difficulty to this class of theories. The latter, indeed, may retain its usual OT meaning if Giḥon be the upper Nile, either as a continuation of the Indus or a separate river; but if it be the Indus alone, Kush must be the country of the Kaššites, conceived as extending indefinitely E of Babylonia. Ḥavilah has to be taken as a name for India considered as an extension of NE Arabia, an interpretation which finds no support in the OT. At the same time, as Di. observes, the language employed ('the whole land of Ḥ.') suggests some more spacious region than a limited district of Arabia; and from the nature of the passage we can have no certainty that the word is connected with the Ḥavilah of Gn. 10.—An interesting and independent theory, based on ancient Babylonian geographical documents, has been propounded by Haupt. The common source of the four rivers is supposed to have been a large (imaginary) basin of water in N Mesopotamia: the Euphrates and Tigris lose themselves in marshes; the Pishon (suggested by the Kerkha) is conceived as continued in the Nâr Marratum (Persian Gulf) and the Red Sea, and so 'encompasses' the whole of Ḥavilah (Arabia); beyond this there was supposed to be land, through which the Giḥon (suggested by the Karun) was supposed to reach Kush (Ethiopia), whence it flowed northwards as the Nile. The theory perhaps combines more of the biblical data in an intelligible way than any other that has been proposed; and it seems to agree with those just considered in placing the site of Eden at the common source of the rivers, to the N of Mesopotamia.[1]
3. It seems probable that the resources of philology and scientific geography are well-nigh exhausted by theories such as have been described above, and that further advance towards a solution of the problem of Paradise will be along the line of comparative mythology. Discussions precisely similar to those we have examined are maintained with regard to the Iranian cosmography—whether, e.g., the stream Ranḥa be the Oxus or the Yaxartes or the Indus; the truth being that Ranḥa is a mythical celestial stream, for which various earthly equivalents might be named (see Tiele, Gesch. d. Rel. ii. 291 f.). If we knew more of the diffusion and history of cosmological ideas in ancient religions, we should probably find additional reason to believe that Gn. 210-14 is but one of many attempts to localise on earth a representation which is essentially mythical. Gu. (1 33, 2 31), adopting a suggestion of Stucken, supposes the original Paradise to have been at the North pole of the heavens (the summit of the mountain of the gods: cf. Ezk. 2814), and the river to be the Milky Way, branching out—[but does it?]—into four arms (there is some indication that the two arms between Scorpio and Capricornus were regarded in Babylonia as the heavenly counterparts of Euphrates and Tigris: see KAT3, 528). It is not meant, of course, that this was the idea in the mind of the biblical writer, but only that the conception of the mysterious river of Paradise with its four branches originated in mythological speculation of this kind. If this be the case, we need not
- ↑ The summary is taken from Dri. p. 59 f.; the original article, in Ueber Land und Meer, 1894-95, I have not been able to consult.
