paradise [OE] Paradise goes back to the ancient Iranian language Avestan, in which the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion were written in the 4th century ad. Pairidaēza then meant ‘an enclosure, park’. Via Greek paradeisos ‘royal (enclosed) park’ it was then used in the sense paradise in the Greek translation of the Bible, and through Latin entered Old English, where it meant ‘the Garden of Eden’ before coming to refer to the *heaven of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.