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  • From: "Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Eden & Rivers - Genesis 2:10
  • Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 07:52:33 -0700

On May 11, 2005, at 8:50 PM, <tladatsi AT charter.net> <tladatsi AT charter.net> wrote:

The text of Genesis 2:10 does not say that the four rivers
flow into or through Eden. Rather a single river leaves
Eden and then forms the *head(waters)* for four rivers,
including the Tigris and Euphrates. The head waters of the
Tigris and Euphrates are very close to one another in
Eastern Turkey not far from Mt. Ararat. Several other
rivers have their headwaters in that region, e.g. the
Araxes and Keyhan (Gihon?). So, based on a prima facie
reading of Genesis 2:10, Eden would be in Eastern Turkey,
not in Mesopotemia.

Hello everyone,

First, a "thank you" to Jack Tladatsi for drawing us back to the actual wording of the text. Proposals that locate Eden in southern Mesopotamia must of necessity "rewrite" the Genesis 2:10-14 description in order to locate Eden at the *confluence*, rather than the *origin*, of the Euphrates and Tigris.

As Jack wrote according to Genesis 2:10, the river from Eden "separates" or "diverges" [Heb פרד = PRD] into four "head(waters)." However near together the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates might be--according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the headwaters are "within 50 miles of each other"--there is no single river that "separates" or "diverges" to become these two.

Moreover, the other two rivers present almost insuperable difficulties.

No such river as the Pishon is mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. According to Gen 2:11, the Pishon "is the one that surrounds" or "is the one that flows around" [Heb הוא הסבב = HW) HSBB] the whole land of Havilah. Notice, if you please, that the narrator acts as if the readers know this river; the narrator does not say "the Pishon flows around ..." but "the Pishon, that's the one that flows around ..." Oddly, though, the Pishon is not mentioned anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. In the two other verses where Havilah is used in the Tanakh as a toponym, it is in the phrase "from Havilah to Shur" (Gen 25:18; 1 Sam 15:7). Both verses specify that Shur is east of Egypt; both have the conceptual starting point of "from Havilah to Shur" as southern Palestine (the contexts are Ishmael's wandering/ settling, from Beersheba southwestward, and Saul's pursuit of the Amalekites); both thus suggest that Havilah is somewhere in the Negeb or the northern Sinai peninsula. The other Biblical references to "Havilah" use this as a personal name of one of Noah's descendants, a son of Cush and brother of Seba, uncle of Sheba and Dedan. If the personal name were transferred to a toponym, this would draw Havilah farther south, into southwestern Arabia. In either event, there is no river that "flows around" or "surrounds" either place. Going with the Gen 25:18/1 Sam 15:7 location of Havilah, one might, I suppose, suggest that the Biblical נהל מצרים = Nahal Mizraim ("Wadi of Egypt") could constitute a "river[bed]" that flows "through" Havilah, but this would not fit the verb סבב = SBB, nor would this river originate from a common source shared with the Tigris and Euphrates.

Finally, there is the Gihon. The only water source known elsewhere in scripture as Gihon is the spring outside of Jerusalem. This Gihon certainly does not "flow around" (again, סבב = SBB) the whole land of Cush, whether you associate this Cush with southern Arabia, Ethiopia, or the land of the Kassites. There is no river that "flows around" or "surrounds" Cush-as-southern-Arabia or Cush-as-Ethiopia, nor indeed Cush-as-the-land-of-the-Kassites. Even if you follow Delitzsch and others in locating the origins of the Kassites up in the Urartu region, perhaps along the Araxes river that Jack
mentioned, rather than the Zagros highlands, there still is no river that "surrounds" that region. And the Araxes does not split off from a source common to it, the Euphrates, and the Tigris.

So we have in Genesis 2:10-14 a description of a single river that splits to become four rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pishon (which flows around Havilah) and the Gihon (which flows around Cush). The Pishon and Gihon are completely unidentifiable from these descriptions; no such rivers exist, and if they did, they wouldn't share headwaters with the Tigris and Euphrates. In fact, the Tigris and the Euphrates don't issue from a common source river. The geography of the rivers is quite impossible, if we actually take the narrator's description at face value. We are drawn northward by the Tigris and Euphrates but southward by the Pishon and Gihon. Unless (a) the narrator is using the toponymns Havilah, Gihon, and Cush in a way that departs radically from all other biblical uses of those toponyms, *and* (b) these waterways have been radically altered in the course of recent (since the narrator's day!) geological history such that they once originated from a common "ur-river" but now have individual headwaters, albeit "within 50 miles of each other" for the two rivers we can actually identify, then the geography is simply impossible.

Eden is nowhere.

And the narrator knows it, and expects readers to realize it too. The geography of the rivers, which has no substantial function in the plot, has as at least one of its major functions to signal to the reader not to look for Eden on a map. I suggest (this is not yet well- developed enough to call it an argument) that this geography is analogous the chronological "confusion" in the books of Daniel and Judith. As is well known, the storyline of the book of Judith is "hopelessly confused" from an historical point of view: in it, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Assyria in Nineveh, makes war on one Arphaxad, who ruled the Medes in Ecbatana, as well as Arioch, king of Elam (see Gen 14:1). Similarly, the book of Daniel begins by displacing Nebuchadnezzar chronologically, suggesting that Nebuchadnezzar (who ruled Babylon 605-562 BCE) raided the Jerusalem temple in the third year of Jehoiakim (606 BCE--before Nebuchadnezzar's accession to the throne of Babylon) whereas all other biblical references to this event place it in the 11th and last year of Jehoiakim's reign (597 BCE). These chronological displacements are not, in my judgment, simple mistakes; they are intentional disorientations that signal to discerning readers not to read these works as "histories" but to look for other value. Similarly, it seems to me quite clear that the narrator of Genesis 2 takes a moment to locate Eden precisely nowhere, in an impossible geography, so that readers will not spend their valuable time trying to find it on a map, but will attend to other purposes in the narrative.

Chris

--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info




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