Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/166



interpretation of v.$10$, and take along with it the utopian conception of four great rivers issuing from a single source. The site of Paradise is then determined by the imaginary common source of the two known rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. As a matter of fact, the western arm of the Euphrates and the eastern arm of the Tigris do rise sufficiently near each other to make the supposition of a common source possible to ancient cosmography; and there is no difficulty in believing that the passage locates the garden in the unexplored mountains of Armenia. The difficulty is to find the Pishon and the Giḥon. To seek them amongst the smaller rivers of Armenia and Trans-Caucasia is a hopeless quest; for a knowledge of these rivers would imply a knowledge of the country, which must have dispelled the notion of a common source. Van Doorninck has suggested the Leontes and Orontes (ThT, xxxix. 236), but a Hebrew writer must surely have known that these rivers rose much nearer home than the Euphrates and Tigris. There is more to be said for the opinion that they represent the two great Indian rivers, Ganges and Indus, whose sources must have been even more mysterious than those of the Euphrates and Tigris, and might very well be supposed to lie in the unknown region from Armenia to Turkestan. The attraction of this view is that it embraces all rivers of the first magnitude that can have been known in western Asia (for, as we shall see, even the Nile is not absolutely excluded); and it is no valid objection to say that the Indian rivers were beyond the horizon of the Israelites, since we do not know from what quarter the myth had travelled before it reached Palestine. Yet I find no modern writer of note who accepts the theory in its completeness. De. and Di. identify the Pishon with the Indus, but follow the traditional identification of Giḥon with the Nile (see p. 61 above). But if the biblical narrator believed the Nile to rise with Euphrates and Tigris, it is extremely likely that he regarded its upper waters as the Indus, as Alexander the Great did in his time; and we might then fall back on the old identification of Pishon with the Ganges. But it must be admitted that the names Ḥavilah and Kush are a serious. 1. 13). The fact that in mediæval Arabian geographers Ǧeiḫun is a proper name of the Oxus and the Cilician Pyramus, and an appellative of the Araxes and the Ganges, might seem at first sight to have a bearing on the question at issue; but its importance is discounted by the possibility that the usage is based on this passage, due to Jewish and Christian influences in the Middle Ages.]