Have We Been Getting the Gihon River Wrong This Whole Time?

By MapMaster - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3578442

The location of the Garden of Eden isn't a salvation issue. This is a good thing because none of us really knows where it was! But the text does go to some trouble to describe its location as a real place in the physical world. This shows that it wasn't meant to be a metaphor or just a story about an imaginary place. Rather it was an account of events which happened in a real place. There was a time and a place where the LORD God dwelt with His people. And it is the hope of believers that a world such as this will be manifested in this earth again, made possible and more perfect by the finished work of Christ.

What we know from the text of Genesis chapter two is that a river flowed out of the land of Eden and watered the Garden. From there is was divided unto four chiefs or heads. Even that is somewhat vague, but I think it argues for a northern location for the garden. We believe that we have a good idea as to the identity of two of the rivers - the Tigris and the Euphrates. It is the Pison and the Gihon which are a mystery. 

In my book, I suggested among other things that the Murat or the Aras river could have been the Gihon, and that could still be the case. But there is another possibility that I and everyone else I know of has overlooked. The key to identifying the Gihon is that it runs through or around "the whole land of Cush". The KJV of the bible says "Ethiopia" here but the original Hebrew says "Cush", as in one of the grandsons of Noah.  It isn't likely to be the country in Africa. Cush was a common name in the ancient Near East. For some reason, translators in English usually spell it "Kish". Can you see the city of "Kish" on the map above?

Most of the rivers in that area have since changed course, been diverted or dammed up, or some combination of those things. We don't know exactly how they flowed. There is a map at Ancient Origins which shows Kish on a more eastern branch of that division of the Euphrates, basically where the Hillah Branch of the Euphrates River is now. The point is, Kish was a very ancient settlement. And if someone wanted to identify a river in 2000 B.C. (or earlier) by saying that it was the one which ran around or through the "whole land of Cush" that would be the Cush that they meant, not the Daga Cush in eastern Anatolia and certainly not what we now call Ethiopia. 

If so then the Gihon would be this river which flowed through the territory surrounding the long abandoned city of Kish (Cush). The title "King of Kish" was considered an important one to ANE rulers. To add weight to this idea, Kish bears strong indications of Semitic influence. Don't let it confuse you that Cush was a son of Ham. "Semitic influence" refers to a culture which went beyond what we normally think of as "Semite" such as Arabs and Jews. 

So I am now leaning to the idea that the remains of the Gihon River, which was one of the "heads" or "chiefs" unto which the rivers which flowed out of the land of Eden were divided is now called the Hillah. This also raises questions about the identity of Nimrod. In the book I suggested that David Rohl was onto something when he identified Nimrod with Enmerkar of Ur and Uruk. That is still a possibility, but he was a Sumerian and he came later in history, though we don't know quite when, than a Semitic figure who was a King of Kish named Etana. It was he who "consolidated all the foreign lands" according to the Sumerian King's List.  It could be that Etana is the one we know from scripture as Nimrod. 

None of what I have written above changes my proposed locations for the Garden of Eden. The Tigris and Euphrates come close together (and may be fed by the same underground aquifer) near what is now the Keban Reservoir and Lake Hazar. Somewhere between just west of there and Lake Van to the east fit the descriptions either way one reads it. 

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The book isn't mostly about questions such as this, but something vastly more extraordinary. It is about how early Genesis points to the work and person of Christ. Directly, as the original point. Of course this could not be so unless Christ is indeed who scripture says and that same scripture is the product of Divine Inspiration.

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