The noun κηπος (kepos) means garden, which is a carefully designed and maintained piece of land, commonly planted with flowering fruit trees and additionally aimed at providing beauty, delicacies and recreation to visitors. It appears to derive from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root of similar meaning from which also stems the Dutch word hoeve, which is now a fancy word for a high-end farmhouse but which was originally a unit of area of agricultural land, defined as the amount from which one farmer and his family could make their living. This word survives in family names like Hoeven and Hoven (and Beethoven).

A less common synonym of our noun κηπος (kepos) was imported from Persian, namely παραδεισος (paradeisos), from which comes our English word Paradise.

Our noun κηπος (kepos) has a near synonymous counterpart in the noun χωριον (chorion), which denotes a similarly carefully manicured, relatively small plot of land, but possibly with a more practical or agrarian purpose. But both these words describe land that's been wholly divorced from the wilderness: cleared, plowed, planted, cordoned off and guarded and ultimately repurposed to serve man, albeit while still gratefully making use of the laws of nature and biology.

A third word that describes a plot of agricultural land is αγρος (agros), which describes land that hasn't been cleared but rather cultivated from the wild conditions in which it was found. Such a land may, for instance, hold a stand of wild olive trees, that was once found by foragers and over eons has become cultivated into an orchard by the repeated traffic of their customers rather than by their willful design.

Large sections of the New Testament are built around the broad metaphor of seed that is sown onto fields by sowers, to yield crops that are harvested by harvesters (who in turn are overseen by managers and owners and heirs), sold by merchants, processed by cooks and bakers, consumed by consumers; all of which apply to the cognizant mind of man into which preachers plant ideas that grow into schools of thought, which in turn produce traditions and written works of science and technology (χωριον, chorion), or else literature, art and music that seeks beauty for beauty's sake (κηπος, kepos). See our article on the noun αγρος (agros) for a closer look at this.

Our noun κηπος (kepos) occurs 5 times in 4 verses, see full concordance, and is mostly associated with the arrest and burial of Jesus. From this noun derives:

The noun πρασια (prasia) refers to a garden-plot, and particularly one with vegetables or even flowers in neat rows. This word appears in the classics (twice in the Odyssey) with the primary purpose of demonstrating the organizational prowess of the gardener. Our noun derives from the noun πρασον (prason), meaning leek — see χρυσοπρασος (chrusoprasos), or chrysoprase, mentioned in Revelation 21:20 — with the evident implication that our ornamental garden derived from the aesthetics of rows of leeks. This noun πρασον (prason) in turn probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European root "prso-", meaning leek, but that root is suspiciously similar to the Hebrew verb פרס (paras), to divide or spread out (hence too the names Persia and Pharisee).

Our word occurs in Mark 6:40 only, in the emphatic term πρασιαι πρασιαι (prasiai prasiai) or row-by-row or more precise: "patches-of-rows by patches-of-rows". This is commonly explained to demonstrate the orderly nature of Jesus' audience, but Mark may have had something else in mind. The Hebrew word for leek is חציר (hasir), from the verb חצר (hasar), which tells of the first visual manifestations of a gathering or emergence of some sort: to begin to cluster or gather or emerge. Noun חציר (hasir) means grass and noun חצצרה (hasosra) means trumpet.

The relationship between these three nouns isn't hard to fathom, for starters because a leek looks like a trumpet (or even a small palm: see our article on φοινιξ, phoinix, palm-tree), but also because by blowing trumpets, armies were directed. That means that to anybody who spoke Hebrew in addition to Greek, our term πρασιαι πρασιαι (prasiai prasiai) rather evoked the image of the mustered troops of YHWH Sabaoth, or even the twelve legions of angels that Jesus had at his disposal (Matthew 26:53), or Isaiah's enigmatic statement: "So the word of the Lord to them will be, "Order on order, order on order, line on line, line on line, a little here, a little there" that they may go and stumble backward, be broken, snared and taken captive" (Isaiah 28:13).

A reader of Hebrew may further be reminded of the verb סדר (sadar), which describes the formation of any ordered arrangement of rows of lines (hence the Jewish prayer book called Siddur). Via transposition, the verb סרד (sarad) is formed, which refers to net- or law-making. And identical verb סרד (sarad) means to be a refugee or escapee from captivity. All this brings to mind the toponym Sardis in Asia Minor, one of the seven churches addressed by Jesus in Revelation.