Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

The Book of Ecclesiastes
Chapter 4 -- The Cross
Ecclesiastes 1:7 cemented the early Christian opinion concerning underground waters.
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
How the rivers return is not specified, but as such conduits are not visible on the surface, it stands
to reason that they must be below.
The term “rivers” of this verse is the Hebrew “nhl,” flash flows in wadies after heavy rainfall.
“Nhr,” Hebrew for a river continually flowing, was not used for streams in Palestine, but was used
for the Tigris and Euphrates. Ecclesiastes 1:7 speaks metaphorically of the vain course of human
nature, for those seeking scriptural explanation of nature, the verse would provide 2000 years of
mindset. We'll get back to metaphors in Chapter 29.
And now we must move on to the New Testament, which is to say, welcome the Greeks.
The Early Church
Jesus made what must have been an arduous trip
to "the Gates of Hades" in Caesarea Philippi
(Mathew 16:13), at least a full day uphill from
Bethsaida. The gate was the Cave of Pan with its
Paneion Springs, a 15 by 20-meter cavern which in
pre-Roman times was taken to be an entrance to
the underworld. King Herod built a marble edifice
dedicated to Caesar at the entrance.
Reference to an underground Hell is nonexistent in
the Old Testament. Hebrew tradition was not
particularly concerned with questions of the
afterlife; "She'ol" is where all go. To a Jew such as
Matthew, "the Gate of Hades" was to a Greek
Hades.
The early Christians thus advanced a hydrologic perspective based on the authority of the
Hebrews, Greeks and Romans.
De Providentia by Bishop of Cyrus Theodoretus (393-457) instructs the
faithful that water rises to the mountain tops in “obedience to the word of
God.”
In the diagram to the right, it's the will of God -- angel power, we might
say -- that moves waters from the sea to hillside springs. Nothing more
need be said regarding the physics, as the Church had more important
matters with which to deal. The noun "Agnostic," for example, is from
"agnus" (lamb) and "Stygis," our very own River Styx. "Agnostic" was
applied to those who thought the specific miracles of Christianity to be
improvable and thus by reason of the Lamb of God, neither believing nor
disbelieving, would be left stranded on the riverbank.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Springs
Ocean
Emerging in the fifth century, the monastic movement was about prayer, not the workings of
nature, but monastic transcriptions over the subsequent 800 years preserved medical manuals, a
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