Day 12 Devotion – Where was the Garden of Eden?

Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Genesis 2:10-14



The location of the Garden of Eden has always been a mystery. One hypothesis says that the rivers mentioned here point to the Holy Land and maybe that’s why God called it the Promised Land. We know where two of these rivers are. The Hiddekel is the Tigris River and the Euphrates still goes by that name. Some say that another name for the Nile River was the Gihon and that Ethiopia was once called “Kush”. The river we are not sure about is the Pishon. If the Nile is intended here then this just points to the Middle East as a whole. Another thing to consider is that if the garden was destroyed by Noah’s flood then there is probably no hope of finding it.
My favorite historian is David Rohl and he wrote a book called “Legend”. In the book he looks for the Garden of Eden and finds some remarkable clues that it was located in what is now northern Iran. The verses tell us that there is a water source that splits into four headwaters for four rivers. Lake Urmia is in the region of the headwaters for the Tigris and Euphrates. David found two other rivers flowing from here toward the Caspian Sea that have ancient names very similar to Gihon and Pishon. Another clue is the word Bdellium or aromatic resin. Scholars agree that this is the Lapis Lazuli gem stone. Lapis is a blue colored stone that is found in Afghanistan. There is one other place where geologists have found it and that is this region around Lake Urmia. David also found a local region called Cush that fits the spelling better than Ethiopian Kush does. We will see more clues from here in later verses.