IF, it's all a big IF. Early Genesis is far too scanty in its details.
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dick Fischer" <dickfischer@verizon.net>
To: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 4:07 PM
Subject: RE: [asa] Re: The Eden in Israel Proposition
> Bruce:
>
> If the Gihon is in Ethiopia, what's the name of the river today? And
> how would you connect rivers in Iraq and a river in Egypt and a river in
> Ethiopia with Israel? Your argument that the Gihon flows in Ethiopia
> doesn't make your case. And Noah's grandson was named Cush because he
> was black? Were Elamites black? Was Nimrod black? Perhaps Ham married
> a black woman. How did a black woman get to Mesopotamia before the
> flood and where did she come from originally?
>
> Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association
> Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
> www.genesisproclaimed.org
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of gbrown@Colorado.EDU
> Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 9:49 AM
> To: Bruce Paul
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] Re: The Eden in Israel Proposition - Reconciling the
> story of creation with science
>
> There seem to have been two lands that could have been translated as
> Cush. The less familiar one (Babylonian Kash) was the land of the
> Cassites, which was located to the east of the Tigris and Euphrates
> Rivers near the Zagros Mountains (hence not technically in
> Mesopotamia). There is a river that flows "around" this area and joins
> the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at their confluence.
>
> Gordon Brown
>
> Quoting Bruce Paul <luke15twenty@yahoo.com>:
>
>> If Cush was considered by the Israelites to be in Mesopotamia,
>> then the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would have also circled the
>> land of Cush. It would have therefore been worthless for Moses to
>> qualify the location of the Gihon with this detail.
>>
>> Strong's Concordance - Cush (Kuwsh) = "black"
>> Related to the Hebrew word Kuwshiy = Ethiopian = their blackness
>>
>> Verses where it's clear that the Kuwsh was in Africa.
>> Psa 68:31, Isa 20:3, 4, 5, Isa 43:3, Isa 45:14, Jer 46:9, Eze
>> 29:10, Eze 30:4, Eze 30:5
>>
>> The Septuagint translates the Genesis 2:13 Hebrew word Kuwsh as
>> Αιθιοπιας - Which still
>> means Ethiopia to this day.
>>
>> Who wrote Genesis? - Moses!
>> Who was the intended audience? - The Israelites!
>> Where did they come from? - Egypt!
>> Where are the Israelites going to believe the land of Cush was? -
> Ethiopia
>>
>> Cush was ancient Ethiopia, and the only reason scholars have tried
>> to re-locate these people in Mesopotamia is to make the Genesis 2
>> Edenic river system work there.
>>
>>
>> gbrown@colorado.edu wrote: Some of the descendants of Cush (e.g.
>> Nimrod) lived in Mesopotamia.
>> The Cush in Genesis 2 makes sense in the context if it is identified
>> with the Cassites.
>> Gordon Brown
>>
>> Quoting Bruce Paul :
>>
>>> Dear Dick
>>>
>>> The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are in Mesopotamia, and have
>>> headwaters that flow right out of the East Anatolian Fault in
>>> Western Turkey - a direct extension of the Great Rift Valley that
>>> the Dead Sea rift is also a part of. The issue is . . . where were
>>> the other two rivers, the Gihon & the Pishon?
>>>
>>> Josephus and the book of Jubilees both define this Gihon to be the
>>> Nile River, which is further confirmed by the Hebrew word Cush used
>>> in the Genesis 2:13 description of this river, which invariably
>>> refers to the land south of Egypt each of the 29 times this word is
>>> used. In fact, present-day Ethiopians still call the top of the Blue
>>> Nile the Ghion River.
>>> __________________________________________________________________
>>> From my book
>>>
>>>
>>> According to Genesis 2:11-12, "The name of the first is Pishon: that
>>> is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is
>>> gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the
>>> onyx stone." The name of the River Pishon itself is not very
>>> helpful, but the name of the people Havilah identifies the area. The
>>> people are Arabian (as seen in Genesis 25:18 and 1 Samuel 15:7) and
>>> are thought to be one of the Joktanean tribes in northern Arabia.
>>> This reference to the "land of HAVILAH" suggests Moses was
>>> identifying this river with the man for whom the region was
>>> named-Noah's grandson (see Genesis 10:7). In other words, the area
>>> didn't take on this identity of the "land of HAVILAH" until after
>>> the great flood and during a time more contemporary with the Exodus.
>>> Also, during the time of the Exodus, a region east of Medina and
>>> toward the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, called Mahd ed Dahab,
>>> "the Cradle of Gold," was renowned for its pure gold and even today
>>> remains one of the only gold-producing areas in Saudi Arabia. The
>>> Hebrews understood this gold of Ophir to be of the most excellent
>>> quality (see Job 22:24), and later the Greeks would extol Arabia's
>>> gold as being so pure that it didn't need to be smelted. Southern
>>> Arabia was also one of the few places in the world where bdellium
>>> was produced, and the semiprecious onyx can still be found
>>> throughout the Arabian Shield.
