PARADISE, RIVERS OF (plei-dis, rIvIrs tiv).
The old question, "Where was the garden of Eden?" is a fascinating one, but it is one of those which the monuments have not yet elucidated, al though they do provide some illustrative material concerning it. Where it was must be settled from the description of the four rivers, although after the rivers are settled or conjectured, it re mains to decide whether their head waters or their mouths are to be regarded as making the "four heads" spoken of as the locality of the gar den. We may dismiss the conjectures which put Paradise in America or at the north pole, and consider the theories which suppose the four riv ers to be somewhere about Southern Baby/onia.
Of these, the one which has of late had the most currency is one which has been developed at length by the younger Delitzsch in his work entitled "Wo lag das Parodies,'" He begins with the certainty about the two rivers Euphrates and Tigris (Hiddekel) and makes the other two to be the two great canals of Southern Babylonia the volume of whose water was nearly as great as that of the two main rivers—the Pallakopas Ca nal, which runs along under the Arabian hills west of the Euphrates, being the Pison, and the Shaft-en-Nil which runs, or ran, between and parallel to the Euphrates and Tigris, being thc Gihon. But it is not easy to show that the Pal lakopas "compasseth the whole land of Havilah" which ought to be Arabia where are found gold, onyx, and thc bdellium.
Neither can the Shatt-eu-Nil be supposed to "compass the whole land of Ethiopia." . The latest considerable discussion of the four rivers is that by Professor Haupt in a paper read before the Amcrican Oriental Society. Of course the Tigris and the Euphrates are perfectly clear, and Ile supposes that the author meant to describe the. imaginary upper course of the Nile in the Asiatic region as the Gilion. The river Pison is in the cxtreme east, most distant from the writer and so named first and most fully described. It flows around Havilah (Arabia) whose products are pure gold. the gum bdellium, and the shoham stone—translated onyx in the English version, but really the pearl, literally, the "gray gem," as its Assyrian name indicates.
This can be nothing but the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, conceived of as one river flowing around Arabia, but originating from the same source as the Tigris and Euphrates. The Pales
tinian writer would have conceived of the Per sian Gulf and the Red Sea as much narrower than they now are. liVe must remember that the Assyrians called the Persian Gulf naru marratu —the bitter or salt river. There is no sharp dis tinction between river and sea in Semitic lan guages, and it is quite a modern thought to dis tinguish different bodies of water, such as a river, bay, sea, and ocean.
So far as the Pison is concerned, this identifi cation is very much like that of Dr. Taylor Lewis in his translation of Lange's "Commentary on Genesis," published as long ago as 1868. He placed Eden at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates in Lower Babylonia ; and then taking this same idea of the ocean as a river, which is familiar to every reader of Homer, Pindar, or Strabo. he supposed the Red Sea and the Per sian Gulf surrounding .A rahia to be the Gihon, while the Indian Gulf and the Indian Ocean washing the shores to the end as far as India, along which he places Havilah, he supposed to be the Pison. It will be seen that he makes both rivers to be ocean streams, one tending eastwardly and the other westwardly, from Eden.
It will seem strange to many to think of the broad ocean as we know it as only a river. But we must get out of our modern conceptions, to be in a condition to understand ancient ways of con ceiving of the earth and the ocean.
In the Old Testament the word nahar, river, is applied to floods, which lift their waves or voices. In Ps. lxvi:6 it is applied to the Red Sea. Jonah says (ii :4), "The river (translated flood) went round me," referring to the Mediterranean. Equally rivers like the Nile are called "sea." So Homer frequently speaks of the ocean as a river, and the Greek geographer, Strabo, also speaks of the four great bays. or sinuses—the Caspian and the Pontus on the north, and the Persian and the Arabian seas on the south—as inlets from the ocean streams. The question of the location of the Garden of Eden is one which we can hardly answer satisfactorily, and it only in minor points that anything can yet be added to guide a conclusion as to the site of Eden or the identity of the two disputed rivers. Pison and Gilion. (Rivers of Paradise, by William Hayes Ward, D. D., Hom. Rev., Dec. 1894.)