Genesis 2:10–14 describes a single river flowing from Eden and dividing into four rŏ'šhīm — heads or principal branches — each associated with distinctive geographical regions and natural resources. No known landscape simultaneously satisfies all four identifications, and the explicit presence of Mesopotamian river names within a description whose other geographical markers point toward the Horn of Africa has resisted scholarly consensus for centuries. This paper advances a paleogeographical hypothesis: that the four rivers originated in the Afar Depression during the African Humid Period (c. 15,000–5,000 BP), when monsoon intensification expanded paleo-Lake Abhe Bad to an estimated 6,000–7,000 km² and sustained a perennial multi-tributary drainage system radiating outward in approximately cardinal directions from the central Afar basin. The Gihon’s identification with the land of Cush — consistently Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in biblical usage — provides the strongest textual anchor for an African location and is engaged through Goldenberg (2003) and Ullendorff (1968). The Pishon’s mineral associations (gold, bdellium, onyx) are examined against the documented geology of the Ali Sabieh Precambrian basement and AHP vegetation reconstructions. The Hiddekel and Euphrates are proposed as memorial namesakes — Afar river names transposed by AHP-desiccation migrants onto the two most prominent rivers of their Mesopotamian destination — a process grounded in documented ancient Near Eastern toponym transfer practices (Horowitz 1998; Blenkinsopp 2011). The paper engages the dominant Persian Gulf confluence hypothesis (Speiser 1964; Cassuto 1961), the Armenian highlands proposal, and allegorical readings, arguing that the Afar model resolves textual and geographical problems that the established alternatives leave unaddressed. The four river identifications carry explicitly differentiated epistemic weights, and the memorial naming claim is presented as the most inferential element of the argument.
Diogo Azevedo Oliveira Sennfelt (Fri,) studied this question.