13 That is the one that flows all around Nubia. ה֣וּא הַסּוֹבֵ֔ב אֵ֖ת כָּל־אֶ֥רֶץ כּֽוּשׁ׃
For the first time in our geography lesson, we are in a known location. It’s off the beaten path, but it is on the map. My go-to English translations are split between simply transliterating the name of this country as Cush (with a C and not a K because the Hebrew letter is כ and not ק) and calling it Ethiopia.
I always used to translate כושׁ as Ethiopia myself until a sophisticated undergraduate once politely informed me that the correct translation of this word is “Nubia.” I’ve come to think he’s right.
There is a Talmudic discussion (on b. Meg. 11a) about whether Cush in Esth 1:1 — which tells us that the Persian emperor Ahasuerus ruled “from India [Hodu] to Cush” — is showing the vast reach of the Persian Empire, or whether Hodu and Cush were actually right next to each other. In fact, there is a mountain range just to the west of India (on today’s political maps) called “the Hindu Kush.”
Perhaps this is how the Ganges got into the mix as one of the four rivers. But both in Esther and here (and elsewhere in the Bible), Cush is an African country, not a South Asian one. In Gen 10:6, Cush and Mitzrayim (Egypt) are both descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who is understood to represent the continent of Africa, as Japheth represents Europe and Shem represents Asia. More on this, of course, when those three boys show up in our reading.
Why Nubia? As with India, the political borders of the country we call Ethiopia are not the same as they were even 50 years ago, let alone at the time when Genesis was written. It’s worth pointing out Rashi’s comment that all of the names we are being given here, both of countries and of rivers, did not exist at the moment that the story is describing. “The names are written here because that is how these lands [and rivers] would eventually be identified.” It’s also worth remembering that we have interrupted a story about our primordial past for some informative points that belong to the time of the writer, not to the time of the story.
Now, with Nubia, we are south of Egypt and into black Africa. HALOT notes the Egyptian name Kʾš used to describe “the lands of the Nile in southern Egypt, meaning Nubia and Northern Sudan.” Perhaps (though this is only speculation) including Cush as our first “known” geographical name is intended to spread the reach of the four rivers to the farthest extent (in one direction) of the human world as it was then understood.
It would be amusing to think Nubia was the first choice because that is where humanity originated; “Lucy,” the first specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, an ancient ancestor of humanity, was found in Ethiopia. But that is an alternative story of creation, not the one we are reading in Genesis 2.
There would be much more to say about Nubia if we were later in history and reading Samuel or Kings. English speakers who still have some familiarity with the Bible — though I understand there are fewer of them than there used to be — may nonetheless recognize Jeremiah’s question (in 13:23), “Can the Cushite reverse his skin or the leopard his spots?” (And I’ve been told that כושׁי is “the כ-word” in Modern Hebrew and should be avoided. In Biblical Hebrew, it is descriptive, not pejorative.
I must add just one more note from David Kimhi (the Radak), the 12th-13th c. Provencal commentator, simply because it charmed me. He picks up from our verse’s assertion that the Gihon/Gusher “flows all around Nubia” to add: “From which it flows into Serendip, the great southern ocean.”
14 The name of the third river is Tigris וְשֵׁ֨ם הַנָּהָ֤ר הַשְּׁלִישִׁי֙ חִדֶּ֔קֶל
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