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21 corroborated by modern researchers that have identified the tribal locations throughout Arabia. Even the name Hagar was found to be the name of an ancient city in eastern Arabia. An updated study by E.A. Knauf (Ismael, 1985) conclusively deciphered the name Havilah as the Hebrew for "Sand Land," and identified it as the geographic name for south- ern Arabia. as The problem with such convincing conclusions has been that no river in Arabia could qualify as the biblical river Pishon, if for no other reason than the simple fact that the whole of Arabia is arid, a huge desert land. Could the Bible be so wrong? Could the whole tale of the Garden of Eden, and thus of the events and Divine Encoun- ters in it, be just a myth? Starting with a firm belief in the veracity of the Bible, the following question came to our mind: Why does the biblical narrative go to relatively great lengths to describe the geogra- phy and mineralogy of the land (Havilah) where the Pishon was; list the land and describe the circular course of the Gihon River; merely identify the location ("east of Assyria") of the Hiddekel; and just name the fourth river, Prath, without any additional identifying landmarks? Why this descending order of information? The answer that had occurred to us was that while there was no need whatsoever to tell the reader of Genesis where the Euphrates was, and a mere mention of Assyria was enough to identify the Tigris (Hiddekel) River, it was neces- sary to explain that the Gihon—evidently, a lesser-known river by then—was the river that encompassed the land of Kush; and that the apparently totally unknown river Pishon was in a land called Havilah, which, devoid of landmarks, was identified by the products that came from it. These thoughts began to make sense when, in the late 1980s, it was announced that scanning of the Sahara desert (in North Africa, in western Egypt) with soil-penetrating radar from Earth-orbiting satellites and with other instruments aboard the space shuttle Columbia, revealed under layers of desert sand dry beds of rivers that once flowed in this region. Subsequent research on the ground established that the area was well watered, with major rivers and many tributaries, The First Encounters