>>>
>>> Some remarkable Space-Shuttle Radar-Imaging photos were released to
>>> the public in the early 1990's by Farouk El-Baz of the Center for
>>> Remote Sensing at Boston University that confirm this hypothesis.
>>> These satalite images of the northern Arabian panintula show a
>>> three-to-six-Km-wide river from the Hijaz Mountains near Medina, up
>>> 530 miles northeast into the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of
>>> present-day Kuwait. This matches our Biblical and historical
>>> information perfectly, so we can fairly confidently state that this
>>> first river mentioned in Genesis 2 was in Arabia. The headwaters for
>>> this river can also be traced from the Medina area all the way to
>>> Jabal al Lawz, which is where we would suggest was the location of
>>> the real Mount Siani.
>>>
>>> Affirming these locations of the Pishon and Gihon is a mosaic map of
>>> the rivers of paradise in a 7th-century Byzantine church's
>>> baptismal near Jabaliyah, north of Gaza City. The river's wavy
>>> bands are combined with human characters and partial spellings of
>>> the river's names to define their locations. This clearly
>>> demonstrates that the early church believed the Pishon and Gihon to
>>> be in Arabia and Africa, the very locations the scriptures identify
>>> as their locations.
>>> ____________________________________________________________
>>>
>>> So we see 2 rivers in Mesopotamia with headwaters in Western Turkey
>>> (500 miles apart from each other), one in Arabia with headwaters
>>> near the Gulf of Aqaba, ant the fourth in Africa with Headwaters
>>> near Lake Tana. All of these river headwaters are coincidental to
>>> the Great Rift Valley and the only way to join all these river
>>> headwaters is through an underground river source just as Genesis
>>> 2:6 suggests - "But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered
>>> the whole face of the ground."
>>>
>>> My book, however, goes much further than just reviewing the Genesis
>>> 2 narrative. The book looks at remnant images residing within
>>> ancient Sumerian and Egyptian mythology; ancient Jewish apocrypha
>>> texts like the Book of Jubilees, and of course the Bibles other
>>> references to this land of Eden.
>>>
>>> The most compelling evidence in my mind, however, is how this
>>> approach unfolds so many mysteries within the Bibles text, such as
>>> the nature of the Tree of Life - which according to Dr James Harris
>>> is tied to the Menorah and the El Yah term for God in the ancient
>>> Proto-Canaanite language. See:
>>> http://net.lib.byu.edu/imaging/negev/Names.html
>>>
>>> Bruce
>>>
>>> Dick Fischer wrote: Hi Bruce,
>>>
>>> Don't wish to throw any kinks in your theory but there are some
>>> considerations. The rivers of Eden are in Mesopotamia. Ezekiel was
>>> among the captives in Babylon by the "river Chebar" (Ezek. 1:3;
>>> 3:15, 23), corresponding to nar Kabari meaning the "great canal,"
>>> the largest of three or four navigable canals that watered the
>>> fields of ancient Nippur. The tree of life appears to correspond
>>> with the date palm, the "sacred tree" depicted in numerous Sumerian
>>> cylinder seals - again Mesopotamia, not Israel.
>>>
>>> Dick Fischer
>>> Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association
>>> Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
>>> www.genesisproclaimed.org
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
>>> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Bruce Paul
>>> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 12:09 PM
>>> To: asa@calvin.edu
>>> Subject: [asa] Re: The Eden in Israel Proposition - Reconciling the
>>> story of creation with science
>>>
>>> I'm trying to find a few apologists / thinkers review a book I'm
>>> just about to have published. I began a study of the Eden in Israel
>>> proposition while investigating the work and purpose of the Holy
>>> Spirit. Because "Living Water" is Scripture's principal metaphor for
>>> the Holy Spirit, I was going through every verse in the Bible
>>> referring to water, wells, rivers, and springs, and it soon became
>>> clear that the river in Eden is a type of the Holy Spirit. An
>>> interesting principle of scripture I've often meditated on is how
>>> God regularly visits certain places over and over again, such as the
>>> temple residing on the very location where Abraham took Isaac to be
>>> sacrificed. After working through my study, I became convinced that
>>> the first river from Eden mentioned in Genesis 2, was the same
>>> river mentioned in Ezekiel 47, and both of these were for-runners
>>> of the River of Life found in Revelation 22.
>>>
>>> I had come to believe these were all one in the same river because:
>>>
>>> 1. All three of these rivers appear during principal
>>> transformational points of the earth throughout redemptive history.
>>>
>>> . Eden 's River at the beginning of creation(Gen 1-2).
>>>
>>> . Ezekiel's river during the New Millennium (Eze 40-47)
>>>
>>> . The River of Life when the New Jerusalem comes down
>>> from heaven (Rev 21-22).
