The Bible Skeptic

Paradise: MIA

Another Reply to Damien Mackey Regarding My Article, "The Loss of Paradise"

It would appear that Damien Mackey is not finished trying to argue for his proposed location of the biblical Garden of Eden as having been in Israel. Nor has he completed his quest for drawing together Eden’s four rivers into the Jordan valley rather than in the Persian Gulf. In his initial attempt, Mr. Mackey argued that Eden’s four rivers mentioned in Genesis are not to be found solely anchored in the lower Mesopotamian basin as my original article had argued. As noted in my response to his first critique, Mr. Mackey took a great deal of his ideas from the work of the late Bible scholar Abraham S. Yahuda (1877-1951). According to Yahuda, Eden’s garden was located in Israel and the "rivers of Eden" had their source in an as-yet-to-be-discovered underground water system that also supplied the Jordan.

Mr. Mackey’s original article and critique never offered the archaeological data to support this "single source" assertion and, sadly for his position, neither does this new argument. However, this new argument is not his own. Mr. Mackey has merely directed me to an article written by a gentleman named Gaines R. Johnson, another Christian apologist and creator of a website called the "Christian Geology Ministry."

While Mr. Mackey offers no commentary on this article by Mr. Johnson, I must assume that by sending it to me he agrees with its arguments and conclusion. Since this is not Mr. Mackey’s own work and since I have not been contacted directly by Mr. Johnson regarding his article in support of Mr. Mackey’s position, I don’t feel particularly obligated to give the article much attention other than to note and respond to how it may support Mr. Mackey’s initial assertion: Eden was located in Israel and the four rivers were fed by a single source which also fed the Jordan.

Recall that my original article’s argument for the location of Eden and the single river which branched into four heads rested heavily on the work done by Egyptologist Dr. Kenneth Kitchen in his book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament. As noted in my reply [1] to Mr. Mackey’s first response to my article,

Dr. Kitchen has read the text of Genesis 2:10-14 and concluded, based upon the geographical markers in the story that the four rivers of Eden are limited to the area which is now southern Iraq. Dr. Kitchen notes that the Genesis author lists the rivers in an east to west configuration. Since modern geography knows that the Tigris flows to the east of the Euphrates, and the Genesis author names the Tigris before the Euphrates, Dr. Kitchen reasons the two unknown rivers, the Gihon and the Pishon, mentioned first before the Tigris and the Euphrates, likely flowed (following the directional pattern he sees in the text) to the east of the last two mentioned rivers. Therefore, from east to west, Dr. Kitchen believes the rivers are the Gihon, the Pishon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. That would mean that the Gihon and the Pishon lie closer toward the modern Iranian border with Iraq than far to the west in the land of Egypt as Mr. Mackey’s Professor Yahuda has argued. Mr. Mackey’s article in no sense refutes Dr. Kitchen’s reading of Genesis but merely prefers Professor Yahuda’s assumptions without mentioning Dr. Kitchen’s "geographical scenario" whatsoever.

Mr. Mackey had argued in his own article that Professor Yahuda believed the Gihon and the Pishon are actually one and the same river: the Nile; the Gihon flowing as the "Nubian Nile" in Upper Egypt, the Pishon in the region of the Nile flowing through Egypt proper which Mr. Mackey’s Professor Yahuda calls the "Egyptian Nile." Therefore, according to Mr. Mackey’s quotation of Professor Yahuda, "[T]he Pishon and the Gihon [are] the two portions of the Nile which in those days were regarded as two separate rivers." However, this latest offering from Mr. Mackey has abandoned this argument and instead favors a different identification of the Gihon and Pishon. Mr. Johnson’s article, which Mackey peddles today, argues instead that the Gihon and Pishon are not two different sections of the Nile, but that both have shifted to the east with the Pishon having once bisected the center of modern Saudi Arabia and the Gihon running from the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, through what is today the Red Sea, and then turning westward into modern Ethiopia.

Mr. Johnson first notes in his article that "[t]he quest for pinpointing the exact location of the Biblical Garden of Eden and the four rivers almost rivals the quest for the location of fabled Atlantis." I don’t think Mr. Johnson realizes just how accurate his analogy is. Both Eden and Atlantis, according to their fables, were utterly destroyed in a supernatural disaster. Both vanished without a trace. Both are fictions. What motivates people to continue a search for something that never existed in the first place (as described in their mutual fables) is itself a fascinating quest. What drives people to spend money and expend energy searching for something they can’t possibly find? I suppose only those that pursue Bigfoot or the 12^th Planet would be able to understand.

