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religion · Shared topic · Revision 0

Where Does the Word Paradise Come From?

Where Does the Word Paradise Come From?

Starting explanation, not independently reviewed

The current answer

A Persian word for a walled garden, borrowed into Hebrew as a plain orchard, that became heaven.

What remains uncertain

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Claims & evidence

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The Old Iranian compound behind it is pairi-daēza-, "around" plus "to build a wall," so literally a walled enclosure: the royal parks and hunting grounds of the Persian nobility.

Imported citation, not independently checked: B. J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible (2019), bedrock

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Greeks who served in or travelled through the empire found these remarkable enough to need a word for, and Xenophon uses parádeisos for exactly that, a Persian royal park.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Xenophon, Anabasis; Oeconomicus

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Nehemiah 2:8 has Nehemiah asking the Persian king for timber from "the king's pardēs," which is a royal forest or park, an administrative request inside the Persian bureaucracy.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Nehemiah 2:8

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When the Hebrew Bible was rendered into Greek, the translators needed a word for the garden God plants in Genesis 2, and they reached for parádeisos.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Septuagint, Genesis 2:8

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