Eibert Tigchelaar concludes an essay on early Jewish views of Eden and paradise in these words: “The later identification of Eden with the future Paradise, the transposition of Paradise to heaven, or the distinction between a heavenly Paradise or Eden and its earthly counterpart are not yet made in the Early Jewish texts.” This conclusion is accurate so far as the Enochic Book of Watchers, the Enochic Astronomical Book, Jubilees, and the texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls that he studies are concerned. But a study of these works alone cannot demonstrate that the ideas he mentions in this conclusion “are not yet made in the Early Jewish texts” as such, unless “early” is given a more restricted sense than is usual. By the middle of the first century it was possible to locate paradise in the third heaven, as Paul very probably does (2 Cor. 12.2–4).

The Jewish texts most likely to help us in exploring whether, within the Second Temple period, the paradise of Genesis was identified with the eschatological abode of the righteous and whether the paradise of the righteous dead was located in the heavens are a group of three, evidently closely related works from the period between the two revolts: 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo. The present essay is confined to the last of these works, which differs from the other two in belonging to the genre of “rewritten Bible” rather than to that of apocalypse, but especially when it deals with eschatology is usually close to both the terminology and the ideas of the two apocalypses.