the Tigris: the eastern and swifter of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia, carried into Hebrew under its ancient Mesopotamian name
Hebrew does not call this river the Tigris. It uses the name the river carried in Mesopotamia itself, a name that began in Sumerian as something like "the swift river" and passed into Akkadian as "Idiqlat." The same old name survives in Aramaic and Syriac as "Diglat" or "Deqlat" and in Arabic as "Dijla." "Tigris" belongs to a separate branch of the same family, a Persian and then Greek reshaping, and that is the form that eventually reached English. So the Hebrew preserves the older eastern name, which is one reason many scholars regard the river list behind Genesis as genuinely ancient.
The word appears only twice, and the two places sit at opposite ends of Israel's story. In Genesis 2:14 it is the third of the four rivers of Eden, said to flow east of Asshur, listed beside the Euphrates (פְּרָת) and the two rivers no one has ever located, Pishon (פִּישׁוֹן) and Gihon (גִּיחוֹן). In Daniel 10:4 it is the bank where Daniel is standing, deep in the years of exile, when he receives the last and longest of his visions.
That pairing is most of what the name does. Naming the Tigris anchors Eden in a landscape a reader could point to, however much the writer's exact geography is argued over, and naming it again in Daniel sets the final revelation on the soil of the empire that had swallowed Judah. Between the two verses the one name spans the world's beginning and Israel's exile.
Daniel's verse carries an oddity of its own. It calls the Tigris "the great river," a title the Hebrew Bible otherwise saves for the Euphrates, and then adds an identifying phrase, "that is, the Tigris," which most scholars who work on Daniel take to be a later clarifying note.
Whether Genesis 2:14 places the Tigris on a real map of the world the writer knew, or uses the name within a symbolic picture of a sacred garden at the source of the world's water.
- contestedThe passage describes real geography. The four streams are actual waterways, and the writer and his source took the garden to be a place on the earth, most plausibly near the head of the Persian Gulf, with the rivers understood as converging on it rather than branching out of it.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); E. A. Speiser, "The Rivers of Paradise," in Oriental and Biblical Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967)
- contestedEden is an archetypal sacred space, and its river with four heads belongs to sanctuary imagery rather than to a map: the named rivers mark points of transition between the world and the sources of blessing.; Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2-3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2000); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary 1; Waco: Word, 1987)
Whether the identifying words "that is, the Tigris" in Daniel 10:4 are original to the text or a later explanatory addition.
- majorityThey are a secondary gloss. Calling the Tigris "the great river" is without parallel in the Hebrew Bible, and the identification reads like a clarifying note added by a copyist, prompted perhaps by the vision at Susa in Daniel 8:2 or by the Persian setting announced in Daniel 10:1.; James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1927); John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel (Anchor Bible 23; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); Carol A. Newsom, Daniel: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014); Andre Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, trans. David Pellauer (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979)
- minorityThere is little reason to posit a gloss. The Tigris lies close enough to Babylon that a setting on its bank calls for no explanation, and the text can stand as it is.; John E. Goldingay, Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary 30; Dallas: Word, 1989)