garden

Distinctions

gan (גן)

Forty-one times in Tanach by Even-Shoshan's concordance: Gan Eden (Bereishis 2:15), the garden of Hashem (Bereishis 13:10; Yeshayahu 51:3; Yechezkel 28:13, 31:8-9), the garden of the king (Melachim II 25:4; Yirmiyahu 39:4, 52:7; Nechemiah 3:15). It is absent from the Mishnah, which uses ginah (Kilayim 1:2; Shabbos 9:2; Bava Basra 6:1, and many more). In Modern Hebrew gan also means kindergarten, a calque on the German kindergarten, "children's garden."

The column gives cognates in the other Semitic languages: Aramaic gena, Akkadian gannatu, Ugaritic gn, Arabic janna. It adds, in the name of the author's cousin Yoninah Chagit Klein, that the Arabic name of the city Jenin is a cognate of gan, and that scholars have identified modern Jenin with the Biblical Beis HaGan, where Achazyah fled from Yehu (Melachim II 9:27), and possibly with the Canaanite town Gina of the Amarna letters.

On the root:

• Guarding. Menachem Ibn Saruk traces gan to the biliteral ג-נ, Ibn Janach and Radak to ג-נ-נ, and both to the same root as haganah, protection: a garden is what a man fences and guards so that what grows in it is not trampled. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo) makes it explicit, with yagen (Yeshayahu 31:5), migen (Bereishis 14:20), and magen, a shield, on the same root; he adds agan, not any vessel but the one used for watering a garden (Shemos 24:6; Shir HaShirim 7:3), and niggun, whose variety of sounds answers to a garden's variety of growing things. Rav Hirsch (to Bereishis 2:8) notes the same pairing in English, garden and guard. The column then checks that pairing against modern linguistics and reports that it does not hold: garden descends from the Proto-Indo-European root gher, "to enclose" (Frankish gard, Old English yard, Old North French gardin, Middle English garden; the same root gives Latin hortus, hence horticulture and cohort, and Russian grad, the element inside Novhardok's own name), while guard descends from wer, "to see, watch out," and is kin rather to ward and warden. Rabbi Aharon Marcus adds ganav, a thief, who hides himself as a garden is hidden from those shut out of it; that derivation is open to him, since he lets a biliteral root take any letter, and closed to Rabbi Pappenheim, whose system lets a biliteral root combine only with hey, aleph, mem, nun, tav, yod or vav.
• Softness. In Yerios Shlomo, Rabbi Pappenheim instead traces gan to the single letter gimmel, whose core he gives as softening or melting (with precedent in Machberes Menachem and in Rashi to Tzefaniah 3:18 and Eichah 1:4). On that root he places nemigah/hismogeg, melting in the physical and the figurative sense; yagon, sorrow, by which the heart goes soft and melts away; niggun again, a tune having the power to soften a heart and melt sorrow off it; gai, a valley, whose ground is soft and absorbent and so fertile; gas, a winepress, which softens and smashes the grapes; gigis, the vessel the pressed grapes go into; magen, a shield, here because such armor was often made of a soft piece of hide (note that this is a different reason from the one the guarding root gives for the same word); gei'eh, high or haughty, growth upward resting on a man's pliancy toward change; and gag, a roof, from ga'ah, the highest part of a building. And gan, the plot whose soil is soft enough for things to grow in it. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras (Ohalei Yehuda) offers both cores at once: a gan is a stand of trees whose shade protects from the sun, or else the place whose ease and sweet air cure a man whose heart was hismogeg.
• Related words without a gimmel. Radak (to Tehillim 80:16) reads kanah with a kaf as a form of gan, on the interchange of gimmel and kaf, though most other commentators, Radak himself in Sefer HaShorashim among them, join it to כ-ו-ן. Rav Hirsch (to Bereishis 6:14) reads ken, a nest or dwelling, as a stronger gan: a gan is closed off by barriers, a ken more enclosed still.

Shir HaShirim calls the beloved a gan na'ul, a locked garden (Shir HaShirim 4:12), and on that pasuk the derashos go so far as to say that gan means "woman" (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer ch. 21; Shir HaShirim Rabbah 4:24). Dr. Alexander Kohut explains that assertion as wordplay on the closeness of Hebrew gan to the Greek gini (gynaíka), "woman," the element inside androginus; linguists derive that Greek word from the Proto-Indo-European root gen-, "to give birth," which is also behind genesis, genealogy, gender, gene and much else. Kohut adds that Latin hortus, literally "garden," is likewise used at times as a euphemism for female anatomy (so also in Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary).

pardes (פרדס)

Three times in Tanach: Shir HaShirim 4:13, Koheles 2:5, Nechemiah 2:8. Koheles plants both ginos and pardeisim, so the two are not one word:

