We have times for Genesis. How about places? Ronald Loui Ronald Loui Ronald Loui Published May 30, 2026 + Follow Apparently when mowing the lawn makes the old prof dizzy, he starts writing things down furiously so the next generation will have a chance to find them. Yes, some puzzles remain but not big ones. I'll try not to be too speculative and just commit here to the more solid ones. Start with Eden. I was just outside in my garden. But I don't think their referent "garden" was a walled grove like the children's books show. Many think it was the foothill range stretching across the headwaters of the Harran Plain's Balikh watershed (actually a triangle of flows in some old maps) and the triangle of tributaries that feed the Khabur/Habor. With the Euphrat and Tigris, you get four rivers flowing out of a place where pastoralists would have had a great time pasturing their flocks. Of course, you have to compare the founding myths of Enki and Set/Horus if you want to see how wildly mythic these stories can get. But yes, Padan Aram, Aram Naharaim, the "river region", the Sanliurfa Province today at the Syro-Turkic border. Start there. Feel free to include Adana in Cilicia as a derived toponym (an homage as Uru Adaniya in Kizzuwatna), though that area is trans-, not cis-Euphrates from their perspective. As far as Ur-kesh to the East. By the way, you can find it on a satellite image by looking for the green rectangle near Lake Assad (we still calling it that?) right on the Turkish side. Apparenly Rojava Kurds keep it well watered! Why are they enumerating with Balikh first? Because that's their urheimat. That's home base. Balikh has gold and onyx because they are considering the whole upper Euphrates as part of that system. When rivers have confluences, you have choices how you want to name their parts, especially if you do not have satellite or aerial photography. This is where the Watchers can be found (and all the way to Mount Hermon, southwest near Golan Heights if you believe the text, at least on excursion). If you look closely at Book of Enoch, the dark arts of the Watchers are essentially the Agriculture and Astronomy departments, science and industry, Meteorology and Method, of the modern university. Cain will be guilty of birthing similar descendants who love arts and sciences, Music and Metallurgy. Rurals have always disliked urban knowledge. Watchers are like monastic Apkallu of declining Ur-III c. 2000 BCE; they are there to study in quiet, like monks while southern cities burn. Men/human/dm/Haadam means Amorites (MarTu). Everyone non-Amorite doesn't count, at least in the translations we get. Even goyiim seems to apply to non-tribal but fellow Northwest Semites. So truly goyish today would not even be in the scope of human in the text. Tough to be Chinese in the OldT terminology. Watchers break their oaths of celibacy and intermarry with Amorites (MarTu). Enoch is a great read. Ebla is Havilah. That one is all mine as far as i can tell. It's a good one. The migration pattern is eastward from upper Balikh to the west-most and central spurs of the upper Khabur. I think Shekhna could be Enoch, but similarity of phonology in modern renderings of names is so fraught with errors. Suffice to say Noah enjoys seeing the Tell Leilan lahar (volcanic mudflow inundation) documented by Weiss and Courty, and he probably does so from Kiziltepe (Little Urartu/Ararat/Armenian Hill) or Mardin (Kurdish for fortress, which is Arg in Persian -- tebah to arca actually restoring the fortress concept lost in Hebrew). The way to escape a downvalley lahar is to move upmountain ahead of time. This tephra is the same ejecta from Mt. Masius (Karaca Dag) which spewed pumice, or had phreatic venting, or fissure fumarole, or all three during expulsion. Volcanology has a lot more words now than when aetiology was anthropomorphic and thunder came from gods. Flaming sword turned every way sure sounds like Kilauea at night. I like to say the area of the Hurrians, then Yamhad, then the Mittani, then the Assyrians, then ..., the Kurds, is always the same arc. For pastoralists, it's like the 210 Highway in LA. You can move from water source to water source, spaced perfectly, then enter the North-South highways, raid or trade, and retreat back into the peace of the foothills. The post-diluvian diaspora is not as interesting as it sounds. These people did not found the cities and places where they went, but they founded Amorite/MarTu/WestSemite outposts. Or tried. Probably many were unsuccessful missionaries of their language (Amorite) and faith (Ba'al Hadad and Dagan pantheon and storm god worship?) and genes (again, see Kurdish gene markers!), taken to pre-existing places filled with non-WestSemites. As we learn in history, such sojourners often get killed for their