Searching for The Garden of Eden's Pishon River

Genesis chapter 2 describes the location of the Garden of Eden in relationship to Four Rivers three of these rivers are known and one is a mystery uh the Lost River of Eden so to speak uh this is the river that the Bible calls the ponne now the biggest clue to understanding where to go looking for the ponne river is in Genesis 2:11 where it says the Pichon it winds through the entire land of Jaa therefore if we know where the ancient land of La is located then we know where to go looking for the ponne river Genesis 2518 says the land of java is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria and so the only land that is opposite Egypt that is east of Egypt on the way to Assyria is the Arabian Peninsula what is known today as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia this is Expedition Bible and we're in Saudi Arabia [Music] okay hold on [Music] oh well it is pretty clear today that there is not a river that flows across the Arabian Peninsula however what does the evidence say was there such a river in ancient times this is the leading candidate for the ponne [Music] river if you want to support me and the making of these videos please hit the Subscribe button also thank you for making my book number one in archaeology I'll leave a link in the description where you can order a copy so I was reading Genesis 2 in my ESV Bible and I noticed the map that showed the two main proposals for the location of the Garden of Eden one is a northern proposal and the other one is a southern proposal uh I've been up in the are area of turkey and Armenia uh where the northern proposal is this didn't make a lot of sense to me for one thing it's very high mountainous country not really ideal for a garden the other thing is is that even though the Tigers and Euphrates rivers start in this region they aren't connected to each other and then the rivers that were proposed in this Northern Area for being the Pichon that doesn't make any sense at all because that area of turkey and Armenia is is not east of Egypt it is not opposite Egypt on the way to Assyria Genesis 2:10 says a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden and there divided and became Four Rivers at some point the four rivers are one River the area of the Southern proposal on the other hand is very intriguing because this is an ideal place for a garden it's low it's warm it's well watered one of the criteria from the verses about these four rivers and watering the Garden of Eden is that at some point they have to all connect with each other to form One River and with the three known Rivers the only place that they do connect in this way is in southern Iraq which also happens to be opposite that is east of Egypt and so I travel to Iraq to explore this area I'm here at a town called alcara and uh this is the place where the Tigers and Euphrates River come together and join and become one River uh this river flows down and flows into the Persian Gulf so uh the Genesis account for where the Garden of Eden is located talks about four rivers and two of them are known for certain one is the tigis which is coming in from over here and the other is the Euphrates coming in over here and then it talks about these where these four rivers come together to form One River and so we know where that takes place with the Tigris and Euphrates River it takes place right here from the Confluence of the Euphrates in the Tigers River I travel further south down to where the Kon River joins them now the Kon river is the main candidate for the gone and it flows through the ancient land of the cites which in ancient times was called Kush there's actually two lands called Kush one is in Africa up in Ethiopia and the other one is in what is today Iran now which one is the guon river well it has to be the one that flows through uh what is today Iran the Kush of the cides because that is the river that then comes and has its Confluence with the Tigers and Euphrates of course the Nile river that flowed through the other Kush in Ethiopia never has a Confluence with the Euphrates and Tigress Rivers because it's on a different continent it's the largest river in Iran and where it has its Confluence with the Euphrates and the Tigers is a border between Iraq and Iran and therefore a very sensitive place and so it was a bit nerve-wracking going down into that area and I wanted to get closer but I got as close as I could but you can see the bridge over here this bridge is not going over the Tigers and Euphrates this bridge is going over what is called the karon river and the Kon river is uh the main candidate for the gone Genesis 10:2 says now a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from there it parted and became four riverheads one thing that really helped me understand Genesis 2 in regards to these four rivers is reading the renowned Hebrew scholar EA spiser in the anchor Bible commentary uh there he explains the meaning of this verse because it can sound very confusing uh it kind of has that uiver uh perspective where it's talking about one river that then becomes four branches that go up to the headstreams and the reason that's confusing is we know that's not what rivers do rivers do the opposite they