by
Damien F. Mackey
Moses,
traditionally considered to have substantially authored the Pentateuch, was
only the editor in the case of the Book of Genesis, which comprises a series of
ancient family histories of the Patriarchs who pre-dated Moses. Hence the JEDP theorists were right about the use
of various sources for the compilation of the Book of Genesis, but they were generally
clueless about the nature and age of these sources.
Now,
certain geographical indicators that Moses added to these patriarchal histories,
whilst
fully
respecting their content and structure, serve to elucidate for us some
contentious issues concerning the geography of the ancient world, including the
pre-Flood world and Sodom.
Introduction
The marvellous observation by P. J. Wiseman, that the Book of
Genesis structurally consists of the following eleven toledôt (‘family histories’) divisions:
- These
are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. (Genesis 2:4)
- This
is the book of the generations of Adam. (Genesis 5:1)
- These
are the generations of Noah. (Genesis 6:9)
- These
are the generations of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. (Genesis 10:1)
- These
are the generations of Shem. (Genesis 11:10)
- These
are the generations of Terah. (Genesis 11:27)
- These
are the generations of Ishmael. (Genesis 25:12)
- These
are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. (Genesis 25:19)
- These
are the generations of Esau (that is, Edom). (Genesis 36:1)
- These
are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in the hill country
of Seir. (Genesis 36:9)
- These
are the generations of Jacob. (Genesis 37:2)
is the one that I have accepted as being the most plausible
explanation of it, indeed, the very key to the book’s structure. And it is so
simple that even a child could understand it. For an account of the toledôt theory, and the editorial part played by Moses with regard to Genesis, see
for example my:
Tracing the Hand of Moses
in Genesis
and Part Two:
The JEDP theory, on the other hand, is complex, confusing and
unreal. T. Brodie has written, in
Genesis
as Dialogue: “Thus the conclusion begins to dawn: like a confusing myth,
the JEDP theory has created an unreal world”. (
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=2slFA-c).
Hence I have found myself much
Preferring P. J. Wiseman
to [the] un-wise JEDP
Now, those toledôt
that will be of interest in this particular article are the ones numbered above
as 1, 2 and 3 (for the location of the Edenic Paradise and the Flood) and 7
(for the location of Sodom).
Eden and its Rivers
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
None of these models, however … properly
takes heed of the biblical information,
especially the geographical indicators supplied
by editor Moses.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we are going to learn, there is a vital geographical
connection between the location of Eden and the extent of Noah’s Flood.
Various models have been proposed for the Flood.
Many, notably Creationists, believe that it was a global
event, and that it had wiped out all trace of previous civilisations. A tabula rasa effect.
Others would have the Flood as being only local, usually confined
to a part of Mesopotamia. A unique contribution to the debate was that by the Australian,
Wallace Johnson, formerly an Evolutionist who turned Creationist. Wallace, whilst
accepting the notion of a global Flood, still allowed for a pre- and post-Flood
archaeology. This was interesting, but quite unrealistic.
None of these models, however, according to my own estimate, properly
takes heed of the biblical information, especially the geographical pointers supplied
by editor Moses.
What do these tell us?
Paradise (Genesis 2)
After the first toledôt: “These
are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created” (Genesis
2:4), we arrive at the toledôt
of Adam, concluding with: “This is the book of the
generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1). This toledôt quite appropriately, as being
that of Adam, involves the description of Eden, or Paradise, and its Garden,
beginning with (vv. 8-9):
Now the Lord God had planted
a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were
pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the
tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Next, occurs mention of Eden’s ancient river (v. 10): “A
river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from
there it divides and becomes four branches”. This is a most basic statement,
one perhaps befitting first man, Adam. Immediately following it, however, is a
more precise and detailed statement, which I think must have been added much later
by Moses. And, indeed, Professor A. Yahuda (The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian, Oxford,
1933) saw clearly, as have others,
that this description was a scribal addition to the ancient Genesis document:
The
whole passage 2:10-14 though belonging to the story itself has so far the
character of a gloss in that it does not refer to Paradise itself, but to the
relation of the four rivers to this one river of Paradise. Indeed, many critics
have already a clear inkling that by this passage the flow of the narrative is
interrupted and that accordingly it must have been inserted here from another
version [sic] of the Paradise story; but in spite of all this it is connected
by them with Paradise itself and they assume that the four rivers belong to
Paradise ….