troubles. But of course Elam probably is the Kudur-Mabuk to Rim-Sin-I lineage that works Isin-Larsa into the orbit of Susa's Sukkalmah Dynastic Elam. Mizraim seems off to Goshen on the Pelusian branch of the Nile and Avaris (this was likely a loose trading confederation with the Sinai and Levant, related peoples sharing much culture, though not centrally administered like an urban empire). And Nimrod is really two famous Amorites (read the adjacent verses carefully!): the founder of Amorite Babylon, one guy early 19thC BCE; and the founder of Amorite Upper Mesopotamia, a different guy late 19thC BCE, including Ekallatum, Nineveh, Assur, and later Shubat-Enlil (restarting settlement of Tell Leilan) in the Khanaean parts of Khabur River Basin (see also Nagar/Nawar and Kurda). Sumu-Abum in the south and Shamshi-Adad-I in the north. No I don't know where Accad/Agade is, but it's got to be near Kish just like they say. Funny thing is the B-names are on one side of the river and the K-names are on the other. Abram, Sarai, and Terah are clearly from Balikh watershed Urfa/Riha, which also had the name Edessa, and was originally Urhai/Urhay. This is your Ur of the Chaldees. It's so insulting to propose they come from Ur of Sumer, I won't even start the rebuttal. Chaldeans were late arrivals to the south. Woolley was wishful-thinking. Which Patriarch moved back from the Khabur to the Balikh? Hard to say. Enoch did and never came back. Probably Arphaxad (Chalde), Eber (Hebrew), and Peleg (Balikh) are the candidates for the move back to Padan Aram. Nahor and Harran are eponymous for good reason in that region (though there are a lot of Nahor=river references, just as there are a couple of Gihons=springs and Kadesh places, and lots of different "wilderness", and even havilah gets coopted for stretch of sand). Josephus has Abram leading men at Damascus. If Old Abe were pious in the Hadad cult, he'd have crossed through Aleppo, or at the confluence where Tuttul was a Dagan center (now close to Raqqa). He could have crossed around Palmyra (Jebel Bishri, the Amorite desert stronghold) but then Sarai would have been kidnapped even earlier by war lords. Where did Lot go? Hard to say where Zoar is, but it makes sense for a well-watered pentapolis in the eyes of an exurban pastoralist to be in the Moabite Plain north of the salty sea. Not south, not downstream. This is a natural place for a conurbation, and it includes Jericho. The multi-king expeditionary force clearly cleaned up both sides of the Dead Sea (the Sea of Lut), but the place to find Sodom and Gomorrah is ironically in the region where the famous later Madaba map is (which shows Zoar on the south of the Dead Sea!), southwest of Amman. Big cities tend to like the same spots throughout human settlement. The Ammonite/Moabite dividing line seems to be Wadi-Mujib (River Ar-non), which makes me think Zo-ar is right there, dividing the legacy land rights, bisecting the northern and southern tips of the Dead Sea (which has changed extent a lot). What was the path of Exodus? I have no idea. The text clues and commonsense are contradictory, so it's a coin toss. I do know that the biostats of three or four generations over 100 years with good survival rates in Heliopolis suggest 6000 warriors, the right size for a dozen legions or battalions. You could feed them if you were indeed "shepherd kings" who knew the people of the Sinai because you were related, spoke the same language, adopted their desert Yahwist god, and had continuously traded with them while esconced in the Hyksos Egypt enclave. They would have called y'all Aamu, the Asiatics, not Israelites, and your Shasu and Habiru Ahlamu-derived friends and relatives wold have stretched all the way into Syria, in the Retjenu. Did they go as far as Midia southeast of Petra? Probably not. These names often conflate peoples and later associations of peoples. I suspect all reference to Midia is to the Kenite subpopulation of Midianites (the same Yahwists who give us Jethro and Zipporah). The Kenites may have ranged in the Arabah southwest, where Edomites would be found. I do believe Sinai is Sin+Ai, which is a moon reference (Sin of Ur and Isin, Nanna of Ur and Uruk, Yarikh of Ugarit and Mari, Beth Yerakh, Yareach, Erach, ... Jericho... Le[b/v]anah/Laban, Iah/Ah of Egypt's Ahmose). Yahwism seems to me as a repackaged storm-god-face on a Yarikh moon-cult's revulsion at Amorite child sacrifice. BTW, Josephus Antiquities has wonderful detail about how Hyksos Egyptian Moses as a young prince led armies past Theban Egypt and into Nubia/"Ethiopia". That's all the biblical geography I care to know, unless you want to start talking Byblos Canaanites and Kanesh Hittites. Or Awan Elam. I once met someone who claimed to be descended from Awan. Should have asked HER where Awan was.