One Word, Carried Across Four Languages

Firdaws is a loan word and its route is traceable. Old Iranian had pairidaeza, a compound meaning something walled around, used for the enclosed hunting parks and gardens of Persian nobility. Greek took it as paradeisos, and Xenophon uses it in exactly that concrete sense of a Persian gentleman's walled park. The Septuagint then used the same word for the garden in Genesis, which fixed a horticultural term as the name of the primordial garden. Hebrew has pardes as a loan in the later books. Latin has paradisus, and Arabic has firdaws.

So the word for the highest level of the Garden began as an estate feature. That is not a debunking; it is the reason the imagery works. A walled garden with running water, shade and fruit, in a hot and largely arid region, is the most concrete possible image of security and abundance, and every tradition along the route kept it.

Within Islamic usage Firdaws is the summit. The Quran names it twice as the inheritance of the believers, and a well-known hadith advises that when asking God for paradise one should ask for al-Firdaus, because it is the highest part and the throne of the Merciful is above it. The garden that began as a nobleman's park ends as the place immediately beneath the throne.