• Rabbi Yosef Kara and Metzudas Tzion (to Koheles 2:5): a gan or ginah is for vegetables and flowers, a pardes for fruit trees, that is, an orchard.
• Ibn Ezra (to Koheles 2:5 and Shir HaShirim 4:13): both are orchards, but a gan holds several species and a pardes only one. Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer supports him from the Gemara, where an unqualified pardes is a pomegranate orchard (Bava Metzia 104a; Bava Basra 7a), as in pardes rimonim itself.
• Rabbi Avraham Bedersi (Chosam Tochnis), on his rule that a pasuk lists near synonyms in ascending order, infers from Koheles naming gan first that a pardes is the more esteemed: a gan grows all sorts, often for profit, a pardes is an exclusive plot of one species where royalty takes its pleasure. His son Rabbi Yedaiah HaPenini (introduction to Sefer HaPardes) makes a pardes smaller than a gan, and Rabbi Wertheimer supports him from the Gemara's diminutive ginunyisa for a small garden (Bava Basra 68a).
• Rabbi David Luria, against Ibn Ezra, holds a pardes is exactly the orchard of many species, and on that basis derives it from Hebrew פ-ר-ד, separation, the species standing in their separate rows. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras likewise looks inward, treating pardes as a fusion of Hebrew words: pri with hidus, dancing (the mihades chicken of Bava Kamma 2:1), since an orchard's trees seem to leap and dance heavenward above the low plants of a field; or, dropping the final samech, pri with rar (flows), dar (dwells), hadar (beautiful), dash (threshing, separating), or datz (ditzah, happiness), each on a stated letter interchange.
• Against all of these stands the four-letter root itself. Ibn Ezra and Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur both hold that a Hebrew word built on four letters tends not to be native Hebrew but a loanword. Linguists have long argued pardes is exactly that, and Rabbi Ernest Klein gives the original as Avestan or Old Persian pairidaeza, an enclosure, itself a portmanteau of pairi (around, cognate with Greek peri, the prefix of perimeter and peripheral) and daeza (wall), the name of the boundary passing to what grew inside it. Ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim) already noted an Arabic cognate, probably the Modern Persian and Arabic firdaus. The Old Persian went into Greek as paradeisos and Latin as paradisus, and from there into English as paradise; the Greek entered common currency because the Septuagint used paradeisos for both pardes and gan.
• As a place rather than a plot: Chagigah 14b, the four who entered the Pardes, which Rashi explains as Heaven, a notion the column notes is reflected in the Christian idea of Paradise as in the Heavens. The Arizal reads PaRDeS as pshat, remez, drush, sod; the Ramak puts rayah for remez, the Rema seser for sod; for the Rambam see Yesodei HaTorah 4:13, Talmud Torah 1:12 and Moreh Nevuchim 2:30-32. Chazal also read Avraham's eshel (Bereishis 21:33), ordinarily taken as a single tree and possibly a tamarisk, as a whole pardes (Sotah 10a; Targum Yonasan and Targum Yerushalmi there).

bustan (בוסתן)

The ordinary word for a garden in the Aramaic of the Gemara: David HaMelech's gardens (Shabbos 30b), Achashverosh's (Megillah 16a), the Reish Galusa's (Eruvin 25b), and in Targum Sheini to Esther 3:8. Rashi (to Eruvin 25b and Bava Metzia 22a) defines it with pardes; his grandson Rashbam (to Bava Basra 61b) defines it with gan, so the word itself does not decide between them. It is a loanword from the Middle Persian bostan, a botanical garden, which Rabbi Ernest Klein parses as bo, smell or fragrance, plus the suffix -stan, "place of" (the ending of Pakistan, Kurdistan, Afghanistan), cognate with Arabic bustaan. The Turkish bostanji, the Sultan's palace guards in the Ottoman Empire, comes from the same word and literally means "gardener."

It served as a personal name too. Bustanai was Reish Galusa in seventh-century Bavel, and the legend, as the column presents it, is that the Persian king had killed off the male Davidic line but was shown in a dream a beautiful garden he was destroying, and an old man rebuking him for cutting down even the ungrown saplings; he spared the one pregnant widowed daughter-in-law, and her son was named for that garden. Parts of the story are referenced by Rabbi Hai Gaon in a legal discussion; for the legend see Seder Olam Zuta, Seder HaDoros (year 4420), Otzar Yisrael s.v. Bustanai, and Ben Yehoyada to Sanhedrin 5a.

The column reports one guess of its own that failed: it had suspected bustan was somehow related to English botanical, and Rabbi Shaul Goldman set it straight. Botanical runs back through Latin botanicus and Greek botanikos to Greek botane, fodder or pasture, which sits closer to botamia (pastures), boton (grazing beast) and boter (herdsman); it has even been suggested that the bo- there belongs with Greek bous and Latin bos, cow, which would make botanical kin to bovine and nothing to do with the sweet-smelling bustan.

Rendering guidance

• Gan in Tanach and ginah in the Mishnah: "garden" for both; the shift is one of stratum, not sense. Pardes: "orchard," and "park" only where the passage is about royal pleasure grounds and Bedersi's reading is in play.
• Koheles 2:5, where both appear: "gardens and orchards." This is the one pasuk where a single English word for both destroys the verse. Bustan: "garden," noting that Rashi glosses it pardes and Rashbam gan.
• Trap: English "garden" absorbs all three, and "paradise" absorbs pardes and Gan Eden together. In Chagigah 14b keep "the Pardes" untranslated; the Gemara is naming a place, and "paradise" hands the reader a foreign picture.
• Second trap: a source building on gan and haganah, or gan and ken, cannot survive in English; keep the Hebrew and put the link in a note.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Enter the Garden," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, in two parts, 8 and 15 Tishrei 5784 (2023-09-23, 2023-09-30): sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11105-enter-the-garden-part-1-of-2.md and sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11106-enter-the-garden-part-2-of-2.md. Primary loci as cited above, with Cheshek Shlomo and Yerios Shlomo, Ohalei Yehuda, Chosam Tochnis, Sefer HaPardes, and Rabbi David Luria's glosses to Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer. Three citation corrections: the article gives Tehillim 8:16 for Radak on kanah, which is Tehillim 80:16; Yirmiyahu 54:7 for the king's garden, which is Yirmiyahu 52:7; and, in ruling out ganav on Rabbi Pappenheim's system, names the root "GIMMEL-LAMMED" where the root under discussion is ג-נ. The Semitic cognates of gan, the Indo-European histories of English garden and botanical, the Old Persian and Greek behind pardes and bustan, and Dr. Alexander Kohut's Greek reading of the derashah that gan means "woman" were previously dropped from this entry and have been restored to the body, as the column has them.