At any rate, Mr. Johnson quotes from Genesis and states that "[t]he Bible says that a single river flowed ‘out’ of Eden" and then separated into four other rivers "downstream all fed from a common single river source." Mr. Johnson makes two errors here. The Bible does not say that the single river flowed out of Eden. The Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:11 is yatsa’ which means, "to go or come out". It doesn’t necessarily refer to the directional flow of a river. Using Mr. Johnson’s own example from his article, one could say that the Ohio River goes out of Cincinnati toward Pittsburg from thence it parts, and becomes into two heads. That is accurate without stating in which direction the Ohio is flowing. So, for Mr. Johnson to say that the separation of this single river into four other rivers is "downstream" is an unwarranted interpretation of the text. In fact, the text specifically states that these four branches outside the garden are the "heads" of the single river that went out of Eden. A river head is, by definition, a source. As a matter of fact, the Hebrew word translated "head" in the KJV and other English versions of the Bible, is ro'sh. Ro'sh means, among other things, "beginning; top; upper part". Thus, the river that went out of Eden was not the source of the other four, but the other way around. Dr. Kitchen observes this same interpretation of the text. He writes of the narrative in Genesis 2:10,

This is a ‘snapshot’-type view, taken…looking out from where the single stream entered the garden, and looking back just upstream to the point where four ‘head’ rivers came together to form the single stream that entered the garden. (emphasis original, p.429)

The four branches were the source of the river that eventually "watered the garden" of Eden just as the Monongahela and Allegheny are the two heads which feed the Ohio if we were to be looking out at them from down the Ohio. Looking back at the heads we would be looking upstream, not down. If the four branches were the source of the greater river, then the flow of water was down these branches, converging in the single river mentioned first in Genesis 2:10 which must have emptied into the Persian Gulf. Mr. Johnson has misread the verses and the rest of his argument rests upon this misinterpretation.

Mr. Johnson then proceeds (based upon an erroneous reading of Genesis) to try and identify the four river heads and a single river source from which they sprung. Of course, the Bible never states that the four rivers had a single source from which they received their waters, only that the single river into Eden had as its source the four rivers named the Pishon, the Gihon, the Hiddekel [Tigris] and the Euphrates. For an unknown reason, Mr. Johnson has misread the Bible and assume the average reader believes the narrative of Genesis to suggest that "if two of the rivers [the Tigris and Euphrates] started [in the mountainous terrain of modern Turkey], the other two must, as well". But that isn’t what the Bible says. Genesis 2:10 merely states that a single river went out of Eden to water a garden. From there it parted and became four heads. There is nothing to suggest that the four heads had a common source in the northern reaches of modern Turkey, or anywhere else for that matter. Presumably, these four heads had their sources from numerous tributaries (as the Tigris and Euphrates still do) that flow down from various highlands in the region.

So, Mr. Johnson’s quest is doomed from the start since he is misreading the text and basing his quest on an error. Nonetheless, he accepts the modern Euphrates and Tigris courses as the Hiddekel and Euphrates rivers named in the text. He then agrees with Dr. Kitchen’s location of the Pishon as having once flowed through Arabia. This, of course, is against Mr. Mackey’s previous selection of the Pishon as being but one portion of the extensive Nile as argued by Professor Yahdua. Mr. Johnson writes that "[t]here is a recently discovered ‘Fossil River’ [sic] that runs from the western mountains of Saudi Arabia towards Kuwait. This now long since dry riverbed was detected by satellite imaging." He then links to a creationist website that quotes from a July/August 1996 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review:

Although the meaning of some of the details in [the biblical] passage is uncertain, [Genesis 2:11-12] does describe a river flowing into the head of the Persian Gulf from the low mountains of western Arabia, the path followed by the recently discovered Kuwait River. An important key is the Biblical phrase "the gold of that land is good." Only one place in Arabia has such a deposit — the famous site of Mahd edh-Dhahab, the "Cradle of Gold." This ancient and modern gold mining site is located about 125 miles south of Medina, near the headwaters of the Kuwait River. (4)

This matches Dr. Kitchen’s conclusion exactly:

…in very far antiquity, just such a river once existed, and its long-dried course has recently been traced from its rise in the west Arabian goldlands (in Havilah) east and east-northeast toward the head of the gulf, via modern Kuwait. (p.429)

