The word paradise, from old Iranian paridaya (which came from avestan pairidaêza) meant “garden or walled park,” which as it passed to Akkadian, a Semitic language, became pardesu. The idea of ​​a closed garden appears again in the Hebrew pardes, which figures three times in the Tanak, the hebrew bible, with the meaning of orchard or fruit garden, particularly in The Song of Songs. In the Septuagint—translation of the Tanak into koine Greek—pardes appears as paradeisos, which was used to imply not only the idea of ​​an orchard but also the hebrew word gan “garden.” It is from this circumstance that the word Paradise came to refer the Garden of Eden (Gan Eden). By virtue of this semantic field the Biblical Paradise is a closed park or garden guarded by a cherub, a huge winged bull that brandishes a flaming sword. Outside the Hebrew zone of influence, the Greek paradeisos also referred to an animal park and, in the Anabasis of Xenophon, the royal gardens that Xerxes left in the city of Celenas in his retreat from Greece:

Here Cyrus owned a palace and a large park [paradeisos] full of wild beasts, which he used to hunt on horseback, whenever he wished to give himself or his horses exercise. Through the midst of the park flows the river Maeander, the sources of which are within the palace buildings, and it flows through the city of Celaenae.¹

Hunting beasts in a park or a closed field (in a “paradise,” so to speak), is a theme that we will find repeatedly in this study.² Paradeisos as a translation of the Hebrew word pardes is also the reason why in some Spanish versions of the Bible this word was transcribed indistinctly as either “orchard” or “garden.” The Song of Songs is a clear example of the matter. With regard to our topic, this nuptial song attributed to Solomon offers one of the most refined expressions of the pleasant place, in which the beloved is likened to a garden or a spring:

Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride; milk and honey are under your tongue. The fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain. Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates with choice fruits, with henna and nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree, with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices. You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon.³

The image of the beloved as an “orchard/garden locked up, sealed fountain” (hortus conclusus), in addition to offering a metaphor of purity and virginity—and highlighting the reserved and discreet, walled-off character of the pleasant place—⁴ offers us an entry point to its emotional antipode, the locus terribilis.

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1. Xenophon, Anabasis. 1.2.7-8. ↩︎
2. The closed character of paradeisos survives in its etymology: “para” from Proto-indoeuropean root per-, which also originates the Greek cognate peri, "around" (as in periphery), and “deisos” from root dheig, “to build,” in this case a wall or palisade. A paradise is essentially a place surrounded by a wall. Similarly, the English word “garden” and its cognates jardin, jardín and giardino, express the same idea through the root *guer, “to grasp, enclose” present in the vulgar latin hortus gardinus which could be translated as “closed garden” or, simply “garden garden.”
3. Song of Songs, 4:11-16. ↩︎
4. It is worth mentioning that the metaphor “milk and honey are under your tongue…” which applies to the beloved in the the case of The Song of Songs, is also found in Exodus 3:8 in reference to the promised land: “So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.” Milk and honey, be it under the lovers tongue or flowing through the land, is a common metaphor for the psychological and topological varieties of the pleasant place. ↩︎