tree-of-life by Phillip Ratner
“And a river went out of (the Garden of) Eden… and from thence it was parted, and branched into four streams”: the Pishon, the Gi?on, the ?iddeqel and the Prat. Let us try to examine what are these four rivers. Concerning the ?iddeqel and the Prat – there is little doubt that what is meant are the rivers called the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their origin is in the inner Taurus Mountains in Turkey, where they separate, and then return and unite a little North of the city of Basra, in order to flow into the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf. Concerning the Gi?on and the Pishon there is no semantic continuity, especially since the only water source that kept the name Gi?on is the pulsing (ga?) spring around which there developed Jerusalem. But this is a tiny spring, compared with the immense water sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris (albeit there is a prophecy that in the future a great river will go forth from Jerusalem). It is necessary, therefore, to examine the further hints given by the scriptures about their basins – the Pishon “which compasses the whole land oh ?avilah, where there is gold” (2:11), whereas the Gi?on “it compasses the whole land of Kush”. From these Rashy deduces that these are the Nile sources, the White and the Blue Nile, which separate in East Africa, in the present Ethiopia, and return to unite near Khartoum, to flow together into the Mediterranean.
If so, we are dealing here precisely with the four rivers that gave the life to “The Fertile Crescent”, and which enabled the existence and development of humans in ancient times. It was not for nothing that when Lot, Abraham nephew, decided to settle “at the plain of the Yarden (Jordan), that it was well watered everywhere” (Gen. 13:10) it was compared to the waters of the Nile “like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Mi?rayim (Egypt)”.
Upon reading the sentence: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and branched into four streams”, we intuitively assume there was a single source from whence flow these four streams – but this is not so. Not only do these rivers not meet, they even surround the whole region of the Fertile Crescent, from the North and from the South. We should then assume a source river that surrounds the whole region of the Fertile Crescent as if in a circle, actually existing in a surrounding higher dimension, and gives the gift of water, that is – the vitality (?ayut). The river that went out of Eden seems to have disappeared, along with the garden, but left behind the four streams, that still preserve a few facets of paradise. Without them, the whole wide region that is considered as the cradle of human civilization would have been a desert.
The original Bible was written in Hebrew, the language of the people of “?ver haNahar” – the other side of the River – and is marked by the character of that environment. The site of the Biblical Garden of Eden must have been here, in the Fertile Crescent that is in the Middle East. But since this region is, in fact, at the center of the earth’s continents,[30] at the sacred center-point for all humankind, the ancient Biblical parable (Meshal haQadmoni) holds a universal meaning for all humankind. In fact, the name of that small river of Jerusalem, the Gi?on, means a spring that stops and disappears, but then would spring forth (yagi’a?, ????) again, suggesting that paradise may re-appear at Jerusalem.
But it is not mere geographical territory that we are dealing here with, but mainly with psychological-symbolic territory. We have already related to the river from Eden as surrounding. With this, we return to the Qabbalah symbols, where a world surrounds a world: the World of ?ssiyah-Action is the central circle, and is limited to concrete things. It is in turn surrounded by the World of Ye?irah, with which we are dealing here, and which is structured to contain still much more.
Thus, for example, the separation of the surrounding one into four streams: The pattern of the Four is called in the ancient Hindu teachings “Mandala” (which actually means in Sanskrit a circle), and is a model of the world. Such a model, made of four elements, is not exclusive to Indian beliefs, but is common around the world, ever since the times of ancient Sumer.
The psychologist Jung reported that people who have entered into chaotic states, and have started to reorganize their lives – are inclined to draw Mandala-type drawings with clear four-fold symmetry. Often these drawings also contained two trees in the middle. This cannot be explained away by referring to the Judeo-Christian tradition within which Jung operated, because such elements appear already in ancient Sumerian art.
Let’s leave for a moment the fourfold pattern and return to the Qabbalah sages, who formed from the story of Genesis seven-fold patterns: seven mansions of the lower paradise and seven of the higher paradise, and against these seven kinds of earth and seven regions of hell.[31] These patterns derive from the pattern of the Creation in seven days and the Sabbath, as well as on the first seven words of the Torah (Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’Shamayin ve’et ha’Are? – “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth”).