So, while Mr. Mackey’s original argument (via Prof. Yahuda) was that the Pishon "can only mean that portion of the Nile which circumscribes the gold-land of upper Egypt, and which, in contradistinction to the Nubian Nile, we would call the Egyptian Nile", he now has hitched his wagon to Mr. Johnson who identifies the Pishon in exactly the same location as Dr. Kitchen, bisecting the Arabian peninsula, some 500 or more miles away from Yahuda’s proposed location. I suppose it doesn’t matter to Mr. Mackey where the various rivers of Eden flowed, as long as they can be made to wind up in Israel he will be happy. It appears Mr. Mackey will hang out with whatever author can help him get the rivers into the Jordan valley.

Mr. Johnson’s article next tackles the problem of locating the Gihon. He notes that the Bible speaks of the Gihon as encompassing the whole land of "Ethiopia". But "Ethiopia" is not found anywhere in Genesis. The word used is Kush (or Cush). And, as Dr. Kitchen noted,

It should be obvious that this Kush cannot have been Upper Nubia in East Africa [aka Ethiopia], most of two thousand miles away to the southwest of the Tigris zone…The land of ‘Kush,’ as others have suggested long ago, would be the land of the Kassites (Kashshu), in western Iran… (p 429).

Having mistaken the location of the land of "Kush" in Genesis 2:13 as Ethiopia, Mr. Johnson now makes a leap which is very reminiscent of Prof. Yahuda’s identification of Pishon and Gihon as parts of the Nile. Mr. Johnson believes that the Gihon "formerly flowed down what is now the Red Sea basin". He has no real biblical support for this idea, nor any true geological support. He merely places a river there at a time before the rift occurred between what are now the eastern and western sides of the Red Sea. He does mention a study from 1937 which states that the similarities among fish species of the Jordan and those in Ethiopia are due to "a river system that ran down the Great Rift Valley", apparently sometime in the distant past. Interesting, if true. However, similarities in fish species do not place a river down the Red Sea basin, connecting it with the ancient Pishon and the Tigris and Euphrates. Indeed, Mr. Johnson does not tell us when this extensive river system is believed to have existed or when the separation of the eastern and western coasts of the Red Sea began. Does the geological history of the Red Sea area even line up with biblical assertions, granting for the moment that a river did once run down the basin in the days of Adam and Eve?

Mr. Johnson confesses on his website that he is an "Old Earth" creationist. That means Mr. Johnson doesn’t believe the earth is a mere six to ten-thousand years old. People who believe the earth to be that young are called "Young Earth" creationists. A creationist is a person who believes Genesis offers an accurate (depending upon interpretation) history of our planet. Mr. Johnson has found a creative way of arguing that the earth is old but since that subject is not of current concern, I won’t examine his reasoning here. Suffice to say that while Mr. Johnson may not believe the geological history of the earth is only six to ten-thousand years old, he certainly maintains that human history only stretches back that far. Thus, for Mr. Johnson, and all other creationists (whether "Young" or "Old") humanity in the form of Adam and Eve appeared on the earth roughly six to ten-thousand years ago. So, the question is begged for Mr. Johnson’s proposal of a river running down the Red Sea basin: when could such a river have existed at a time which would have been retained in human memory?

Obviously, the river could not have been there while the Sea occupied the basin. If any ancient river crossed the basin it would have done so prior to it filling with sea water. And when did that happen? What is the history of the Red Sea basin? According to Daniel H. Swartz and Jr. Arden [2],

During the Mesozoic, movements in the region of the present-day Red Sea were primarily epeirogenic in character, accompanied by deep-seated fracturing and intermittent volcanism. At the end of the lower Eocene, a stress couple inferred to have developed in the Hermon mountain region (Lebanon) caused horizontal displacement of crustal blocks, generation of compressional forces in the north and concomitant tensional stresses in the southern part of the region, and opening of the Red Sea-Suez gulf depression (paar) along the lines of separation between the Sinai, Arabian, and northeast African blocks. The depression continued to widen and deepen, but remained closed at its southern end until separation of a fourth block, the so-called Horn of Africa, commencing in Miocene time, and opening of the Bab el Mandab strait in the Pliocene.

