Havilah

Overview

Havilah is a land named several times in the Old Testament. In the account of Eden it is the land around which the Pishon flows, "where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there" (Genesis 2:11-12). Elsewhere it marks a boundary of the desert south and east of Canaan, where the descendants of Ishmael "settled from Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria" (Genesis 25:18), and where Saul "defeated the Amalekites from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt" (1 Samuel 15:7).

Biblical References

The name is also borne by two individuals in the table of nations: Havilah son of Cush (Genesis 10:7; 1 Chronicles 1:9) and Havilah son of Joktan, in the line of Shem (Genesis 10:29; 1 Chronicles 1:23). Lands in the table are often named after the peoples who lived in them, which suggests that more than one region may have carried the name. Several scholars, including W. W. Müller and W. F. Albright, have distinguished the Havilah of Eden from the Havilah of Genesis 25 and 1 Samuel 15, the second evidently lying in the desert between Egypt and the Arabian interior.

Proposed Locations

Most proposals place Havilah in Arabia. Müller located the Havilah of Genesis 2 in south-western Arabia and that of Genesis 25 in northern Arabia; others connect the name with Khawlan, a people known from South Arabian inscriptions. Albright looked instead to the Nubian region south of Egypt, and older interpreters proposed places as far apart as Somalia and India. None of these identifications is certain.

The Arabian River Proposal

The archaeologist James A. Sauer argued that the Pishon was an ancient river, now dry, that once crossed the Arabian Peninsula along the course of the Wadi al-Batin toward the head of the Persian Gulf, a system traced by Farouk El-Baz from satellite imagery. On that reading Havilah is the land drained by its upper reaches, and its gold is the gold of the region around Mahd adh-Dhahab, one of the oldest gold mines in Arabia. It is Sauer's argument rather than an established identification, and it is the one presented in Expedition Bible's programme on the Pishon. If it is right, the description in Genesis 2 preserves accurate knowledge of a landscape that had changed long before the text reached its final form.