Pishon
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The Pishon is mentioned in the Biblical Genesis (2:11) as one of four rivers branching off from a single river within Eden. The river is described as encircling "the entire land of Havilah", which cannot be positively identified.
The only two identified rivers of the four streams said to issue forth from Eden, the Tigris (Hiddekel, from Genesis 2:14) and the Euphrates, do not now rise in the same place. It must therefore be assumed that either the topography of the area has changed or the geographical notions of the Genesis writer(s) were inaccurate. However, some scholars have questioned English translations that say the rivers issued forth from Eden, and claim improved renderings are more flexible in their description. This interpretation would allow Eden to be a confluence point for four rivers originating elsewhere.
Together with the Tigris, the river Pishon is briefly mentioned in the book of Ecclesiasticus (24:25), but this reference throws no more light on the location of the river.
In the Biblical Table of Nations, Havilah is associated with Arabia. If the two can be equated, the Pishon may correspond to an ancient dry riverbed that terminated in the Persian Gulf. Evidence of this river is visible in satellite photos and a telltale, fan-shaped delta of gravel deposits at the old river mouth. Such identification is necessarily tentative.
David Rohl identified Pishon with the Uizhun and placed Havilah to the northeast of Mesopotamia. The Uizhun is known locally as the Golden River. Rising near Mt. Sahand, it meanders between ancient gold mines and lodes of lapis lazuli before feeding the Caspian Sea. Such natural resources correspond to the ones associated with the land of Havilah in the Genesis account (2:11).
Certain Christian fundamentalists have sometimes appealed to the effects of the Noachian Flood to explain the seeming disappearance of the Pishon river and the supposed change in the upper courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the Bible, names like Havilah and Cush may have come to mean different places at different times.
