Bible passage: Genesis 2:14-15
"The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. [15] Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it."

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, 

This is the 51st lecture on Genesis. In the last session, I talked about three of the four major rivers that God made on Earth. Now, let me talk about the fourth river, the Euphrates. We have the Euphrates River today as well. The Euphrates starts from the highlands of Eastern Turkey and runs through Syria and Iraq to finally end in the Persian Gulf. It flows very close to the third river, the Hiddekel or otherwise called the Tigris, and these two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, later join together. So, sometimes they combine these two rivers and call it the Tigris-Euphrates. 

The original Euphrates is not exactly the same as today's Euphrates. The topography has changed to a great extent over a long period of time. Genesis 15:18 also mentions the Euphrates. It says, "On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates:" Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, on the lower end of the Euphrates, around 2,000 BC. 

Then, in obedience to the word of God, he moved to the land of Canaan. The big river Euphrates at the time of Abraham is in close relation to today's Euphrates. But there is no way for us to know exactly the shape and location of the Euphrates when God first made it. The literal meaning of 'Euphrates' is to taste sweet. But the spiritual meaning that God put in this name is 'affluence'. Why did God put such a meaning- Where the Euphrates adjoins the Tigris, a plain of very fertile land is formed.

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