So far we have learned that the Garden of Eden was
geographically located so as to benefit from a pristine river, one that would
proceed on from there to become four rivers - presumably the rivers from which
the whole land of Eden would be irrigated. Such, according to the Bible, is the
primitive geography and hydrography of Adam’s time.
But so what, critics would say, since neither Adam, nor
Paradise, ever existed.
The Creationists, for their part, whilst agreeing with this
basic Genesis scenario, would argue that none of this is now traceable owing to
the totally erasing effects of the global Flood. But these now have to contend
with Moses, who will add to the primitive narrative some more precise and
recognisable details.
Whilst professor Yahuda had considered the “gloss” to embrace
vv. 10-14, I would suggest instead vv. 11-14, which read, regarding those four
branches:
The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire
land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that
land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The
name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of
Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it
runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
This is more like it: “Havilah” land of gold and gemstone,
“Cush”, “Tigris”, “Ashur”, “Euphrates”. We know much more about these.
Oh, but, say the Creationists, these cannot be the actual
Tigris and Euphrates, and locations of the same names, of post-diluvian times.
The latter they say - and they have said this to me - are duplicated names of
the antediluvian ones - like when old world colonisers, such as the British,
frequently replicated names (such as “Armidale”, “Newcastle”), but now in
Australia.
Ironically, however, those Bible-believing Creationists are,
in this case, employing an argument that is not consistent with the biblical
data. Moses is, as I am now going to argue, telling us something quite different
- that the four antediluvian rivers of Genesis 2:10/11-14 are the very same ones as those he knew in
his postdiluvian age, many centuries after Adam. To demonstrate this, as I have demonstrated it
before, I shall need to move on now into Genesis 14, to the history of Abram
(Abraham) as recorded in our toledôt
No. 7, Ishmael’s: “These are the generations of
Ishmael” (Genesis 25:12).
2. Location of Sodom (Pentapolis)
Moses,
having led the Israelites (archaeologically = the Middle Bronze I people) in
Exodus out of Twelfth Dynasty Egypt,
Moses - May be Staring Revisionists Right in the Face
and
right to the edge of the Promised Land, had - at some point in time - added his
geographical notes to the ancient documents of his forefathers for the sake of
his people who would shortly come to occupy much of this land. Moses himself
well knew the region, as he had already spent 40 years with the Midianites in
the southern Paran desert:
True Mount Sinai in the Paran Desert
And Moses
had, even prior to that, successfully led Egyptian armies into at least the
Sinai and southern Palestinian regions. So Moses, whilst carefully preserving
the original patriarchal histories, had also up-dated these, as editors do. For
example, he provided new names in cases where older ones had since been
replaced.
And, in
so doing, Moses has allowed for us to know exactly where Sodom was located.
Genesis
14 apparently was in particular need of an update. Hence we are advised by
Moses:
Bela (that is, Zoar) (vv. 2,
8);
Valley of Siddim (that is, the
Dead Sea) (v. 3);
En Mishpat (that is, Kadesh)
(v. 7);
Hobah (that is, north of Damascus) (v. 15);
Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley) (v. 17).
And what
has all this to do with Sodom?
Well it
is to the fertile valley region of the Valley of Siddim (v. 3), where Sodom was
located, that Lot had chosen to dwell (Genesis 13:10-11): “ Lot looked around and saw that the whole plain of
the Jordan toward Zoar was well watered, like the garden of the
Lord, like the land of Egypt. (This was before the
Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose
for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east”. According
to (
http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/20020708.htm): “Lot chose to live in the Valley of Siddim because it was
then "well watered everywhere like the garden of The Lord" …”. By the
time of the Exodus, though, we find, the Valley of Siddim, shockingly, had
virtually ceased to be. Moses tells the Israelites that it was now “the Salt
Sea” (the Dead Sea), a most desolate region - sometimes described as the
‘entrance to Hell’.
