Tigris: Etymology and the meaning of Hiddekel in Genesis 2:14 – Short Notes

Koot van Wyk (DLitt et Phil; Thd) Visiting Professor, Department of Liberal Education, Kyungpook National University, Sangju Campus, South Korea, Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College, Australia

 

The conditions before the world wide catastrophic Flood that created the fossil-record, destroyed the dinosaurs, and formed the Grand Canyon in the biblically calculated year of 2683 BCE were different from those after the Flood. Noah was able to position himself by probably using astronomy to find the spot again where Adam pointed out for them since Noah's great grandfather may have known Adam. The situations are no longer identical and modern pictures of the area at the Tigris and Euphrates cannot be used for these rivers in this particular verse. The Hebrew form Hiddekel is a Sumerian loanword that is glossed together. The Sumerian word for "river" is ID. That is why it sounded like "hid" to the Hebrews. "Dekel" in the Hebrew is from the Sumerian loanword into Hebrew "dagal" meaning "wide". The translation in Sumerian is literally "wide river". The Akkadian form of the Sumerian was very similar as the one Moses is using here: Idiglat. It is also a compounding of two Sumerian ideograms: ID meaning "river" and GAL meaning "big". A final choice would be to say that Moses is rather using a Sumerian form of the name for Hiddekel (hid.dagal) rather than an Akkadian form (ID.glat). The Egyptians also heard the Akkadian word ID.glat which sounded as Idiglat and since the Egyptians did not have an /l/ in their alphabet, they used an /r/ normally. The Greeks heard it from the Egyptians as Idigrat and ended with the Greek form Tigrit > Tigris.

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