Third, the philologists were reporting this based on empirical observation, not pure speculation. Their informants were Syrians who could tell them that the word was used by both Arabs and Greek-speakers and that it referred to gardens and inferred that the Arabs got the word from Greek. This is pretty clear from the reports and I see no reason to discount them.
Absolutely correct. In a culture based on oral transmission of knowledge, people tended to have very good memories spanning many generations.
It should be obvious that it makes no sense to believe that prior to the arrival of Islam, Damascus had no gardens or orchards watered by the river that ran just outside the city, or that its inhabitants, including ethnic Arabs and Arameans, didn’t know the Greek word for “garden” when Damascus had been a Hellenistic city for many centuries.
In addition, Arabic
firdaws (a) is primarily associated with “garden, orchard” and not with “royal park” (as the original Persian) and (b) it seems to designate “a group of gardens”. In consequence, it could perfectly well have passed into pre-Islamic Arabic as a plural directly from Greek (παράδεισοι
parádeisoi > فَرَادِيس
parādīs/
farādīs) after which it became “
the Garden” (
al-Firdaws) in the sense of “Paradise”, presumably under Christian influence.
However, I am inclined to believe that not only Arabic
firdaws but Hebrew פַרְדֵּס
pardes and Aramaic פַּרְדַּיְסָא
pardaysa are also borrowed from Greek instead of Persian. If this turns out to be correct, it would provide additional support for Arabic
firdaws being a direct loan from Greek.
The reason why we need to consider a Greek derivation for
pardes/pardaysa is that the default position assumes a (more or less direct) loan from Persian for which, however plausible it might seem,
there is no hard evidence.
Briefly, פַרְדֵּס
pardes, “garden, orchard, park” in the Hebrew Bible occurs at Song of Songs 4:13, Nehemiah 2:8 and Ecclesiastes 2:5. Song and Ecclesiastes are traditionally believed to have been composed by a certain “King Solomon” and therefore, presumably, relatively early.
Song starts with the affirmation that “this is Solomon’s Song of Songs”, but this appears to be a spurious claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever. In fact, there is no evidence that Solomon as described in the HB was a historical person and even less that he wrote poetry, so this seems to be a text that was misappropriated for politicoreligious reasons.
Moreover, although Song was later interpreted as an allegory of the “love between God and Israel” it actually is about two human lovers and seems out of place in a religious text. But further problems come to light on closer examination. For example, as suggested in Wikipedia and elsewhere, Song
1. Has language supporting a date around the 3rd century BC;
2. Seems to reflect contact with Greek culture;
3. Has parallels with the compositions of Greek poets such as
Theocritus (a court poet at Alexandria) and Philodemus (who was from Jordan in Seleucid Syria);
4. The earliest MS fragments are from the Herodian period;
5. Was included in the Jewish Canon in the 2nd century AD and may have been used for non-religious purposes earlier.
6. Refers to places associated with Lebanon which is inconsistent with a text supposedly composed in the southern kingdom of Judah, etc., etc.
As pointed out by the
Encyclopaedia Judaica, “The fact that for two centuries Palestine was part of Hellenistic kingdoms, first of Ptolemaic Egypt and then of Seleucid Syria, made Greek influence on Jewish thought and life inevitable … Jason the high priest carried his Hellenizing to the extent of establishing Greek educational institutions, the gymnasium and ephebeion, and of founding Jerusalem as a Greek city, Antioch-at-Jerusalem …” -
Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 8, p. 786 ff.
Additionally, if Song is composed in the style of a Greek drama (dramatic performance) as some scholars have suggested, it seems reasonable to assume some connection with the wider Hellenistic tradition introduced to the region after Alexander’s conquests, which persisted well into the Christian Era.
Certainly, statements like “Come with me from Lebanon, descend from the peak of Amana, from the summits of Senir and Hermon” (4:8); “Garden spring flowing down from Lebanon” (4:15); “The Tower of Lebanon towards Damascus” (7:4), etc., suggest a connection with the northern areas of Lebanon and southern Syria and brings us very close to the paradise-like garden landscape of Damascus and environs.
Amana or Abana is identified with the River Barada (Chryssorrhoas, “streaming with gold”) which, together with Pharpar from the same mountain range, runs by Damascus and waters the landscape discussed earlier. The reason why Syria is important is that it was a major cultural influence in the region.
In particular, Syria was a major centre of Hellenistic and Christian civilisation. Damascus itself is associated with St Paul as is Antioch and it is clear from Paul’s epistles that he used to address the new Christian communities in Greek.
The same is true of Luke whose name is Greek (Λουκᾶς
Loukas) and who may have been Syrian or Greek. Indeed, Luke’s native city Antioch was founded in 300 BC as a Greek city settled with Athenians and Macedonians as well as with some native Syrians and Jews. As the capital of Roman Syria, Antioch was a Greek-speaking Hellenistic city almost the size of Alexandria.
Similarly, Damascus became a Greek city under the Seleucid Empire and was later rebuilt by the Romans and incorporated into the
Decapolis group of Hellenistic cities in the region which stretched southwards all the way to
Philadelphia in Jordan.
It may be worth noting that "recent scholarship has concluded that it is probable that Jesus himself sometimes spoke Greek” (
Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 8, p. 787), which shows that direct contact with Greek goes back to the very beginning of Christianity and applies to all major ethnic groups in the region.
In summation, there can be no doubt that some Arabs had direct knowledge of Greek and this was the language through which at least some of the early Arab converts became acquainted with Christian teachings. There is no reason to assume that Greek-speaking Arabs had to wait for somebody to translate a Greek word into Aramaic or Syriac. 😀
Incidentally, the
Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, p. 1839 in its discussion of derivational processes of Arabic nouns gives “
firdaws ‘paradise’ (< Greek
parἀdeisos)” as an example of retrograde derivation where
parἀdeisos is reanalysed as a plural pattern to which a singular pattern is added or as a quinqueliteral back-formation (where
w is taken as a root consonant).
On Song of Songs see also:
Joan B. Burton, “Themes of Female Desire and Self-Assertion in the Song of Songs and Hellenistic Poetry”, Anselm C Hagedorn, ed.,
Perspectives on the Song of Songs, 2005, pp. 180-205.
Patrick Hunt,
Poetry in the Song of Songs: A Literary Analysis, 2008.
David M. Carr,
The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction, 2011.
Matthias Rüdiger Hopf, “The Song of Songs as a Hebrew ‘counterweight’ to Hellenistic drama”,
Journal of Ancient Judaism, 2017 8(2): 208-221.
;maybe someone messed it up and everyone else repeated because he was an elder or something (like how borrowings are occasionally corrupted in every language). There are plenty of possible explanations out there, and there is no reason to assume the linguistically interesting back formation is a better answer.
