THE RIVER THAT WENT OUT OF EDEN

Revised: July 15, 2014; August 10, 2014

The mysteries hovering around the garden of Eden are quite tantalizing to our minds. We wonder where it was and what it looked like. We are told a number of things about it in the Bible. We do know that their was a river that flowed through it, for Genesis 2:10 states, "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it was divided and became four heads" (Gen. 1:10).¹ Please read my article "Where is the Garden of Eden?" in which I give evidence that the Garden of Eden was located in Northern Iran. Genesis 2 tells us the names of the four rivers associated with these four heads, two of which we know were the Tigris and the Euphrates. There is a website out there that uses this passage from Genesis to try to show that the Bible is not inspired since there are no rivers that split and become four heads two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. But the author of this website makes the same mistake that many others have made. When the Bible says that "a river went out of Eden to water the garden" it does not mean that this was the direction of the river's flow.
Translators who translate the words this way do so because the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures were not likely to write that a river flows. They would have said, it went. In Hebrew, the idea of flow seems to be reserved for the concept of "gushing forth." But I believe that the Hebrews also could write that a river went and mean that it was located there, without reference to the direction of its flow. In Hebrew it is possible to say that a strip of land or border of a strip of land went out from place to place. Examples of this are the following verses that contain the Hebrew word yatsa meaning "go or come out" ^{(BDB, 422)}:

Num.21:13 “From there they pulled and camped beyond Amon, which is in the wilderness that comes out [Heb., yatsa] of the boarder of the Amorite.”

Joshua 18:11 “…and the border of their lot went out [Heb., yatsa] between the sons of Judah and the sons of Joseph.”

Let us look again at Genesis 2:10: "And a river [Heb., yatsa] went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it was divided and became four heads." (Green) This sentence seems to indicate from the word "became" that there was a continuity of this river into the four heads. Here is where a little more study of the Hebrew terms for river or stream is helpful: Two words of interest are found in the following verse that I shall present in order to show that the word for river can mean more than just the water bed and flowing water; it can include the land that surrounds it. The first Hebrew word is ethan (BDB No. 5158), which means in this case "ever-flowing" and the second Hebrew word we are looking at is  nachal, (BDB No. 5158), which means "torrent, torrent-valley, wady." The following verse shows that it included the land of the valley next to the torrent bed:

“And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to an ever-flowing [Deut. 21:4 BDB No. 386, p. 450-51, adj., basic meaning is perpetual] stream [Heb. ethan], which is not plowed or sown. And they shall break the heifer's neck there by the stream [Heb. nachal].” (Deut. 21:4, emphasis mine)

The significance of this verse may be seen through the statement "which is not plowed or sown." These words definitely refer to the ground of the valley surrounding the continuously flowing stream. This shows us that when the Hebrews thought of a river they sometimes also included the land on each side of it, which they also included in the term. See Jamieson A Commentary Vol. I, p.669, where he observes that the Septuagent calls it a "valley."

Please carefully consider Joshua 13:16-18 because it contains the same Hebrew word for river (nahar, BDB No. 5104) as the Hebrew word used for river in our text, Genesis 2:10:

“And Moses gave to the tribe of the sons of Reuben, for their families; and their border was from Aroer on the lip of the river [nahar] Amon and the city which is in the middle of the valley [lit. river, nahar], and all the plain by Medeba; Heshbon, and all its cities in the tableland; Dibon, and Barmoth-baal, and Bethbaalmeon....” (emphasis mine)

Please note that Green translates nahar here "valley." From this use of nahar we are able see that it can include the whole valley that is adjacent to a river because the city was said to be in the middle of the [nahar]. I demonstrated in my article "Where Is the Garden of Eden" that the Garden was located in Northern Iran at the heads of four rivers, the Pishon (now called the Uizhun or the Kezel Uzun), the Gihon (now called River Araxes), the Tigris River,  and the Euphrates River.  If we include the land surrounding the river that went out of Eden, that is, the Adji Chay, we can move right into the land surrounding the head streams of the Pishon. Now we can observe from a map that the Pishon seems to be the closest of the four rivers mentioned in out text to the head waters of the Adji Chay. The next river listed, called "the second river," the Gihon, is almost as close to the head waters of the Adji Chay as the Pison, and one of the streams that feeds the Pishon is close to one of the streams that feeds the Gihon. Other streams that feed the Gihon originate near some of the head streams of the river the text calls "the third river," that Tigris River. Now it appears that the author of Genesis is listing the rivers in order as you leave the head waters of the Adji Chay and work outward, because the northmost head waters of the Tigris are near the northmost head waters of the Euphrates River, the last river listed. Since the author goes to the bother of numbering these four rivers, it seems that the author means by the words "became four heads" that if you follow these four heads from river head to river head you will successively move in turn from the Adji Chay (the river that "went out of Eden," to the Pishon, to the Gihon, to the Tigris, and to the Euphrates.

Consider the fact that rivers flow from higher elevations into the valleys. This is common for all rivers. That the author of Genesis was asserting that a river flowed to its mouth and then split into four streams that became the heads of four other rivers is very unlikely because such a scenario borders on the impossible. If we place the Garden of Eden at a location near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, how can this river that waters the Eden become the heads of these river named? It will also not due to say that it means that the valley of the Tigris or Euphrates goes up to the place of the heads of these rivers in Iran because the river which flows through Eden is not one of the rivers named in this passage.  The Bible is not in error; people misinterpret it.
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¹Unless otherwise noted scripture quotations are from The Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, copyright © 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985 by P. Green, Sr. which was contained in the side column of Green’s work The Interlinear Bible: Hebrew-Greek-English, © 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 2nd ed. 1986 by Jay P. Green, Sr. (Lafayett, IN: Sovereign Grace Publishers).