It
is thus a far cry from the fertile Valley of Siddim that had so attracted Lot.
Since
the original account (14:3) had been written at around the time of Abraham, a
dire and fiery cataclysm had totally defaced the primeval Valley of Siddim in
whose place now stood the eerie, sinking, and stinking (one of its actual
names) Sea.
אֶל-עֵמֶק, הַשִּׂדִּים: הוּא, יָם
הַמֶּלַח )) On
biblical evidence, therefore - and thanks to the added information supplied by
Moses - we can probably say with great certitude that Sodom must now lie at the
bottom of the Dead Sea. There came to light some fascinating news about this very
issue back in 2010 (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/141132#.VWUY2k3GN9A):
Russia and Jordan have signed an agreement
to search the bottom of the Dead Sea for the remains of the Biblical
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Arabic news media
reported over the weekend.
….
According to the Jordanian, Israel
recently sent a submarine down into the Dead Sea in an attempt to explore the
bottom of the sea, but discovered that the objects in the NASA photos were on the Jordanian side of the sea. Jordan
prevented the Israelis from searching over the border, and now Jordan is
seeking to discover what it believes are the remains of the cities by itself.
[End of quote]
I believe that they are at least looking
in the right place, if they can ever agree to co-operate.
Perhaps Moses, when providing this
particular annotation, about “the Dead Sea”, did not want his people blundering
into the region hoping to find, as according to the out-dated (in this case)
patriarchal geography, a beautiful fertile valley.
Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed
Genesis 19:
….
19 The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting
in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed
down with his face to the ground. 2 “My
lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your
feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”
“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night
in the square.”
3 But he insisted so strongly
that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them,
baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before
they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both
young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They
called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us
so that we can have sex with them.”
6 Lot went outside to meet
them and shut the door behind him 7 and
said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. 8 Look,
I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to
you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these
men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”
9 “Get out of our way,” they
replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge!
We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved
forward to break down the door.
10 But the men inside reached
out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. 11 Then they struck the men who were at the door of
the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.
12 The two men said to Lot,
“Do you have anyone else here—sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in
the city who belongs to you? Get them out of here, 13 because
we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it.”
14 So Lot went out and spoke
to his sons-in-law, who were pledged to marry
[a] his
daughters. He said, “Hurry and get out of this place, because the
Lord is about to destroy the city!” But his sons-in-law thought he was
joking.
15 With the coming of dawn,
the angels urged Lot, saying, “Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who
are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished.”
16 When he hesitated, the men
grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led
them safely out of the city, for the Lord was
merciful to them. 17 As soon as they
had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back,
and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be
swept away!”
18 But Lot said to them, “No,
my lords,
[b] please!
19 Your
[c] servant
has found favor in your
[d] eyes, and you
[e] have shown
great kindness to me in sparing my life. But I can’t flee to the mountains;
this disaster will overtake me, and I’ll die.
20 Look,
here is a town near enough to run to, and it is small. Let me flee to it—it is
very small, isn’t it? Then my life will be spared.”
21 He said to him, “Very
well, I will grant this request too; I will not overthrow the town you speak
of.
22 But flee there quickly, because
I cannot do anything until you reach it.” (That is why the town was called
Zoar.
[f])
23 By the time Lot reached
Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. 24 Then
the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. 25 Thus
he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in
the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. 26 But
Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
27 Early the next morning
Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. 28 He looked down toward
Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke
rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.
29 So when God destroyed the
cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the
catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.
3. Connecting 1. and 2.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If we believe in biblical consistency, and in the
Bible’s interpreting itself, then the methodology used by Moses here, in
Genesis 14, of providing a newer name to connect the same location to its ancient name, becomes the key also to the
methodology of Genesis 2.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
“Hu” (הוּא) Factor
The very
same Hebrew word,
הוּא
that we
find used in each of those editorial clarifications in Genesis 14, and
translated as (“that is, …) - {it can also be rendered as (“which is”), or
(“the same is”)} - is the word that we also find the consistent Moses had using
in the case of that geographical gloss in 2:11-14:
v. 11 Pishon, that is: פִּישׁוֹן--הוּא
v. 13 Gihon, the same is: גִּיחוֹן—הוּא
v. 14 Tigris (or
Hiddekel), that is: חִדֶּקֶל, הוּא
v. 14 that is, the Euphrates (or Perath): הוּא
פְרָת
Clearly
Moses was connecting the four rivers, still known in his day, to their ancient
counterparts (no doubt their courses had changed to some extent) at the time of
Adam. He left us in no doubt about this by stating that one of the ‘Adamic’
rivers (un-named in Adam’s toledôt), the “Tigris”,
ran by “Ashur” (or Assur), meaning either Assyria or the city of Ashur.
