Chapter 2:10-14
Next, we have the position of paradise set out with sufficient definiteness to mark the locality in a general way. Eden was the country; “the garden” was that choice portion not in the west or center, but “eastward” which Jehovah Elohim planted for Adam, to which scripture alludes subsequently, not only in this book (3,4,13:10), but in the prophets repeatedly (Isa. 51:33For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody. (Isaiah 51:3), Joel 2:99They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the windows like a thief. (Joel 2:9)), and most at length in Ezekiel (28:13, 31: 9-19, 36:39). It is quite distinct from another Eden, spelled in Hebrew somewhat differently, in Babylonia seemingly, referred to in 2 Kings 19:1212Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed; as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were in Thelasar? (2 Kings 19:12), Isaiah 37:1212Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which were in Telassar? (Isaiah 37:12), and Ezek. 37:2323Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God. (Ezekiel 37:23)).
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became four heads. The name of the one (first) [is] Pison, that which compasseth all the land of Havilah, where the gold [is], and the gold of that land is good; there [is] the bdellium (B'dolach) and the onyx stone (Shoham). And the name of the second river [is] Gihon, that which encompasseth all the land of Cush. And the name of the third [is] Hiddekel, that which goeth forth before (or eastward to) Assyria. And the fourth river [is] Euphrates” (vers. 10-14).
That the district indicated is the plateau of Ararat ought not to be doubted, though it may be beyond the means of man to determine the great center of interest with precision. What is given clearly it was of interest to know: such particulars are withheld as might only gratify man's curiosity, or perhaps expose to dangerous superstition. The burial place of Moses is not the only spot which divine wisdom has veiled from human ken. And the site of the lost paradise might have been perverted to a still wider, yea universal, pilgrimage of folly and evil. The sad truth is that sin led to man's expulsion. He is an outcast. The natural tree of life was thenceforth barred with unmistakable power and rigor. But a better hope was set before the guilty, if we may anticipate a little, in the to be bruised Bruiser of the old Serpent, the Devil and Satan, who too easily overcame the first man. That God should have sooner or later effaced the Adamic paradise (for it was an extensive park, rather than what a garden ordinarily means) is as intelligible morally, as it accords with the fact that no such scene has greeted the eyes of man in the quarter where it must have been when our first parents were introduced there.
This is confirmed by the notable fact that the river which watered paradise is without a name; silence the more striking, because the four rivers, into which, after its allotted service, it was parted, are carefully named. One can readily understand that fact, if it were caused to disappear as well as paradise. It is implied in the description that it flowed through Eden before it watered the garden, and only after that was severed into four chief streams, two of which are the well-known rivers, Hiddekel or Tigris, and P'hrath or Euphrates. The last was notorious enough to need no description, its companion calling for the very few words, “that which floweth toward,” or in front of, “Assyria.” The first and second are described more fully, as being comparatively unknown to Israel, and in fact nowhere else mentioned in the scriptures. But the account has the difficulties arising from countries obscure to later generations at least, both in their own names and in those of their products. Havilah and Cush have been debated nearly as much as Pison and Gihon; and not less the exact force of B'dolach and Shoham.
Josephus, in the first book of his Antiquities, led the way in strange departure by interpreting Pison as the Ganges! and Gihon as the Nile! Him not only many Rabbis follow (some reversing the case) but the best known of the Christian Fathers, as Eusebius, Epiphanius, Augustine and Jerome, &c., without speaking of allegorists like Origen and Ambrose, who adopted the idea of heaven, as others did the misty ideas of Philo Judæus. They accounted for those distant rivers by the supposition of their immense disappearance in the earth and rising again in the east and the south.
The great Reformed commentator, J. Calvin, was too sober to allow such reveries; but he adopted, or rather invented, the notion that by the four heads were meant, both the beginnings from which the rivers are produced, and the mouths by which they discharge themselves into the sea. Thus he argues that the Euphrates was formerly so joined by confluence with the Tigris that we might justly say one river was divided into four heads. But he misunderstood Strabo (Geog. lib. xi.) who nowhere says that at Babylon these two rivers unite, only that at Babylonia they approximate. The junction (save by artificial canals) is really far below at Kurnah (? Digba), whence their united streams form what is now called the Shatt-el-'Arab, discharging its waters into the Persian Gulf by the town of Bassorah.
