The Geography Lesson

Into and Out of the Garden

We interrupt this story about the creation of the first earthling and the beginning of human history for a quick geography lesson.

Vv. 8–9 place our ancestor in a garden and introduce the Tree of Life and the Tree of Sorting. Then we suddenly pause for a public service announcement about rivers. Why do we care? What’s the purpose of vv. 11–14?

What I think is happening here is that the author is interested in demonstrating the connection of Eden with the world that we all actually do live in. Eden is a world of myth, and our story will return there shortly, but make no mistake — we are on planet Earth, and this is the story of our own human ancestors.

Before long, at the beginning of Genesis 6, we will find a world in which gods interbreed with humans. It will sound an awful lot like the Greek mythology so many of us learned in school. Heroes like Hercules and Achilles had mixed human and divine parentage of the kind we’ll read about in Genesis 6. Here in Genesis 2, and in Genesis 1 as well, human beings are created by God but not related to him.

This strikes me as a good time to repeat, for the sake of newcomers who haven’t read from the beginning, that I’m doing this close reading of the Bible not strictly to teach, but to learn as well. I’m making a new translation of Genesis not because (like some translators I could name) I think all the existing translations are wrong, nor because I, as a scholar, now have information that wasn’t available to previous translators.

I’m translating anew because I’m convinced by the assertion of the late Judah Goldin that translation is the surest way to make sure you understand a text, to find out what you really know and what you don’t. Much of the Bible’s wording — certainly here in Genesis — is so familiar to me now that it’s easy for me to fool myself in to thinking that I know what the words mean.

I’ll go further and say that the one way to make sure my understanding of the Bible is solid is to reconstruct it from the ground up. If you don’t know what the words mean, you are only guessing at the meaning of the sentences, and that means you could be entirely missing the point of the paragraphs and longer narratives.

What we’re doing at this stage of our reading is trying to understand what these geographical names listed in vv. 11–14 are identifying; why this description matters; and what it’s doing at this particular point in the story. We’ll go back to discussing the details soon, but first I want to zoom out and look at the sequence of information presented here. I’m hoping that will help us understand the larger question: Why do we care about these rivers?

Here's a quick summary of the four rivers in the Genesis 2 geography lesson. For now, I’m taking all the proper names and the more challenging nouns from the NJPS translation, reserving the right to change them later as I look more closely at them:

• River: Pishon • Land: Havilah • Principle Products: Gold, Bdellium, Lapis Lazuli

• River: Gihon • Land: Cush

• River: Tigris • Land: Assyria

• River: Euphrates

What we see, if I’m not mistaken, is the following sequence:

• unknown river, unknown land, identifying details

• unknown river, known land

• known river, known land

• known river

What can we make of this sequence?

To me it seems that our story is interested in locating the mythical site of humanity’s creation in an imaginary geographical place that is nevertheless directly connected to locations that would be known, at least by name, to the readers of the story.

We begin in Eden, from which, as we saw in v. 10, the river emerges, turning into the headwaters of four other rivers. Our first stop (to channel Donald Rumsfeld for a moment) is with an unknown unknown — both a river and a land whose names are evocative but not of any particular geographical location to which we could buy a ticket.

We continue with a known unknown: a river whose name we’re not familiar with, flowing through a land we recognize on our maps. Cush was one of the provinces ruled by Ahasuerus (see the first verse of the book of Esther). You can buy a ticket to Cush nowadays, though perhaps not under that name; I’m embarrassingly weak on my African geography, but Cush was somewhere in Ethiopia, Erirrea, and/or Sudan. For present purposes, the point is that this is somewhere we could stick a pin in a map.

Next, the Tigris River and the country of Assyria — two knowns — and finally the Euphrates, the Big Muddy, the river that itself perhaps defines a land. Certainly the Tigris and the Euphrates together define the land that we call Mesopotamia (“Between the Rivers”), a name that is matched in the Bible by Naharaim (“The Two Rivers”). We are home.

Another point worth making is the parenthetical nature of this paragraph. We’ll have more to say about it when we get to v. 15, but it’s obvious to any reader that this information is interrupting the story that’s being told. This is not background information (as Gen 1:1–2 and 2:5–6 are), but something additional that is fulfilling a need not for readers but for the writer.

One last thing for today, before we begin our detailed look at this river system in Tuesday’s post (fully accessible to paid subscribers). The movement from myth to reality that I’ve used to describe vv. 11–14, the movement from a world that does not seem to be the one we inhabit to a world that clearly is our own, is exactly the same movement that the Bible itself uses:

• Genesis moves us from the Primordial History of chs. 1–11 to the recognizable world of chs. 12–50.

• The Bible as a whole takes us from the Garden through the age of the Patriarchs (who inhabit a recognizable landscape) and on through to the Kingdom of Israel. The further we go in the biblical story, the more it intersects with the history we know from other sources.

Now back to the details. We’ll start with the Pishon next time.