Another, the Gihon, encompassed Cush (or Nubia), a land well known to Egypt
which had conquered Cush at the time of (and legend says by) Moses.
These
rivers were still healthy and flowing more than a millennium after Moses, at
the time of Sirach (C2nd century BC?), who now includes the Jordan:
Sirach 24:25 The Law overflows with Wisdom like the Pishon
River, like the Tigris at fruit-picking time.
Sirach 24:26 The Law brims over with understanding like the
Euphrates, like the Jordan at harvest time.
Sirach 24:27 It sparkles with teachings like the Nile, like
the Gihon at grape-picking time.
And they
are still known to this very day!
What all
of this means is that, contrary to the view of the Creationists, the Garden of
Eden was raised on, to use the words Dr. Carol A. Hill, “a modern landscape”.
The
Garden of Eden:
A Modern Landscape
In
this paper, I try to apply the findings of modern geology to Gen. 2:10-14. I
deduce from the evidence that the four rivers of Eden--the Pishon, the Gihon, the
Hiddekel, and the Euphrates--were real rivers which existed on a modern
landscape before Noah's flood. The now-dry Wadi al Batin was probably the
Pishon River, the Gihon was probably the Karun River, and the Hiddekel (Tigris)
and Euphrates Rivers flowed in approximately the same courses as they occupy
today. The confluence of these four rivers was located at the head of the
Persian Gulf, but a Gulf that may have been inland from where it is today. The
spring which "rises up" in Eden could have been supplied by the
Dammam Formation, the principal aquifer of the region. Oil-drilling in southern Iraq confirms that six miles of sedimentary
rock exist below the biblical site for the Garden of Eden. This same
sedimentary rock is the source of bitumen at Hit, a site which may have
supplied Noah with pitch for constructing the ark. The question is asked: How
could pre-flood Eden have been located over six miles of sedimentary rock
supposedly formed during Noah's flood?
….
[End of quote]
I believe that Dr. Hill is entirely correct
in what she has written here regarding modern geology, the sedimentary rock and
how this affects Flood models, and also the fact that “the Hiddekel (Tigris) and Euphrates Rivers
flowed in approximately the same courses as they occupy today”. Her location of
the Gihon river away from Cush (Nubia) to Persia, and identified as “the Karun
River”, is not the direction that I would be going, however. See my:
The Location of Paradise
(Genesis 2:10-2:14)
Extent of the Noachic Flood
According to 2 Peter 3:6:
“Whereby
the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished”.
And that, for me, determines the extent of the Flood, “the world that then was”.
What world then was?
It was obviously the world of Noah’s time,
toledôt 3: “
These
are the generations of Noah” (Genesis 6:9). That “world” was still basically the same one
as the antediluvian world described a mere four chapters earlier, in Genesis 2,
a world enframed by the four rivers. Since that is what I believe that the
Bible is telling us, I must therefore reject, as
un-biblical, those various Flood models to which I had referred
earlier:
whether
global - Moses and Dr. Hill combined
spell death to this view;
or
localised (e.g. to Mesopotamia) -
that is too limited for the riverine world of Genesis;
or
Wallace Johnson’s unorthodox version
- an impossible combination.
For my model, which I hope combines both the biblical evidence
and common sense, see:
Just How ‘Global’ Was The
Great Flood? (Genesis 6-9). Part One.
and Part Two:
This version allows for a Noachic Flood that was much vaster
than one located purely in, say, Mesopotamia, as well as being able to
accommodate a real pre- and post-Flood archaeology, the validity of which
Creationist Wal Johnson had perceived.
