Genesis 2:11-14

NOTE ON THE RIVERS OF PARADISE

Genesis 2:11-14

The mention of the four rivers of Paradise has given rise to many endeavours to localize the site. A famous pamphlet by Prof. F. Delitzsch, entitled Wo lag das Paradise?(What was the site of Paradise?), 1881, gave an immense impulse to the enquiry.

1. Delitzsch himself ingeniously identifies Pishon with the Pallakopas, a canal on the W. bank of the Euphrates, flowing into the Persian Gulf, and Gihon with the modern Shaṭṭ-en-Nil, a canal from the E. bank of the Euphrates, near Babylon, and returning to the Euphrates over against Ur. Hiddekel and Euphrates will then be the lower portions of the Tigris and the Euphrates; Havilah part of the desert W. of the Euphrates; Cush the name for that region in Babylonia, which gave its name to the Kassite dynasty. According to this theory, Eden is the plain(edinu) between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the riverin Genesis 2:10 is the Euphrates. It seems, however, fatal to this ingenious view that

(a) it identifies the river of Genesis 2:11 with one of the four heads into which it divides itself:

(b) "the whole land of Havilah" must be intended to denote something much more extensive than the small district enclosed by the Pallakopas canal: while the canal Shaṭṭ-en-Nilcould never be described as encircling the land of Cush:

(c) "in front of Assyria" is a description of the Tigris to the N. of Babylonia, and is unsuitable to the region near Babylon where the two rivers approach most closely to each other.

2. Sayce, in H. C. M. 95 ff., proposes that the garden of Eden is to be identified with the sacred garden of Ea at Eridu, once the seaport of Chaldaea on the Persian Gulf; and the river which waters it (Genesis 2:11), with the Persian Gulf, while the four rivers are the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Pallakopas (Pison), the Choaspes (modern Kerkha) = Gihon, their waters entering the Persian Gulf by separate mouths. The Persian Gulf was sometimes designated in the Babylonian language Nâr Marratum("Bitter River"). It is an objection that the Biblical account makes the one river divide up into four, while this theory makes four rivers flow into one.

3. With this view should be associated that of Hommel (A.H.T.314 ff.), who identifies Eden with the "garden" at Eridu, the river of Genesis 2:11 with the Persian Gulf, and the three rivers Pishon, Gihon and Hiddekel with three wâdisin N. Arabia.

4. Haupt, quoted in Driver, supposes the common source of the four rivers to have been an imaginary lake in N. Mesopotamia. The Pishon is the Persian Gulf encircling Havilah, or Arabia; the Gihon is the Karun, supposed to flow eventually through Cush and become the Nile; while the Tigris and the Euphrates entered, by separate mouths, the marshes, beyond which was the Persian Gulf.

5. Skinner suggests (p. 64) that the Hebrew geographer, who was himself only acquainted with the two great Mesopotamian rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, added to them the names of two others, the Pishon and the Gihon, by which he intended the two mysterious rivers of the Indian world, the Indus and the Ganges.

Delitzsch and Dillmann identify the Pishon with the Indus, and the Gihon with the Nile. "But if the biblical narrator believed the Nile to rise with Euphrates and Tigris, it is extremely likely that he regarded its upper waters as the Indus, as Alexander the Great did in his time; and we might then fall back on the old identification of Pishon with the Ganges" (Skinner).

6. Two of the rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates, which were known to flow from a remote Northern region into Mesopotamia. The tradition supposed this Northern region to contain also the sources of two other rivers which rivalled the Tigris and the Euphrates. One of them, according to the vague notions of ancient geography, somehow encircled Havilah (Arabia), while the other watered the region of Cush (Soudan).

7. The well-known names embodied in this strange piece of ancient geography make it very improbable that any mythological or astrological explanation can meet the requirements of the problem.