Ecclesiastes 2:5

Footnotes

1. 28 Heb “made.”
2. 29 The term does not refer here to vegetable gardens, but to orchards (cf. the next line). In the same way the so-called “garden” of Eden was actually an orchard filled with fruit trees. See Gen 2:8–9.
3. 30 The noun פַּרְדֵּס (pardes, “garden, parkland, forest”) is a foreign loanword that occurs only 3 times in biblical Hebrew (Song 4:13; Eccl 2:5; Neh 2:8). The original Old Persian term pairidaeza designated the enclosed parks and pleasure-grounds that were the exclusive domain of the Persian kings and nobility ( פַּרְדֵּס; παράδεισος). The related Babylonian term pardesu “marvelous garden” referred to the enclosed parks of the kings ( 2:833 and 3:1582). The term passed into Greek as παράδεισος (paradeisos, “enclosed park, pleasure-ground”), referring to the enclosed parks and gardens of the Persian kings ( ). The Greek term has been transliterated into English as “paradise.”