A dry riverbed stretching from the western highlands of Saudi Arabia to the northern Persian Gulf is back in the spotlight after satellite images — first analyzed more than three decades ago — were revisited this month on the religious commentary site Patheos. The images show Wadi al-Batin, a fossilized river up to three miles wide, which some scholars believe corresponds to the biblical river Pishon described in Genesis.

The renewed attention hasn't produced new data. What it has produced is a fresh round of fascination with an old question: Can modern technology map the terrain of Scripture?

What the satellites actually show

In the early 1990s, Boston University geologist Dr. Farouk El-Baz analyzed radar images captured by NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor and identified Wadi al-Batin as the remnant of a massive ancient river, the Daily Mail reported. The channel runs from the Hejaz highlands near Medina northeast to the Persian Gulf near Kuwait — a course that, during a wetter Holocene era, would have sustained a waterway three miles across before climate shifts dried it out between 2000 and 3500 BC.

"These satellite images give us a window into landscapes that have vanished over millennia. We can now trace rivers that once shaped human settlement and perhaps even inspired ancient biblical narratives."

Biblical archaeologist James A. Sauer analyzed the same satellite data and concluded the dry riverbed's features best match the biblical description of the Pishon — one of four rivers Genesis names as flowing from Eden. The others: the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Gihon. The first two still flow today. The Gihon, some scholars argue, may correspond to Iran's Karun River, which cuts through the Zagros Mountains and historically ran through Kassite territory — identified by some as the land of Cush mentioned in Genesis.

Archaeologist Juris Zarins reached a similar conclusion: satellite imagery showing ancient riverbeds near the Persian Gulf corresponds with Genesis descriptions, suggesting the Eden narrative may reflect real ancient geography even if its spiritual elements remain interpretive.

Genesis describes the Pishon as a river that "compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone."

The geological record and the scriptural record, in this case, point to the same patch of earth.

A competing theory — and its limits

Not everyone is looking at the Persian Gulf. A 2025 study by Mahmood Jawaid, a Texas-based chemical engineer, proposed that the Garden of Eden was located in Bahir Dar, a fertile region in northwestern Ethiopia near Lake Tana, sitting roughly 6,000 feet above sea level. Jawaid drew on readings of both the Bible and the Quran, analyzing descriptions of Adam and Eve, the rivers, and the garden.

The study was not peer-reviewed. And it ventures into territory that makes clean scholarship difficult — Jawaid suggested Adam may have evolved from Homo habilis or a late form of Australopithecus, a claim that attempts to stitch evolutionary biology onto religious narrative without obvious seams. The ambition is notable. The rigor is another matter.

Why does this keep pulling people back

There's a reason these images resurface every few years, and it isn't academic novelty. The question of whether Eden was a real place taps into something deeper than cartography — it touches the credibility of Scripture itself. And in a culture that has spent decades trying to reduce the Bible to metaphor, any physical evidence that corroborates its geography lands differently than it might have a generation ago.

The secular instinct is to treat Genesis as an allegory and move on. But the satellite data complicates that dismissal. If the Pishon was a real river — and the geological evidence says it was — then the Genesis author was describing a real landscape. That doesn't prove Eden existed as theology understands it. But it does mean the text was grounded in something more than imagination.

This is the part that makes certain corners of the academy uncomfortable. Not the claim that Eden was literally a garden with a flaming sword at its gate, but the quieter implication — that ancient religious texts encoded geographical knowledge we're only now recovering with billion-dollar satellite systems. It's harder to dismiss a tradition that turns out to have been paying closer attention to the physical world than its critics assumed.

The landscape that vanished

Arabia's arid transformation accelerated after the last Ice Age. Rising sea levels may have submerged parts of the delta where these rivers once converged. A land that was lush became sand. Rivers three miles wide became invisible — until radar saw through the surface.

Four rivers are named in an ancient text. Two still flow. A third may cut through the mountains of Iran. And a fourth left a fossil in the Saudi desert wide enough to see from space.

The map isn't complete. It may never be. But the blank spaces keep shrinking — and what fills them keeps looking familiar to anyone who's read the first two chapters of Genesis.