So, while Mr. Johnson has provided us with no geological evidence for a river placed where he wants it to be, playing the devil’s advocate let’s pretend that a river ran through the Red Sea basin prior to when the sea filled it in. Given the above information, that would mean the river had to have existed sometime between the end of the lower Eocene and sometime in the Pliocene (5.3 million to 1.8 million years before present) prior to the opening of the Bab el Mandab. Being generous and assuming for Mr. Johnson’s argument that the river flowed only during the most recent time we’ll place his Gihon river in the Red Sea basin sometime toward the late Pliocene (or some 1.8 million years ago). At that time, numerous members of the hominin family existed on earth. In Tanzania and Ethiopia, scientists have found evidence of a hominin species, Australopithecus boisei. Could a pair of these creatures have been the biblical Adam and Eve for Mr. Johnson's thesis? In South Africia there were found remains of another species, A. robustus. Could a pair have been in Mr. Johnson's Red Sea valley and spawned the creation of the Eden story? Perhaps Mr. Johnson would be more comfortable finding Adam and Eve to have been a pair of Homo rudolfensis? This species are believed to have occupied Kenya and Tanzania. Or, maybe H. habilis better suits his tastes? They, too, were around during the right age. Might, however, H. ergaster better fit the Eden story? They populated both Eastern and Southern Africa in the late Pliocene. But, I suspect among all these species of hominin around at the time the Red Sea basin opened up to ocean water, Mr. Johnson would prefer to think of Adam and Eve as pair of a relatively new hominin species that had just appeared around that time: H. erectus. Are two of any of these ancient hominins the Adam and Eve of the Genesis story according to Mr. Johnson? I highly doubt Mr. Johnson, or any creationist –Young or Old—would support the idea of our biblical parents being a pair of any of these long extinct species! [3]

However, all of this river hunting is rather a moot point, as I discussed in my initial article and which Mr. Mackey continues to avoid. The global flood of Genesis 7 and 8 is said to have wiped out the earth which held Eden and her garden. On one of Mr. Johnson’s webpages he goes to great lengths to let his readers know that the Bible means different things when it references the "earth" and when it references the "world." By "earth," Mr. Johnson argues, the Bible is referring to the actual planet beneath our feet. He painstakingly writes,

The English words "world" and "earth" are different words and have distinct, separate conceptual meanings in the Holy Bible and the English language. These meanings are defined by the Scriptures when used in context. Understanding that difference in distinction is CRUCIAL to rightly dividing [sic] the word of truth…

The "Earth" is a planet. It is a spherical-shaped mass of matter in time and space. The "world" is the specific set of conditions prevailing upon the face of the planet Earth at a specific point in Biblical time. The Earth is a part of our present world, past worlds, and the future world to come… (emphasis original)

And I agree. Earth (Hebrew ‘erets), in Genesis always references the actual "spherical-shaped mass of matter in time and space." Whether a creationist wants to believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old along with the majority of mainstream scientists, or wants to believe the earth is only six to ten-thousand years old, the "earth" referred to as having been created in the first two chapters of Genesis is the earth from which grew the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Everlasting Life. It is the same earth from which God took Adam and made him "a living soul" (Gen. 2:8). It is also the same earth that was completely and utterly destroyed in Noah’s Flood. That earth is no more, according to Genesis 6:13. It was drowned along with all the animals and humans save the ones on the legendary ark. It was the one from which the fountains of the deep erupted, tearing the landmasses to bits and upon which the torrential rains from the windows of heaven poured with the Lord’s fury. As any creationist will tell you –Young or Old—the Flood was a singularly catastrophic event unlike any since witnessed. And, as I continue to beat home, was an event that utterly destroyed the earth as Adam and Eve first found it. So, even if we grant the Biblicist position that a real garden of Eden existed just as the fabled Atlantis, and that it had four rivers flowing as heads to a larger river, and that this garden once was the home of Adam and Eve, we can’t get past the absurdity of searching for this location since the earth, including any ancient river systems and gardens, was utterly wiped out during the cataclysmic Deluge.

