Biblical Hebrew Forum

[kwrandolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Walter:

Your admission of "_might_" below underscores the whole problem of 
historical reconstruction-too much information has been lost so that 
we really don't know.

Another explanation that I have heard is that when Noah and his sons 
stepped off their ship, they faced a completely reworked landscape 
where all the familiar landmarks were replaced. They named the first 
two major rivers they came across by names they were familiar with in 
pre-flood geology, but these were not the same rivers. Much the same 
way that migrants named new locales after ones that they left, such 
as Pittsburg California named after Pittsburg Pennsylvania, or Newark 
California after Newark New Jersey, and so forth, so Noah and his 
sons reused old names for new locales.

Secondly, wasn't Ur of the Chaldeas a different city than Ur of the 
Sumerians? I thought that was a reference found among the Ebla 
tablets. Correct me if I am mistaken, but my understanding is that Ur 
of the Chaldeans was a city to the north east of Ebla whose ruins 
have yet to be found, while Ur of the Sumerians was to the south east.

But without more solid data, all of this is speculation based on too 
few facts either way.

Interesting article, by the way.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Walter R. Mattfeld" <mattfeld12 AT charter.net>
>  For an article arguing that Eden's four rivers arising from one
>  _might_ be recalling the "four heads" of the Euphrates crossing
>  "edin-the-floodplain" of ancient Sumer cf. the following url:
>
>  http://www.bibleorigins.net/EdensFourRivers.html
>
>  Regards, Walter
>  Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre, M.A. Ed.
>  mattfeld12 AT charter.net