Seems the spot between the Tigris and Euphrates River where two other rivers might have joined is under the Persian gulf at this time as sea levels rose.
The whole Black Sea deal when the Mediterranean spilled over the Bosphorus was part of same sea level rise back 7600 years, or so, ago.
Good point!
The melting of the last ice age really wasn’t very long ago.
> The whole Black Sea deal when the Mediterranean spilled over the Bosphorus was part of same sea level rise back 7600 years, or so, ago.
The sealevel rise had been going on for a long, long time before the Bosphorus gave way.
> Seems the spot between the Tigris and Euphrates River where two other rivers might have joined is under the Persian gulf at this time as sea levels rose.
If that were the case, where are the other two rivers? They’d be flowing into the Persian Gulf. That would work for your explanation, because the four rivers joined together to flow into Eden — in that case the submerged Persian Gulf seafloor would have been Eden at one time.
It would also work for an area well upstream, and still dry land. One problem is, the geographical description doesn’t make sense if Cush is taken to mean either Hindu Kush or Kush in Africa. A second problem is, bdellium is made from a tree sap, and that tree grows in Ethiopia. Luckily, in Josephus’ time, the source of the sap (and probably/possibly an entirely different tree) grew in Babylon.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Hav′ilah, where there is gold; 12 and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.