The Tigris River rises in the Taurus Mountains, in what is now Turkey, and flows for about 1,900 kilometers before joining the Euphrates in southern Iraq. In the Bible it first appears in Genesis 2, as one of the four rivers that flowed out of Eden.
There the text calls it Hiddekel and says it ran east of Assyria, the great power that would later dominate much of the Middle East. From the very beginning of Scripture, the river marks the real geography where humanity lived after the garden.
Centuries later, during the exile, the prophet Daniel was standing on the bank of this same river when he received one of the most striking visions in the entire book that bears his name. A heavenly being of glorious appearance revealed to him what would yet happen to the people of God.
The Tigris thus links two ends of the biblical narrative: the beginning of the world in Eden and the prophetic revelations given to Daniel, both flowing through the same land where the great civilizations of Mesopotamia were born.
