What comes through in this beautifully produced volume of fourteen essays is not only the many significances of the idea of paradise in ancient Jewish and Christian sources, but also the diversity of modern scholarly interests in the theme. Here only the briefest synopses may be offered. After a wide-ranging introduction by Guy Stroumsa, the book is divided into two parts, the first consisting of six essays on Second-Temple Judaism and the period of Christian origins; the second containing seven more on reinterpretive traditions in the following centuries of late antiquity. Based on a linkage between gardens and kings in the Old Testament, Joachim Schaper discovers royal messianic concepts in the garden references in John xix.38–41. Maren R. Niehoff shows how Philo used the methods of Homeric scholarship (including allegory) to overcome difficulties in the biblical account of paradise. Richard Bauckham concludes that paradise in Pseudo-Philo's Biblical antiquities, as in 2 Baruch, is understood to have been removed to a heavenly location after the sin of Adam and Eve. Martin Goodman notes Josephus’ failure to mention paradise as among the locations of post-mortem existence in the notions of his contemporaries, and thus posits that the conception found in Luke xxiii.43 must have been yet in its infancy at that time. Grant Macaskill exposits the three New Testament passages (2 Corinthians xii.4; Luke xxiii.43; Revelation ii.4 [cf. xxii.1–5]) in which the word ‘paradise’ is used and expounds their significance for Christian Christology and eschatology. Through a comparison with several other early (Gnostic) sources, Simon Gathercole establishes that Gospel of Thomas 50 reflects an effort to teach ‘methods of passing guardian figures blocking heavenly ascent’. In the initial chapter of part ii, Sabrina Inowlocki argues that Tertullian's exposition of the ‘law of paradise’, as containing in nuce the later Law of Moses (Adversus Judaeos 2), is a redeployment of a Jewish tradition in order to subvert it. Yonatan Moss surveys late antique reflections (some, surprisingly, anticipating aspects of modern linguistics) on the original language of paradise. Menahem Kister shows how access to the tree of life was contemplated in Jewish sources as coming through Torah and circumcision, and finds a parallel in Christian appeal to eucharist and baptism. From a phrase in Genesis Rabbah, and with reference to a number of ancient and modern texts, Galit Hasan-Rokem offers a reflection on sex as the temporary reminiscence of paradise. Gillian Clark learnedly explores how Augustine the Christian appraised pagan conceptions of the human afterlife, depicted in ‘Edenic’ terms in Virgil, Cicero and the Platonists. Emille Perreau-Saussine explains how Augustine's city of God/city of man distinction and his anti-chiliast eschatology work out in a realistic programme for earthly politics. Markus Bockmuehl explores assumptions that paradise still existed in the physical world, along with long-standing attempts to locate it, while showing as well that ‘Jews and Christians in late antiquity knew perfectly well how to distinguish terrestrial from celestial realities’. Alessandro Scafi sums up the other contributions and brings us through the Middle Ages, through the post-Renaissance shift (the novel idea that the earthly paradise disappeared after the Flood), and up to the present. Anyone interested in the topic of paradise will gather much from this lush ‘garden’ of essays.