flow from their heads from their Beginnings down to the confluences that they have with other rivers and the Hebrew allows for this meaning spiser wrote in verse 10 the term heads can have nothing to do with stream in which the river breaks up after it leaves Eden but designates instead four separate branches which have merged within Eden there is thus no basis for the search for the Pichon in various remote regions of the world all right well my son Barry and I are flying to Riad Saudi Arabia [Music] today Saudi Arabia m I grew up in this country and it has been 31 years since I've been here and so wow it's just such a blessing I'm so grateful to be able to uh be back here where I grew up my whole childhood I grew up here and uh it's just a thrill for me to be back here so we got into a Riad we were able to rent a four-wheel drive vehicle and now now we've um headed out of Riad and we are doing a over an 8 hour drive today I am wanting to introduce my team members this is my son Barry who is also doing the video Work MH and has been doing a great job thanks Barry and then also this is Greg stro Corb a lifelong friend that I've known from my days in Saudi Greg is 1% bwin right maybe 2% after a few days of driving we made it to the Red Sea Coast we began our exploration opposite Egypt where the Bible says the land of java is located and then began traveling in the direction of Assyria to the hijaz mountains so I'm standing up in in the hijaz mountains and this is the divide the mountains of hijaz are tilted the whole land is tilted across Arabia towards Mesopotamia and so you see all kinds of Ravines through here but when it rains all these Ravines flow together and they join and they flow down what is believed to be the ancient ponne river east of the hijaz mountains is an impressive High plateau of rocks we're up in the high plateau and you can just see all of the volcanic rock that's up here I mean just covering this place look at all this volcanic rock so we've been exploring the hijaz mountains and we've come down into the Foothills and we found this beautiful area here and so we're going to Camp here for the night after breaking camp we continued our journey east across Arabia Genesis 2 says of the pishon that it winds through the entire land of java where there is gold the gold of that land is good this is one of the criteria for Arabia being the land of jav law if Arabia is jav La then there should be gold in Arabia and the gold is good it should be famous for its gold and in fact the largest and most productive gold mine in the Middle East is in Saudi Arabia and right in the area of the Watershed that forms the beginning of the wuma which is the main candidate for the pishon [Music] river behind me here at the base of this mountain is the mine mahab and this in Arabic means the Cradle of gold uh in this region there is also 55 gold mines uh this one being not only the largest of those but the largest gold mine in all of the Arabian Peninsula it's been mined for thousands and thousands of years and it's being uh it's being mined up into this day uh also just to the east you see see this road where the cars are driving and this is a paved portion of the ancient incense route that was the south to North Route um that the Commodities were traded that are mentioned in Genesis 2 so in Genesis 2 it specifically says that there is gold in the land of havah and that the gold is good and here we have all these gold mines this one being the biggest also it mentions the aromatic uh resins the main ones being being frankincense and myrr that were brought on this incense route that passes just a kilometer to the east of this mine and then uh the Onyx the precious stones so the same Commodities that are mentioned in Genesis 2 for the land of Hava are the same Commodities that Arabia is famous for trading and this is the route that those uh that those Commodities were traded on so it just is a it's just a fit between the description of the land of havila in Genesis 2 and the land of Arabia so we're just coming into this area and uh looking for a campsite for the night after another night we continued our journey now it was time to find the ancient riverbed that we would spend the rest of our trip following across the Arabian peninsula in the late 1980s and early 90ss the Egyptian geologist Dr Farooq elbaz while studying satellite images of Arabia discovered a huge ancient Arabian River the ancient riverbed that Dr elbaz discovered that had once flowed across Arabia is called locally W Ruma we have made it to W Ruma and this is the bridge of it behind me here in regards to the river that Dr elbaz discovered archaeologist James sour wrote it may well be the ponne river one of the four rivers according to the Bible associated with Eden no other River would seem to fit the biblical description and so it was a combination of both of them that led to the reality that this Lost River of Eden had finally been found this riverbed that you see here is the leading candidate for the biblical Pichon River it drains the hijaz Mountains and flows out to the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers of course today for most of the Year this river is dry but it was formed in ancient times when the land between Egypt