Pishon: the name of the first river flowing out of Eden, the one said to wind around the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is.
Pishon is the first of the four rivers that branch off from the single stream watering Eden. The word appears in the Bible exactly once, and it turns up in no other ancient record either, which leaves a reader almost nothing to work from besides the name itself and the sentence around it.
The name looks built from a rare Hebrew verb (פּוּשׁ) used of stalled calves kicking and springing about once they are let loose. On that reading Pishon means something like "the Leaper" or "the Gusher," a name that says what the water does rather than where it runs. The best support for it is the company the name keeps: the second river of Eden, Gihon (גִּיחוֹן), is built the same way on a verb meaning to burst out, so the two unknown rivers would form a matched pair of descriptions. Even so, the standard Hebrew lexicons will not commit to it, and one of them calls the derivation "dubious."
Instead of placing the river, the text says what it wraps around: the whole land of Havilah (חֲוִילָה), where there is good gold, along with a fragrant resin and a precious stone. Those treasures have sent readers hunting in every direction for two thousand years:
- An old Jewish tradition read it as the Nile, tying the name to the word for flax and to Egypt's flooded fields.
- Josephus made it the Ganges, while later scholars preferred the Indus, which does curl around India's western side.
- Others look closer to Mesopotamia, to the Kerkha or the Karun in western Iran, on the argument that the four rivers meet near the head of the Persian Gulf rather than spreading out from a northern source.
- A widely publicized modern proposal traces a now dry riverbed running from the gold country of western Arabia down to that same gulf.
None of these can be shown from the text, and every one of them has been answered. Many scholars conclude that the passage was never meant as a map. Two of Eden's four rivers, the Tigris (חִדֶּקֶל) and the Euphrates (פְּרָת), are waters anyone in the ancient world could point to; the other two are not, and that mixture of the familiar and the unplaceable may well be the point. On this reading the four streams show one source inside God's garden feeding the far edges of the world, and the gold and the precious stone are the same materials the Bible later assigns to the tabernacle, marking the garden as holy ground.
Disputed
Which river, if any, the Pishon of Genesis 2:11 names. The name is unattested outside this verse, so every proposal is argued from the land of Havilah and its gold rather than from the name itself.
- majorityThe four rivers of Eden are not a route that can be traced. They portray the garden as the source of the waters that reach the whole world, so no waterway should be matched with the Pishon.; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Waco: Word, 1987); Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2-3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2000)
- minorityA real river near the head of the Persian Gulf, most plausibly a now dry channel draining the gold-bearing hills of western Arabia, with Havilah in Arabia.; E. A. Speiser, "The Rivers of Paradise," in I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood, ed. R. S. Hess and D. T. Tsumura (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 175-182; James A. Sauer, "The River Runs Dry: Creation Story Preserves Historical Memory," Biblical Archaeology Review 22, no. 4 (1996): 52-57, 64; Walter W. Müller, "Pishon," in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:374
- minorityA great river far from Mesopotamia: the Ganges, the Indus, or the Nile.; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.1.3 (1.38); Wilhelm Gesenius, Thesaurus Philologicus Criticus Linguae Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti (Leipzig: Vogel, 1829-1858), s.v. פושׁ
How much weight the derivation of the name from the verb פוּשׁ, "spring about, gush," can carry.
- majorityIt is the best available Hebrew etymology but remains unproven, so the meaning of the name should be left open.; Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. פּוּשׁ, פִּישׁוֹן; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. פִּישׁוֹן; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), s.v. פִּישׁוֹן
- minorityThe derivation is sound and the name means the overflowing or poured-out water, supported by the parallel formation of Gihon on a verb meaning to burst forth.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Thesaurus Philologicus Criticus Linguae Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti (Leipzig: Vogel, 1829-1858), s.v. פושׁ