Paradise ultimately derives from pairidaēza- ‘wall enclosing a garden or orchard’ in the old Iranian language Avestan, from pairi- ‘around’, from PIE base *per¹, and daēza- ‘wall’ (originally made of clay or mud bricks), from PIE base *dheigh- ‘to mould, form, shape’. In the fourth century bce, Xenophon imported this word into Greek as paradeisos, referring not to these walls themselves, but to the huge parks that Persian nobles loved to build and hunt in.

Then, in the next century, paradeisos was used to refer to the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the Septuagint. The word was then used three times in the New Testament to refer to ‘a place of blessedness’, referring back to its base meaning of ‘garden’, a metaphor for ‘heaven’.