>>>
>>> 2. All three rivers were accompanied by a version of the Tree of
> Life
>>> . Eden 's River with the Tree of Life (Gen 2:9)
>>>
>>> . Ezekiel's River has trees on either side of the
>>> river. The Ezekiel 47 passage records that there will be all kinds
>>> of trees for food, which ties Ezekiel's orchard together with Eden
>>> (Gen 2:9), but the trees will bear fruit every month and the leaves
>>> are for healing, which ties it together with the River of Life in
>>> (Rev 22:2).
>>>
>>> . The River of Life has two Trees of Life on either
>>> side of the river (Rev 22:2)
>>>
>>> 3. All three of these rivers have an incredibly vast distribution
>>> . Eden 's River turns into four other rivers that water
>>> the whole surface of the earth (Gen 2:6).
>>>
>>> . Ezekiel's river flows down to the dead sea, but
>>> Zechariah 14 suggests that it will also flow down to the
>>> Mediterranean Sea (Zec 14:8)
>>>
>>> . The River of Life will go out to all the nations (Rev
> 22:2)
>>>
>>> 4. All three of these rivers have a remarkable source
>>> . Eden 's River flowed out of Eden (Gen 2:10).
>>>
>>> . Ezekiel's river flows out of the altar outside the
>>> temple (Eze 47:1)
>>>
>>> . The River of Life flows from God's thrown and from
>>> the Lamb (Rev 22:1)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I realized there is a very logical conclusion in associating these
>>> three rivers together! If Eden 's river flows from the same point
>>> these other two rivers come from, Eden had to have originally been
>>> in the region we now know as Israel . My mind started to race as I
>>> began to appreciate the principle implication of this hypothesis,
>>> that the very ground that saw the first sin and failure would become
>>> the very ground of redemption and restoration. Why else would
>>> Israel be the Promised Land if God didn't have an extraordinary
>>> plan in mind for this territory, and under premise of the Eden in
>>> Israel Proposition, He was winning humanity back on the very ground
>>> that saw man's original fall from grace.
>>>
>>> Invigorated by this glorious possibility, and equipped with a
>>> geology background that enabled me to proficient review maps of the
>>> region, I tried to understand how Eden 's River could have acted as
>>> the source of the four other great rivers mentioned in the Genesis 2
>>> account. But once the source of the first river was fixed, the
>>> pattern was obvious; all four rivers in the Eden narrative are
>>> coincidental to the Great Rift Fault. The Tigris and Euphrates flow
>>> directly out of the East Anatolian Fault (which is actually an
>>> extension of the Great Rift Valley), the Gihon (assuming that
>>> Josephus and the book of Jubilees are correct in suggesting the Nile
>>> is the Gihon) and the Pishon (assuming that Farouk El-Baz's Kuwait
>>> river in Arabia is the Pishon) also have headwaters that are
>>> suspiciously coincidental to the Great Rift Valley.
>>>
>>> Tying this together with Genesis 2:6, "But a mist used to rise
>>> from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground," it seems
>>> apparent that the water was flowing underground from the center of
>>> all these river headwaters from an area we now know as Israel . I've
>>> recently discovered that Dr A. Yahuda suggested the water from Eden
>>> flowed underground 70 years ago, but I believe I'm the first to put
>>> together this connection with the Great Rift Valley .
>>>
>>> Soteriology, Pneumatology, Eschatology, and even Hermeneutics all
>>> have wide-ranging implications effected by this Eden in Israel
>>> proposition, yet there's a theme that can be found weaving its
>>> narrative throughout all these fields of endeavor, tying them all
>>> together and affecting the very way we live - The message and
>>> mandate defining our inheritance within the Kingdom of God . The
>>> Eden in Israel proposition doesn't contradict conservative
>>> evangelical Christian doctrine. Yet, many of the implications of
>>> this proposition are unconventional, and challenge many traditional
>>> concepts in scripture. The mysteries uncovered by this theory are,
>>> however, nothing less than astonishing, and provide a remarkable
>>> framework for understanding the message of God's Kingdom and His
>>> purposes with the land of Israel . I believe this work is only the
>>> beginning; inspiring many other works to follow, resolving mysteries
>>> that have confounded and separated the Church for thousands of
> years.
>>>
>>> This book is an honest endeavor from a Christian geologist's
>>> perspective to reconcile many issues of science and the history of
>>> religion, together with a conservative evangelical perspective on
>>> the authority and inspiration of the scriptures. If you or anyone in
>>> your group would be interested in reviewing this 124 page book, let
>>> me know and I'll send along a pdf copy.
>>>
>>> Kindest Regards
>>>
>>> Bruce Paul
>>>
>>> bruce@faith-friends.com
>>>
>>>
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Received on Thu Jun 7 12:03:18 2007
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