If you’ve read very many of my articles, you know that I enjoy doing deep dives into the Scriptures. Sometimes I find things that immediately strike me as profoundly meaningful. Other times, I encounter passages that make me ask, “why is this here?” Those are especially fun, because they give me a reason to dig in and do some research and serious meditation. One such passage is in the second chapter of Genesis, where we’re told that:
A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates (Genesis 2:10-14).
Scholars disagree about the identification of a couple of the places Moses names here, but there’s no real controversy about what the passage is saying at it’s most basic level; it’s simply describing the geography of the rivers that flowed through Eden. But why? Why did Moses, writing by the Holy Spirit, want the ancient Israelites to know these details about a place they weren’t going? A place, in fact, that none of them would ever visit? That information wouldn’t seem to be very important. So let’s dig deeper into this passage, and see what we can find.
Looking Closer: What was Moses Actually Doing?
The first thing we want to look at is the relationship between this passage and the initial creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3. I’ve written at length elsewhere about the meaning of the seven-day creation story, and I’m not going to repeat that here. The bottom line, however, is that, in the creation story, Moses uses anthropomorphism, which is a type of metaphor that describes God in human terms, to both identify God as creator and to illustrate the pattern that he intends his human agents to follow as they complete the work of turning chaos into order.
But in Genesis 2:10-14, we see something quite different. Even modern American readers will likely recognize two of these four rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. With a little study we can easily discover that Ashur is a real place in Mesopotamia, and Cush is the name of two different real-world locations; Moses doesn’t tell us which one he means, but it’s not hard to figure out if you know the geography of the region. Havilah is a known place as well; it’s in the desert east of Egypt (Genesis 25:18, 1 Samuel 15:7). Not only does Moses give us the name, he identifies some of the major trade goods that come from there. The only names that are not readily identifiable today are the rivers Pishon and Gihon. In a word, there’s nothing metaphorical about this passage; rather, it gives us the geography of Eden in terms of known, real-world locations.
What do we make of this, then? In Genesis 1:1-2:3 Moses uses anthropomorphism to talk about the creation of the heavens and the earth. In Genesis 2:10-14, he has dropped the metaphors and is now detailing the geography of one particular place on the earth. Why the change? In order to answer that question, we should first make sure we know just where in the text this change occurs. That, as it turns out, is actually pretty easy to do if we start by pulling back, as it were, to a larger view, and looking at the the way the book of Genesis as a whole is put together.
If you read through the entire book of Genesis, you can find a number of sentences that begin with “this is the account of…” (That’s the NIV translation. Many English versions render account as generations, which is closer to a literal reading of the Hebrew.) The word translated “account” here is tôlḏôṯ in Hebrew, and these sentences are therefore called tôlḏôṯ statements by Old Testament scholars. There are ten of them in Genesis (2:4, 5:1, 6:9, 10:1, 11:10, 11:27, 25:12, 25:19, 36:1 and 37:2), and they divide the book into eleven sections of unequal length. The tôlḏôṯ statements mark a change in the story line, and they’re usually followed by a genealogy. If you’re looking for a place in Genesis where Moses changes the way he uses metaphor, a tôlḏôṯ statement is where you should expect to find that change. And, in fact, the first tôlḏôṯ statement is Genesis 2:4, which separates the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 from the story of Eden in Genesis 2:4-4:26.
Genesis 2:4 is also the point where Moses shifts from talking about God creating the heavens and the earth as a whole to describing his interaction with specific individual people. Now, to be sure, in the account of Adam and Eve in Eden, Moses does continue to use anthropomorphism to describe God’s activities; God breathes (2:7), he walks (3:8), etc. That’s not too surprising; anthropomorphism is extremely common throughout the Bible. God’s own understanding of himself is so far outside human experience that we need to think in metaphors in order to understand him at all. But Moses limits his use of metaphor in this section of the book to God; he doesn’t use it (or need it) for anyone else.
So that’s the shift, and it gives us the answer to our question about the relationship between the two passages. Moses goes from a bird’s eye view of the whole creation to a tight focus on just two people who live in one particular spot on the earth, and this change in subject occurs at Genesis 2:4. The geographic details of the four rivers tie Eden to the world known to the Israelites in the same way the genealogy beginning with Adam (which is not in this section, but in Genesis 5:1-32) ties him to the Israelites themselves, as well as to everyone else. There is a message here: God is not dealing in this passage with legendary beings like the ones found in the mythologies of the ancient Near East, but with ordinary people, just like the ones that Moses was addressing. Nor does God limit himself to dealing with groups of people; he has an intimate relationship with individual men and women living in a specific place. Just like he’s willing to have an intimate relationship with each individual Israelite. And with each person reading this passage today, because God deals with real people in real situations. The geography serves to help teach correct theology. That explains why it’s here.
Where are the Rivers of Eden?
This raises a separate question, then, of exactly where Eden is (or was) located. And the really interesting thing about that subject is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to care very much whether we figure it out or not. Which is a very good indication that it’s not that important. But even if it’s not important, I do think it’s a bit interesting.
I want to start, however, by correcting a wrong idea that some people have. I have occasionally heard the suggestion that the names in this passage refer to completely unknown pre-flood places that just happened to have the same names as places known to us. This is incorrect. Both Moses and the Holy Spirit intended to be understood by the original audience of Genesis. The names Moses used were names they would have known, referring to places that still existed in Moses’ era. The idea of different pre-flood names is based on a theory that Noah’s flood must have radically changed the surface of the earth, an idea that has no support whatsoever in Scripture.
