Gihon River

Overview

The Gihon is the second of the four rivers that flow out of Eden in Genesis 2: "The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush" (Genesis 2:13). It is not the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem, where Solomon was anointed king (1 Kings 1:33-45) and whose waters Hezekiah diverted (2 Chronicles 32:30). The two share a name, which is usually derived from a root meaning "to burst forth", but they are distinct places.

Proposed Identifications

The oldest identification is with the Nile. Josephus wrote that the Geon "runs through Egypt... which the Greeks call Nile", a reading that follows naturally from taking Cush as Nubia and Ethiopia, the usual meaning of the name elsewhere in the Old Testament. Ethiopian tradition identifies the Gihon with the Blue Nile.

A group of modern proposals looks east instead, and depends on reading Cush in this passage as the land of the Kassites, Akkadian Kashshu, in the Zagros region east of Mesopotamia, as E. A. Speiser argued. On that reading the archaeologist Juris Zarins identified the Gihon with the Karun River in south-western Iran, which flows toward the head of the Persian Gulf near the Euphrates, and the geologist Carol A. Hill judged the Karun the most likely candidate, with the Karkheh a weaker alternative. Other proposals include the Aras in the Armenian highlands, argued from its older name Gaihun, and the Amu Darya, which medieval Arabic writers called Jeyhoun. None of these identifications is settled.

Biblical Significance

The Gihon belongs to the description of Eden as a real place set within the geography its first readers knew, alongside the Pishon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Two of the four rivers can still be named with confidence and two cannot, and the uncertainty over the Gihon turns largely on what the text means by Cush. Some scholars, among them Lawrence Stager, have argued that later biblical writers presented Jerusalem's temple in the language of Eden, which may be one reason the name recurs in the city.