persian Empire. The Septuagint, compiled between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE, used the Greek form to translate the Hebrew word for garden, establishing paradise as a term for Eden.
The Quran refers to the first abode of Adam and his spouse across several surahs, including surah Sad, which devotes eighteen verses to the subject. Unlike the biblical account, the Quran mentions only one tree in Eden, the tree of immortality. The expulsion of Adam and his spouse is attributed to temptation by Iblis. Islamic scholar ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292-1350) interpreted the expulsion not as punishment but as God's design to unfold the full range of his attributes on earth.
In the Talmud and the Jewish Kabbalah, the lower Gan Eden is a terrestrial place of abundant fertility, while the higher Gan Eden is celestial, reserved for righteous souls. Louis Ginzberg's 1909 book Legends of the Jews describes the higher Gan Eden as containing three hundred and ten worlds divided into seven compartments, ranging from Jewish martyrs in the first to the poor who studied the Torah in the seventh.
On his third voyage to the Americas in 1498, Columbus believed he may have reached the Earthly Paradise upon first sighting the South American mainland. This was part of a broader medieval and early modern tradition of mapping the Garden of Eden onto newly encountered lands, which also led Portuguese cartographers to claim the Congo and Zambezi rivers flowed from Paradise, and early Latter Day Saint leaders to place the garden in Jackson County, Missouri.