Over the years, a great many people have poured over Genesis 2, trying to find clues to the location of Eden, and so far none of them have found an answer that convinces everyone. What follows should therefore be considered speculation.
A big part of the problem in locating Eden is the text of Genesis itself. In verse 10 we read, “A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters,” which sounds like one river splitting into four as the water goes downstream. This is not the way rivers typically run, and the two rivers we can positively identify, the Tigris and the Euphrates, definitely do not have a common origin point, although their headwaters are fairly close together in eastern Turkey. Some scholars do, in fact, suggest this as the location of Eden. But in addition to the undeniable separation between the rivers, this identification also has the problem that the names “Havilah” and “Cush” are not known to have ever been associated with this region.
It turns out, however, that the Hebrew of verse 10 does not necessarily mean one river dividing into four headwaters; it can also be understood as four tributaries coming together into one (Hamilton 1990:166). Coming together is the normal pattern for rivers, and in fact, the Tigris and Euphrates do come together to form the Shatt al-Arab river in southern Iraq, which empties into the Arabian Gulf.
So if we take that as our starting point, what do we get? Well, as I mentioned above, the name “Cush” in antiquity applied to two different regions. The better known one was south of Egypt along the Nile, in modern-day Sudan. But the name “Cush” can also refer to the land of a people called the Kassites, who ruled Babylon between 1531 and 1155 BC. They would have been ruling Babylon at the time Moses was writing Genesis. This Cush was located in what is now western Iran. Interestingly, there is a major river that comes out of Iran and flows into the Shatt al-Arab. It’s called the Karun, and may well be the river that Moses called the Gihon.
What about the fourth river, the Pishon? That’s the one that “winds through the entire land of Havilah,” and Havilah was east of Egypt, which puts it somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. That region did produce gold in ancient times, although it came from the southwestern part of the peninsula, close to the Red Sea, rather than near the Arabian Gulf. The Arabian Peninsula also produced onyx and aromatic resin. But is there a river? Well, sometimes. The Wadi al-Rummah is a dry river that starts near Medina, fairly close to where gold was mined at the time of Moses. It runs all the way across the peninsula and empties into the Arabian Gulf. The last part of it, called the Wadi al-Batin, forms the border between Kuwait and Iraq.
This river, as I said, is dry now, although it still occasionally flows during exceptionally wet years. Ten thousand years ago it was a large, active river, but it’s not certain when it dried up; possibly no more than five thousand years ago. It was already a dry river by the time of Moses, but even a dry river is visible. It’s location would have been known. It’s possible, then, that this was the Pishon.
All this suggests that Eden was located near the tip of the Arabian Gulf. Beyond that, it’s hard to say. You see, rivers carry silt, which builds up at the delta where they empty into the sea, and changes the coastline. They also flood from time to time, which can cause them to shift location, sometimes by miles. We don’t know exactly where all these rivers ran even at the time of Moses, much less the much earlier era of Adam. And there is also another, even more interesting, possibility.
It’s been known for quite a while that the floor of the Arabian Gulf was above water during the most recent ice age. At that time, the rivers that now flow into the gulf continued along what is now the sea floor, all the way to the Indian Ocean. This much is not speculation; the ancient tracks of those rivers can still be traced on the sea bottom, using sonar. We know, therefore, that at that time the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi al-Rummah all converged into one river, which flowed into a large lake. Freshwater springs that are known to exist underneath the gulf would have further contributed to making it possible for this region to support life (Rose 2010:850). As the ice sheets melted, the rising sea would have slowly filled the gulf, until it reached its current level about 8,000 years ago. It’s possible that Eden was in this region, which is now underwater.
So how much of this did Moses know? He wrote Genesis, so obviously he knew the story and the general location of the rivers. And he was a highly educated man, so it’s possible he knew that the Pishon doesn’t actually converge with the other three rivers, but that they would have all come together at some spot that was already under the sea in his era. But if he did know that, he didn’t choose to include it in Genesis. On the other hand, the audience he was writing to was made up of former Egyptian slaves. They might have known the names of the places Moses mentioned in this passage, but it’s not likely they knew very much about the geography of southern Mesopotamia or the Arabian Gulf. And neither Moses nor the Holy Spirit thought they needed to know any more than is recorded here in Genesis.
However it didn’t, and still doesn’t, matter very much whether or not anyone knew that the site of Eden is under the sea (if, in fact, my speculation about its location is correct). At the end of the story of Eden we read:
After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:24).
So even if the garden had somehow survived until the time of Moses, and even if it could be found, there would have been no point in trying to go there; it was no longer accessible. And now we’re looking forward to something better – a heavenly country that has been prepared for us (Hebrews 11:16, 39-40).
It’s important to understand that the Bible was not given to us to satisfy our curiosity. As interesting as it is to speculate, we need to remember that this passage was not written to tell us where Eden was, but to teach us who God is, and who we are in relation to him. Just like the rest of the Bible was. When we study God’s word we should always be asking, “what does this passage show me about who my Father is, and who he created me to be?” It’s only when we keep this as our focus that we can become “a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth” (1 Timothy 2:15).
References Cited
Hamilton, Victor P.
1990 The Book of Genesis chapters 1-17. The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids.
Rose, Jeffrey I.
2010 New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis. Current Anthropology 51(6):849-883.