Clearly therefore the scheme of Calvin, modified by Huet, Vitringa, and Wells, cannot stand, though the facts were not fully or accurately known before the publication of Colossians Chesney's Expedition of the Survey of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris (London, 2 vols. 4to, 1850). There is not the semblance of reason in making out two new rivers from the confluence of the old ones; nor did they diverge again, as he imagined and displays in his map. Dr. Hales in the second edition of his New Analysis acknowledges the error of this hypothesis (entertained in the first), and owns it to be untenable in every point. Calvin confounded the Eden which had paradise in it with that of a distinct spelling in Babylonia; whereas on the face of Gen. 2 it lay not far from where the Euphrates and the Tigris rose, their beginnings, not the end of their divided course. Nor can language be more perverse, than to count their separate streams after that union, had they really existed, the Pison and the Gihon, still less the mere canals higher up. And it is no improvement of the scheme, to make out that these rivers are the waters which wash Khusistan on the east and Arabia on the west of the Gulf. Another manifest confusion is the Havilah of our chapter with that of Gen. 14:77And they returned, and came to En-mishpat, which is Kadesh, and smote all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites, that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar. (Genesis 14:7), Num. 13:2929The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south: and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains: and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan. (Numbers 13:29), and 1 Sam. 15:77And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. (1 Samuel 15:7).
But it is needless to point out the incongruities which will occur to intelligent readers. Reland has proved clearly in his Dissertationum Misc. pars. i. (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1706) that the Gihon is the Araxes, or. Aras, and given strong reasons to conclude that the Pison is the Phasis, though Colossians Chesney pleads for the Halys. Indeed the great Orientalist contended that Colchis, through which the Phasis flows is no other than the Greek form of Havilah; and certainly the connection of gold and precious stones with that land is attested from ancient times more clearly than can be done for the land skirted by the Halys. That the Cossaei, or descendants of Cush, were compassed by the Gihon or Aras cannot be doubted. There was an Asiatic Cush no less than an African, and widely dispersed too. It is the certainty of this fact which explains “The rivers of Cush” in Isa. 18:11Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: (Isaiah 18:1). The nation predicted to intervene for Israel is to be “beyond” those rivers (the Nile and the Euphrates) with which they ordinarily had to do.
On the whole then it is plain that the most celebrated men of research (and but a selection of their less strange speculations is here presented) have failed where they trusted either tradition or personal requirements, one swamp of uncertainty only succeeding another. If Dr. Adrian Reland first stood out speaking with more authority than his predecessors, it was because he adhered with commendable tenacity to the word of God. Not that his vast learning failed him here, for he wielded it with a simple mastery found in no other essayist; and this because he put it in its only just place of subservience to the words written with divine authority, while honestly owning difficulties not yet solved. Those who in our day boast of man are no less uncertain according to their unbelief of God's word.
But it may be noticed that in these verses we first hear of a “river.” Of course, to say nothing of previous conditions, there were such in the Adamic earth since the third day. But it was fitting that mention of a river, should be reserved till the Holy Spirit gave it first in connection with paradise. What the river was which went forth from Eden to water the garden seems intentionally withheld: if it vanished when the garden was no longer seen, it is not hard to see the wisdom of the scripture's silence. But it is certain that those who contend like our Milton, that it was the Tigris, which watered paradise, or, as others, the united streams of Euphrates and Tigris, do violence to the inspired text; and “scripture cannot be broken,” says our Lord. An unnamed river, having its rise in the territory of Eden, flows by the garden which it refreshed, and from thence (how far off is not said) it parts and becomes four heads, or chief streams, two of which (P'hrath and Hiddekel) are beyond doubt, Gihon only not certainly the Aras and Pison, probably the Rioni, if not the Kizil-Irmak (or Halys). For the river, after watering the garden in the east, may have run so as to cover the beginnings of these four in the west of that region.
As the chief modern explorer shows, even the Tigris has in Central Armenia two principal sources, both of which spring from the southern slope of the Anti-Taurus, near those of the Araxes and Euphrates, and not very distant from that of the Halys (Chesney's Exped. 1. 13). The Kizil-Irmak, he had already said, has its sources at two places, both of which are much farther to the eastward than they are generally represented on the maps. The sources of the Aras and those of the north branch of the Euphrates are about ten miles from one another (J. of the Royal Geogr. Soc. 6. part 2, p. 200). It is a curious statement, cited by 1. 274, from Michael Chamish in his history of Armenia, himself an Armenian, that Araxmais built a city in the plain of Aragaz, near the left bank of the Gihon, the name of which was then changed to Arast or Araxes after his son. Also, Benjamin of Tudela, the Hebrew traveler who visited the east in the twelfth century, calls the whole tract, east of the sources of the Aras, Cush or Ethiopia, and speaks of the river as the Gihon (Chesney 1. 282).
The text then is conclusive for the Armenian table-land as the true locality, and disproves every modification of the scheme that conceives the garden and the described rivers as in Babylonia or even farther south along Khusistan and E. Arabia. Nor does it compel one to explain away the meaning of a “river” or to give to “heads” any meaning which is not the natural and correct one. As to the moral lesson, it was but creature trial, and no permanence in either river or paradise. How different the paradise of God on high, or even that river the streams whereof make glad the city of God on earth! God is in the midst of her: this accounts for all in His grace. But the manifestation of divine grace and fidelity for both awaits the coming of the Lord. Here was but the responsible man in the midst of the garden; and we see how quickly he fell and dragged down all in his own ruin. Christ alone overcomes, and through Him God gives us the victory.