in Assyria called jaila had a much wetter climate that supported a continually flowing river that wound its way across the entire land Scholars estimate that this River continually flowed until around 200000 BC when the climate changed causing the river to dry up now we were up River where it drains the hijaz mountains and the volcanic rock that is up in the hijaz mountains now can be found in the gravel in the bed of this ancient river you have granite and you have this black Basalt uh you have quartz um all represented that we saw up in the hij mountains uh these are the hijaz mountains this is the source of those uh quartz Pebbles you see this deposit of quartz and running in a vein through the side of the mountain right here and so you have these massive deposits up here in the mountains of uh quartz this is the source for the quartz Pebbles found way down below now are in the gravel and the bed of the river and in ancient times especially when this River flowed was being pushed towards this ancient River's Confluence with the Tigers and Euphrates rivers so in Genesis to what is describing the pishon river for doing winding its way through the entire land of java that is what this River in ancient times did across Arabia winding its way across the Arabian Peninsula so the W Ruma was very easy to find it's huge uh however it proved difficult and a bit nerve-wracking to follow because uh we kept almost getting stuck there was soft sand down in the riverbed itself and the sand dunes had blown over part of the riverbed and at one point we did get stuck but fortunately we were able to push out of it for a comparison this is the ponne candidate WTI Ruma and this is the Euphrates River a amazingly the banks of wuma are actually wider than the current banks of the Euphrates so when we got to our first place that we really filmed uh the WTI Ruma we were very impressed with its size well later we're looking at Google Earth and we realize oh wow it's actually much larger than we realized when we got to W Ruma our first videos were shot here at the time we thought that the ancient riverbed ran somewhere along what looks like like the riverbed today which would have looked something like this in ancient times now that seemed big however what we didn't realize was that the sand dunes had shifted to cover the ancient riverbed which is much larger and runs over this whole area in ancient times the ponne river would have looked something like this which is absolutely massive so this is how big we thought the riverbed was but this is how big it actually was measuring over 1.7 mil across which is enormous as we continue to camp and explore we found several fenced off ancient wells in the bottom of the dry riverbed from when wuma was used as an important travel route to Mesopotamia following wuma we encountered a serious obstacle when the riverbed suddenly disappeared beneath a huge sandom belt our goal was to cross this sandom belt to where we could see on Google Earth where WTI Ruma reemerged from the sea of sand on the other side so we've been working our way across this sandun belt it's it's a bit nerve-wracking because we only have one vehicle and so if we get stuck then we're in serious trouble but we've camped here for the night we're going to bed down and we're going to hope to find the W on the east side of the sandun belt in the morning this is our camp so this is where I sleep in this little tent Barry likes the big tent he's got the big tent over there Greg is way over there on the side of the Hill because he snores really really loud [Music] all right we're going to try to pull out of our campsite problem is we're in kind of some soft sand and we have street tires we need sand tires not street [Music] tires oh we're going fast that's good I ain't slowing down now woo [Music] wo okay we're taking that ledge ready here we go if we're out of here we're free oh camels [Music] ahum [Music] so on the east side of the Dune belt we did pick up the W room again it was huge and it kept getting bigger and bigger as we travel further and further along [Music] it so we made it through another night in the desert and now we got a little over a 3-hour drive into the town of hoffel Boton so behind me we have what's called an Arabic ATI which is just a dry stream bed um and in times Heavy Rain then it'll flow with water for scale this is uh maybe even a larger W than most um but compared to this this is w aruma and it is [Music] massive All Along The River up into this point we had gravel on each bank and and covering the flood zone of this ancient river however as we got down close to Kuwait then all of a sudden this gravel plane just opened up and the reason why is because this is uh the aluvial fan of the river as it comes to its Confluence with the Euphrates tigers and guon rivers uh it this aluvial fan covers much of Kuwait itself and so it just is another indicator of how much water in ancient times was coming down this riverbed so we have in this gravel plane all these Pebbles and years ago the Egyptian geologist Dr Farooq elbaz was here and he realized that these were not indigenous to this area and he asked a simple question where do these come from the closest source for these Pebbles was the hijaz mountains Dr