A river out of Eden

“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. 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 that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”

The first thing to notice about this section is that it was written at the time that it occurred. The writer refers to places that he knows about and assumes that all his readers know about as well. We would have to assume that the original document was written before the Flood, otherwise how would people trying to reconstruct these things after flood know what to write. Apart from Adam and his family, everyone was dead.

But, some might say, how come there are two rivers that we know about today? There are two possible ways to explain this: the first is that Noah and his family, who came out of the ark in the same region that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have their sources. Any person who lives in one of the newer countries like the US or Australia know that settlers will name rivers and towns after places in their homeland. Noah and his family would have wanted to name these rivers after some that they remembered from before the Flood. The other possibility is that The names of the older rivers were written in cuneiform script and different people read the same symbols in different ways so that scribes after the Flood read the original cuneiform and interpreted the names in their own language. However, the first explanation fits the story best.

In spite of Higher Criticism, a person reading these documents would have to accept that they were originally written to be believes as written. This happened long before the crazy Humpty Dumpty world of “Words means whatever I want them to mean”.

1 Cor 14: 33 reminds us that God is not the author of confusion but of peace. If God is not the author of confusion then He would not give us language for communication and then use word to confuse u.

If you would like to find out more about God's grace at the beginning you might like to visit http://www.lulu.com/content/799024 and buy a copy of my book “The Scarlet Thread”.

(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)