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Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

Paradise

Term borrowed from Persian that means “garden of god.” The Hebrews originally used a word that they applied not only to ordinary gardens but also to God’s garden in Eden (Gn 2–3; Is 51:3; Ez 28:13). Comparatively late in their history, they adapted from the Persian language the word that afterward became “paradise”; it appears three times in the OT referring to a park or orchard (Neh 2:8; Eccl 2:5; Sg 4:13). Later still, when the OT was translated into Greek, there was a Greek form of the same word, and the translators used it extensively for “garden”; for Greek-speaking Jews, the garden of Genesis 2 became paradeisos.

The idea of the original Persian word was that of an enclosure or walled garden. It referred particularly to the royal parks of the Persian kings, and this was how the Greeks came to know it. Both ideas fit well with the Hebrews’ picture of a garden where the Lord God walked (Gn 3:8) and from which his subjects could be excluded (v 24). Further important features of the Genesis paradise were its fruit trees and its rivers.

By NT times, this picture of God’s garden had developed in various ways, which are paralleled, not unexpectedly, in the folk beliefs of many nations. Like the Golden Age in Greek and Roman mythology, paradise was first of all something belonging to the remote past. But the Jews came to believe that it still existed in some undiscoverable place; like the Elysian fields, it was inhabited by the deserving dead. Then, with ever more elaborate descriptions of its glories, they wrote of its eventual reappearance at the end of this age.

Thus, in the idea of paradise converge all myths of another world, past, present, and future, where death and evil have no place. The NT witnesses to the truth that is at the core of all such beliefs. Paradise is the place into which, as an actual but otherworldly reality, Paul was once mysteriously “caught up” during his lifetime (2 Cor 12:4). It is also the place where the repentant thief on the cross was promised he would be, with Christ, immediately after his death (Lk 23:43). The third and last NT reference, a similar promise (Rv 2:7), tells us in addition that paradise is where the tree of life grows, and so identifies it both with the original world of Genesis 2 and with the future world of Revelation 22, complete with the life-giving tree and river, the encircling wall, and the presence of the king.