I did not develop my position completely in my original article but let me do so here. I fully accept that the author of Genesis likely received a very ancient oral tradition regarding a beautiful garden as the setting for the Eden story. Indeed, while it is difficult to understand why the area stretching from Egypt, up through the Levant, turning in modern Turkey down to the Persian Gulf is referred to as the "Fertile Crescent" today, in the past the region was not always so desolate. Centuries of farming, grazing and deforestation has brought the region to what it is today. There is no reason to doubt that some sort of region or isolated oasis existed in the prehistoric past that was lush and fruitful that made its way into an oral tradition regarding the creation of the world and humankind. But an ancient oral tradition based upon some memory of a more fertile time in the distant past upon which the story of Eden’s garden is based isn’t the point. The point is that the Bible is held up as the incorruptible Word of God by many and as such is inerrant in all that it claims. The point of my original essay was to draw out the logical conclusion of such a belief regarding certain claims of the second book of Genesis and to demonstrate that the garden of Eden and its rivers would have disappeared in Noah’s flood if we are going to take that belief seriously. The conclusion is obvious: What the Bible claims about the garden, Eden and the flood of Noah cannot be reconciled. If the claim that the Euphrates and Tigris –two modern rivers—were associated with pre-flood Eden, then the claim that the Great Flood which destroyed all life, and the earth along with it, cannot possibly be true. Or vice versa. As I concluded my original article,

There is not a chance, if Genesis 6-8 are reliable accounts of history, that the four rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates would still be following their courses in a post-flood world. Yet, as Kitchen has demonstrated, these rivers indeed exist (or, in one case, existed) in modern Iraq. This means that either the narrative of Genesis 2 is incorrect in locating the garden of Eden in southern Mesopotamia or that the flood story of Genesis 6-8 is incorrect in its narrative of a devastating worldwide flood. Either way, the Old Testament is shown to be a historically inaccurate document and the case for biblical inerrancy, and divine inspiration, is again revealed to be a tenuous position to defend.

Mr. Mackey’s gyrations, through first Professor Yahuda’s identifications of the rivers of Eden and then through Mr. Johnson’s –both mutually exclusive—are evidence of this tenuous position. Also putting tension on Mr. Mackey’s choice in advocates for his position is the fact that while he has found Mr. Johnson’s identification and explanation of the rivers of Eden satisfactory, Mr. Johnson believes Noah’s flood to have been a global event (see "Sediments, Fossils, and Noah's Flood. NOT!"). You might recall that Mr. Mackey’s only defense against my conclusion that Eden, her garden, and the four rivers should have been wiped out in the global deluge of Noah is that the deluge was not as global as both the Bible and Mr. Johnson contend. He offered no support for this assertion and I believe I successfully argued the biblical position against his claim. At any rate, Mr. Johnson’s article certainly did nothing to argue against the worldwide flood of Noah so I stand firmly on my conclusion that whatever river system fed Eden would have been completely destroyed, along with the earth, as Genesis 6:13 so clearly tells its readers.

Frankly, I'm finished with responding to Damien Mackey [4]. Unless he can find an ancient, authentic copy of Genesis in which the claims of Genesis 2 can be reconciled with the claims of Genesis 6, then all his distractions to locate Eden in Israel is worthless. Regardless of where Eden's garden supposedly bloomed, the global flood destroyed it and any geographical markers which would have identified its location. Conversely, if Mackey wants to argue that the flood of Noah was not as global as the Bible says it was, then his argument is with Scripture, not with me.

NOTES

1. I made an error in my response to Mr. Mackey’s first criticism of my original article. I mistakenly wrote that Dr. Kitchen argued the rivers of Eden were being named in order, starting with Gihon, then the Pishon, then the Tigirs and finally the Euphrates in an east-to-west fashion. What Dr. Kitchen was really saying (as quoted in my original piece) is that the author of Genesis 2:11-14 was naming the rivers starting with the Pishon in the far west, then moving to the Gihon in the far east, then moving west again naming the Tigris and finally the Euphrates. With the Pishon being identified as bisecting the Arabian peninsula, Dr. Kitchen had written that "the ancient author’s enumeration runs counterclockwise, from southwest (Pishon) across east to the Gihon, then north and northwest to the Tigris and Euphrates, in a continuous sweep." (p.429) Return to text

2. Geologic History of Red Sea Area AAPG Bulletin; October 1960; v. 44; no. 10; p. 1621-1637 Return to text

3. "mtDNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago." (Link) This is far too late for modern humans to have fished by Mr. Johnson's ancient Gihon if it flowed down the Red Sea basin as he maintains. Return to text

4. It has come to my attention that Mr. Mackey hitches his wagon not only to sources like Yahuda and Johnson, but also to much more infamous (and ridiculed) individuals like Rohl and Velikovsky. Thus my reason for deciding further time spent on his "arguments" only slightly more than wasteful. Return to text

SOURCES

Kitchen, Kenneth A. (2003) On the Reliability of the Old Testament Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co

McIntosh, Jane R. (2005) Ancient Mesopotamia: new perspectives ABC-CLIO, Inc.