Eden and Beyond: Images of Paradise in Biblical and extra‐Biblical Literature

Abstract

The word paradise is one which is so familiar to most of us that its utterance evokes an immediate mental image of a beautiful garden where the righteous dwell for eternity. This image, while finding its roots in the biblical tradition, is influenced as much by Dante, Milton and many Christian paintings as it is by biblical traditions. In fact, it is hard to see the word paradise without bringing to mind those famous medieval and renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden, Heaven and Hell. The problem of this Christian heritage is that it encourages a rather monochrome image of the nature of Paradise which runs contrary to the variety of images contained in texts from the biblical era.The purpose of this study is to examine the references to Paradise in texts from the biblical era and to explore the images evoked by them. The paper will begin and end with a consideration of the texts about Paradise in the New Testament. From there we shall move on to explore the background to these texts first in the Hebrew bible and the Septuagint and then in non-canonical texts from the second temple period. We shall note where ideas shift and develop and note how this affects the image of Paradise. We will end by returning to the texts from the New Testament and noting how this background affects our understanding of the relevant passages.