o, from the paradeisos to the amusement park
I was younger once this guy came to me told me about all the honey out there
He said: “Honey, gold, jewels, money, women, wine, cars that shine.”
I don’t know what he was talking about but I think I had an idea.
He said: “Smell the rose, the sweet sweet rose, catch the sun find where it grows
Smell the rose, the sweet sweet rose that grows on castle walls in heaven. In heaven yeah.”
Kula Shaker, Hey Dude
§ 6.1. Garden/Pleasure
It is commonly argued that the Hebrew word Eden, biblical name of earthly paradise, comes from the Akkadian edinnu—taken from the Sumerian edin—which meant steppe or plain. However, as the word passed from one language to another, Abraham’s people most likely did not hear this meaning, but what this voice meant in their own language: delight or pleasure. Indeed, it is in this sense that the word is used in Genesis 18:12, when Sarah hears one of the angels tell Abraham that within a year she will bear a child:
Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, after I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?1
Seen thus, it is not strange that Genesis 2:8: “and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed,” can be translated as “and the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure,” which is precisely how it appears in the Douay Bible, published in the city of Reims in 1582.
Now, if the word Eden—understood as pleasure or delight—refers to ideas of an overtly sexual and reproductive natural world, the discovery of a bilingual Akkadian-Aramaic inscription in 1979 near the Syrian-Turkish border clarifies its etymology by expressing: “‘to be fruitful, plentiful’ or ‘to be well-watered’,”2 which not only alludes to human and earthly fertility but to one of the fundamental traits of both the paradeisos and the locus amoenus: abundant water. As a matter of fact, argues the same dictionary: “this is also ultimately the connection between the Greek usage of the term paradise to translate (gan) Eden in the Septuagint (e.g., Gn. 2.8) and the parallel usage of the Biblical Hebrew term pardes (well-watered grove, orchard; Eccl. 2.5-6),”3 which we already examined in the preamble (0.3, 0.27).
The Garden of Eden is thus a locus amoenus where pleasure, both physical and psychological, is clearly related to the fertility and abundance of the earth.
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