Havilah

W.F. Albright, in the 1922 publication The Location Of The Garden Of Eden, states that "the Havilah of Genesis, chapter 2, refers certainly to the African Havilah, rather than to the Asiatic Havilah which lay opposite, since it is said to produce good gold, gum resin, and malachite, all of which are important products of the Nubian Desert, and two of which, at least, do not seem to have been found in western Arabia."[3]

Albright goes on further to illustrate that: "Genesis chapter 10 gives the name "Havilah" twice, once in verse 7, among the sons of Kush (Ethiopia) after Seba, and the second time in verse [29], among the sons of Joktan, immediately after Sheba and Ophir. There is no reason to suppose, as is popular nowadays, that the sections came from different hands; we have rather an unskilful attempt to state the fact that there were two divisions of the tribes, one African, the other Asiatic."[4]

The Havilah (or Hawilah in Hebrew) which Albright is referencing is Hawila, Sudan, a place found in the Khartoum region of the country.[5]

Saadia Gaon's tenth-century Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible substitutes Havilah with Zeila in present day Somalia.[6] Benjamin Tudela, the twelfth-century Jewish traveler, claimed Zeila region was the land of Havilah confined by Al-Habash on the west.[7] Zeila (Havilah) had been sacked by the Portuguese governor of Old Goa, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, while its Harla chief Mahfuz invaded Abyssinia in 1517.[8][9]

In 1844, Charles Forster argued that a trace of the ancient name Havilah could still be found in the use of Aval for what is now known as Bahrain Island.[10]

Augustus Henry Keane believed that the land of Havilah was centered on Great Zimbabwe and was roughly contemporaneous with what was then Southern Rhodesia.[11] Havilah Camp was the name of the base camp of a group of British archaeologists who studied the Great Zimbabwe ruins from 1902 to 1904. In the end, they rejected any biblical connection with the settlement.[12]

Sir Walter Raleigh appears to identify Havilah with Tibet.[13]

Map of Havilah

W. W. Müller, in the 1992 Anchor Bible Dictionary, believes that biblical Havilah refers to two different locations on western Arabia.

• Genesis 2 is region in southwest Arabia.[14]
• Genesis 25:18 is a northern Arabian location, possibly Medina Province.[14]

There are a number of features in Medina Province which match the description such as gold deposits, a location on the incense road, Headwaters for the Pishon River, and remains of neolithic and bronze age civilizations in the Harrat region.

The Arabian hypothesis is further strengthened by James A. Sauer's, former curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum, identification of Pishon, which is described as encircling Havilah in the Bible,[15] as the Wadi Bisha, a dry channel which begins in the Hijaz Mountains, near Medina, to run northeast to Kuwait. Sauer makes this identification based on geology and history. [16] In addition, Bible commentators believe that Havilah should be Arabian because the Ishmaelites, who settled between Havilah and Shur, were ancestors of Arabs.[17]