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20 And the name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that circles all of the land Kush. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel, the one that flows east of Assyria. And the fourth is the Prath. Clearly, two of the Rivers of Paradise, the Hiddekel and the Prath, are the two major rivers of Mesopotamia (that gave the land its name, which means "The Land Between the Rivers"), the Tigris and Euphrates as they are called in English. There is complete agreement between all scholars that the biblical names for these two rivers stem from their Sumerian names (via the intermediary Akkadian): Idilbat and Purannu. Though the two rivers take separate courses, at some points almost coming together, at others separating substantially, they both originate in the mountains of Anatolia, north of Mesopotamia; and since this is where the headwaters are as riverine science holds, scholars have been searching for the other two rivers at that "headpoint.". But no suitable candi- dates for the Gihon and Pishon as two more rivers flowing rom that mountain range and meeting the other qualifications have been found. The search, therefore, spread to more distant lands. Kush has been taken to mean Ethiopia or Nubia in Africa, and the Gihon ("The Gusher") to be the Nile River with its several cataracts. A favorable guess for Pishon (possi- bly "The one who had come to rest") has been the Indus River, equating therefore Havilah with the Indian subconti- nent, or even with landlocked Luristan. The problem with such suggestions is that neither the Nile nor the Indus con- fluates with the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia. The names Kush and Havilah are found in the Bible more than once, both as geographical terms and as names of nation- states. In the Table of Nations (Genesis chapter 10) Havilah is listed together with Seba, Sabtha, Raamah, Sabtecha, Sheba, and Dedan. They were all nation-lands which various biblical passages linked with the tribes of Ishmael, the son of Abraham by the handmaiden Hagar, and there is no doubt that their domains were in Arabia. These traditions have been names DIVINE ENCOUNTERS