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name in all geography. The garden of Gen. 2: was planted "eastward" in Eden. In his
translation of Rosenmuller's Biblical Geography of Central Asia the Rev. N. Morran has
reduced the numerous theories as to the exact situation of Eden to nine, but none of them
answer all the conditions of the problem. This brings us to an important question. For
whose information were the geographical notes of Gen. 2: 8-14 written? Were they
given by God to Adam? We can see no reason why the information should have been
given to him. We know that it was given in writing by Moses, and, to illustrate and
enforce the point we desire to make, we turn to another geographical note. In Gen. 23:
we have the record of the death of Sarah, in which Moses wrote:
"And Sarah died in Kirjath-arba, the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan" (Gen. 23: 2).
It is evident that when Moses took up his pen to write the book of Genesis, he had in
his possession the several "books of the generation" of his fathers. In the family
documents relating to Abraham and Sarah, the place where Sarah died is called by but
one name, Kirjath-arba, but, later, for the benefit of Israel who were then about to enter
the promised land under Joshua, Moses gives the more modern name of the ancient city,
namely "Hebron", and, in Numb. 13:, adds a note,
"Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt" (Numb. 13: 22).
If, therefore, when he wrote Genesis, Moses found it expedient to bring its ancient
geography up to date we must be prepared to find his explaining pen at work in Gen. 2:
When we realize that the flood in the days of Noah, must have seriously altered the
configuration of the land, diverted the course of rivers, buried some tracts of land beneath
the sea, and brought up above sea-level, some part of the sea-bed, we can readily see that
references to geographical boundaries, countries and rivers true in the days of Adam,
may, in Moses' day, have proved valueless, except for archæological purposes.
Moreover, one of the lands mentioned in Gen. 2: is Ethiopia. Now in the Hebrew this
word is "Cush", and as Cush was not born until over two thousand years after Adam, to
speak of Adam knowing the land by the name of one of his descendants who lived two
thousand years after his time would be an anachronism.
Ethiopia, in Africa, is not the only land of Cush. Cush was the father of Seba,
Havilah, and Sabtechah (Gen. 10: 7, 8); Nimrod moved northward into Assyria, the others
went South and settled in Arabia, consequently, there is no reason why we should
introduce a region of Africa into Gen. 2: We must, however, return to the record of
Gen. 2: Moses tells us that the river which watered the garden, parted, and was divided
into four heads. The word "head" being rosh, we must understand this to refer to the
sources of these rivers, not their mouths.
"The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah,
where there is gold; and the gold of the land is good; there is bdellium and the onyx
stone."
Nothing further is said of this river in Scripture but the Companion Bible tells us that
it flows West of the Euphrates, and that in the year of Nabonides, the last king of
Babylonia, it was called Pullakat. Havilah is associated with "Shur, that is before Egypt