kēpos

The lexica converge without controversy: BDAG glosses κῆπος simply as "garden," citing Luke 13:19 and John 18:1, 26; 19:41; LSJ traces it from Homer (the orchards of Alcinous and Laertes) through classical and papyrological usage; Louw-Nida places it in the domain of pastures and cultivated lands (1.97) as any area used for growing plants; and Moulton-Milligan document it across Ptolemaic and Roman-Egyptian leases and tax records as an ordinary rented vegetable or flower plot. Two significant silences confirm the word's lack of independent theological weight: it has no entry in Kittel's TDNT and none in Spicq's Theological Lexicon, both of which give substantial treatment instead to παράδεισος (Jeremias, TDNT 5:765-773). Etymologically κῆπος is native Greek (Doric κᾶπος), treated by Beekes as a probable pre-Greek substrate word for a delimited piece of land, in contrast to the Persian loanword παράδεισος (Old Persian pairi-daeza, "walled enclosure"). The Septuagint largely preserves the register difference, using κῆπος for ordinary gardens (Deut 11:10; 4 Kgdms 25:4; Neh 3:15) and παράδεισος for Eden and its prophetic echoes; Ecclesiastes 2:5 keeps both in one verse. On Luke 13:19, whether κῆπος is Lukan redaction for a Hellenistic readership (Jeremias, Marshall, Nolland, Bock, Bovon) or already present in the source (Fleddermann, Meier, the Critical Edition of Q printing κῆπον) is genuinely open; the once-popular reading that the parable stages a forbidden mixing of seeds under Mishnah Kilayim 3:2 (Scott, Crossan) has been decisively critiqued by Schellenberg (CBQ 71, 2009), Amy-Jill Levine, and Snodgrass, and no mainstream commentator reads the verse Edenically, the controlling background being instead the cosmic-tree imagery of Ezekiel 17 and 31, Daniel 4, and Psalm 104. In John, where the word clusters at the arrest, burial, and resurrection (18:1, 26; 19:41) and is joined by κηπουρός at 20:15, scholarship divides sharply. A substantial body reads a deliberate new-creation, Edenic, or nuptial typology (Wyatt, ZNW 81, 1990; Coloe; Wright; Schneiders; Winsor; Lee; Jeannine Brown, CBQ 72, 2010; Zimmermann), appealing to the density of Genesis 1-2 echoes across John's opening and closing chapters and to the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs. A comparably strong body reads the same details as historical topography with modest apologetic function (Raymond Brown; Barrett; Bultmann; Schnackenburg; Carson; Keener; Michaels; Thompson), noting that John, unlike Paul in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, nowhere signals an Adam-Christ typology plainly, and that a Jewish counter-tradition of a gardener removing the body (surfacing in Tertullian and later Toledot Yeshu material) offers an alternative background for 20:15. Koester grants that the settings function symbolically without letting any one intertext control, and the most defensible position is intermediate: the word choice is deliberate, so some resonance is warranted, but it is multivalent and licenses no single reading as exclusive.