elbaz realized that it had been the strong flow of the ancient river that had both formed these Pebbles and carried some of them for more than 500 miles before being spread out across the aluvial fan and when we were back in the hijaz mountains a couple days ago we cor we collected some rock samples so we have some riy some Basalt um some quartz all that we found in the hijaz mountains and then down here um in these these gravel fields we found exactly the same rocks but smoothed um as Pebbles so we have our our Basalt our quartz and our riy so all of all these Pebbles started as rocks like these back in the hijaz and then as they were brought down um this 500 mile long river then they were smooth into the Pebbles that we see all around us here uh Dr elbaz did a map of the of the pebble dist distribution of this River to show that it was the flow of the river that brought these Stones over 500 miles down from the h jaw mountains you just look at the riverbed that we've been following for over 500 miles that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it's just astounding the size of this flow so the question is is this the ponne river in conclusion there's we're standing in a a gravel Bed full of a bunch of little Pebbles that look like the Pebbles you would see um along a river and we know that they're not indigenous to the area and we know that they come from the hijaz mountains and there's a huge riverbed behind us that runs all the way back to the hijaz mountains it's not exactly rocket science as to how they got here even when we asked some locals cuz we didn't know if we were pronouncing the name of the W right they said yeah it's it's w um aruma and it runs from Medina in the hij ja mountains all the way to Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates um join so it's it's really not that that difficult the more that I research this the more that we explored the more it makes sense of the identification that Dr James sour made uh that this is to be identified as the Pichon from Genesis 2 we can say that the Bible describes the location of the Garden of Eden in relationship to Four Rivers that are all identifiable physically on the ground today and so all of these four rivers in southern Iraq came together to form One River now what this place looked like before the flood we don't know however uh I wanted to go and see what it looked like today and I was quite shocked I I don't know why I wasn't expecting it to be such a wet place but what I found there was a whole lot of [Music] water these are the vast marshes of Southern Iraq near where the Euphrates and Tigress Rivers come together the people that live here are Arabs but they're called Marsh Arabs instead of sheep and goats they eat fish and waterfoul instead of camels they raise water buffaloes and as endless as these marshes seem today they covered a much larger area in ancient times stretching all the way from the Gulf to the ruins of the old Samaran cities such as ER and arido spiser wrote all four streams once converted verged or were believed to have done so near the head of the Persian Gulf to create a rich Garden land to which local religion and literature alike looked back as the land of the Blessed according to the criteria of Genesis 2 these four rivers have to at some point connect and become one River where does that happen with these four rivers it happens in southern Iraq not to mention that this is also an ideal place for a garden because it's a low place it's a warm place and as it says in Genesis 13:10 The Garden of the Lord is well watered uh therefore I believe that the most probable place for the location of the Garden of Eden is the southern proposal uh Southern Iraq Romans chapter 5 says for just as through the Disobedience of the one man the many were made Sinners so also Through The Obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ Our Lord this is what we long for we long to regain the paradise that was lost it was lost through sin so sin has to be dealt with if we are to regain it and the only one who can deal with sin is God himself so God came down he became a man he was sinless the one who died for for sin is the one who forgives sin the one who was raised from the dead is the one who raises the dead to live forever On A Renewed Earth that's Paradise gained uh this is the story the historical story that the Bible is telling the end still is to come we have Paradise Lost at the beginning of Genesis which is the first book in the Bible and then we have the promise of paradise being regained at the return of Christ at the end of Revelation which is the last book in the Bible help me out by hitting that subscribe button I'll leave a link where you can order a copy of my book you can watch another video here thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Expedition Bible

Views: 3,041,544

Keywords: Joel Kramer, Bible teaching, Christian, Expedition Bible, Bible, Old Testament, the Bible is true, biblical archaeology, Christianity, Genesis 2, Garden of Eden, four rivers of Eden, Euphrates River, Tigris River, Pishon RIver, Hijaz mountains, marsh Arabs, garden of eden location, joel kramer archaeologist, bible study

Id: jwCdZ4CbA-E

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024