[Footnote 1: So the margin of the A. and R. Versions more correctly.]
Now it will at once strike the reader that two of these rivers are well
known to the present day. The others are not.
It is in the identification of these two, and of the districts which
they "compassed," which form the difficulties of the problem. Up till
recent times, it is remarkable what a variety of speculations have been
attempted as to the situation of Eden. Dr. Aldis Wright, the learned
author of the article "Eden" in Smith's "Biblical Dictionary," remarks:
"It would be difficult, in the whole history of opinion, to find any
subject which has so invited, and at the same time completely baffled,
conjecture, as the Garden of Eden." And in another place he thinks that
"the site of Eden will ever rank with the quadrature of the circle, and
the interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy among those unsolved, and
perhaps insoluble, problems which possess so strange a fascination." It
is, however, to be remarked, (1)that all that was written before
Professor Delitzsch's researches were made known; and (2)that really a
great mass of the conjecture and speculation has been purely in the
air--undertaken without any reference to the plain terms of the text to
be interpreted. It is the extravagance of commentators, and their
insisting on going beyond the narrative itself, that has raised such
difficulties, and made the problem look more hopeless than it really is.
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