The name (
Hebrew Gīḥōn גיחון) may be interpreted as "bursting forth, gushing". The book of Genesis describes Gihon as "encircling the entire land of
Cush", a name associated with
Aethiopia elsewhere in the Bible. This is the reason that
Ethiopians have long identified the Gihon (
Giyon) with the Abay River (
Blue Nile), which encircles the former kingdom of
Gojjam. From a geographic standpoint this might be perplexing, since two of the other rivers said to issue out of Eden, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are in
Mesopotamia. However, first-century Jewish historian
Josephus associated the Gihon river with the
Nile, which is the merger of White and Blue Nile. In the Italian (Venetian)
Fra Mauro map of 1459, the Nile is called
Gion, reflecting this claim. The scholar
Edward Ullendorff has also argued in support of this identification. Nineteenth century, modern, and Arabic scholars have sought to identify the "land of Cush" with
Hindu Kush, and Gihon with
Amu Darya (Jihon/Jayhon of the Islamic texts). Amu Darya was known in the medieval Islamic writers as Jayhun or Ceyhun in
Turkish. This was a derivative of Jihon, or Zhihon as it is still known by the
Persians. A 1929 journal also suggested Gihon was the river Oxus (the Amu Darya).
Juris Zarins identified the Gihon with the
Karun River in Iran and Kush with the land of the
Kassites, which encompassed a Mesopotamian area that is repeatedly flooded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Karun discharges into the same general area at the head of the Persian Gulf as the Tigris, Euphrates, and
Wadi al-Batin (suggested as the identity of the
Pishon, the fourth river of Eden). This view is partly inspired by
Herodotus, who thought there was both an African Ethiopia and an Asiatic Ethiopia. The
Sefer haYashar, a medieval Hebrew
midrash, asserts that in the time of
Enos, grandson of
Adam, the river Gihon was subject to a catastrophic flood due to the wickedness of man. ==See also==