Was apple the forbidden fruit

Was the ‘forbidden fruit’ in the Garden of Eden really an apple?

By Ashley P. Taylor 27 March 2021

Nobody knows because the Hebrew Bible just says «fruit.»

What’s the likely identity of the «forbidden fruit» described in the Bible’s Garden of Eden, which Eve is said to have eaten and then shared with Adam?

If your guess is «apple,» you’re probably wrong.

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t actually specify what type of fruit Adam and Eve ate. «We don’t know what it was. There’s no indication it was an apple,» Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky, a professor of brain science at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, told Live Science.

The pivotal scene is described in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, shortly after God warns Adam not to eat from the «tree of knowledge.» A serpent in the garden, however, tells Eve to go ahead and take a bite.

«When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate» (Genesis 3:6), according to the Jewish Publication Society’s translation at Sefaria.org.

As for the type of fruit, it’s described as «just the ‘fruit of the tree,'» Zivotofsky said. «That’s all it says. No identification. We don’t know what kind of tree, we don’t know what fruit.»

The Hebrew word used in that verse is «peri,» a generic word for fruit in both biblical and modern Hebrew, according to Zivotofsky. The modern Hebrew word for apple, «tapuach,» on the other hand, does not appear anywhere in Genesis or in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Zivotofsky said. (It does appear in other, later biblical texts.) In biblical times, «tapuach,» was a word for generic fruit.

So, if the forbidden fruit wasn’t an apple, what was it?

Rabbis commenting on the Hebrew Bible in the Talmud, a collection of rabbinic teachings and biblical law, and other writings completed by around A.D. 500, have noted several ideas about the mystery fruit’s identity, but — spoiler alert — apple is not one of them, Zivotofsky said.

Over the years, rabbis have written that the fruit could have been a fig, because in the Hebrew Bible, Adam and Eve realized they were naked after eating from the tree of knowledge, and then used fig leaves to cover themselves. Or maybe, some rabbis wrote, it was wheat, because the Hebrew word for wheat, «chitah,» is similar to the word for sin, «cheit,» Zivotofsky said. Grapes, or wine made from grapes, are another possibility. Finally, the rabbis wrote that it might have been a citron, or «etrog» in Hebrew — a bittersweet, lemon-like fruit used during the Jewish fall festival of Sukkot, a harvest celebration in which Jews erect temporary dwellings.

Given all of these potential forbidden fruits, how did apples — which aren’t even from the Middle East, but from Kazakhstan in Central Asia, according to a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications — become the predominant interpretation?

It turns out this interpretation likely didn’t originate in Jewish lore, Zibotofsky said. «I don’t think that within Jewish tradition it ever did become the apple, meaning in Jewish art, you don’t find that,» Zivotofsky said.

Instead, the possible path from fruit to apple began in Rome in A.D. 382., when Pope Damasus I asked a scholar named Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. As part of that project, Jerome translated the Hebrew «peri» into the Latin «malum,» according to Robert Appelbaum, a professor emeritus of English literature at Uppsala University in Sweden and the author of «Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections» (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

«The word [«malum»] in Latin translates into a word in English, apple, which also stood for any fruit . with a core of seeds in the middle and flesh around it. But it was a generic term [for fruit] as well,» Appelbaum told Live Science. Apple had this generic meaning until the 17th century, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary. Jerome likely chose the word «malum» to mean fruit, because the very same word can also mean evil, Appelbaum said. So it’s a pun, referring to the fruit associated with humans’ first big mistake with a word that also means essentially that.

Meanwhile, paintings and other artistic recreations of the Garden of Eden have helped solidify the apple as the forbidden fruit. In art, unlike in writing, a fruit cannot be purely generic, Appelbaum said. «Artists, more than writers, had to show something,» he said. They didn’t always show an apple: Artistic renderings of the «Fall from Eden» depicted the fruit as a citron («Ghent Altarpiece« by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432), as an apricot («Eve Tempted By the Serpent» by Defendente Ferrari, 1520-25), and as a pomegranate («The Fall of Man» by Peter Paul Rubens, 1628-29), according to Appelbaum.

Yet by the 16th century, the apple had also entered the proverbial fruit bowl. In 1504, an engraving by the German painter Albrecht Dürer and a 1533 painting by German painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder, depicted the fruit as an apple, according to NPR. Also according to NPR, in the epic poem «Paradise Lost,» first published in 1667, English poet John Milton uses the word «apple» twice to refer to the forbidden fruit.

But was the apple in «Paradise Lost» really the apple that we think of today, or was it some generic fleshy fruit with seeds in the middle? There’s at least some room for doubt about that, according to Appelbaum. Milton describes the «apple» once Eve takes a bite, «as being fuzzy on the outside, and extremely juicy and sweet and ambrosial. All words which are attached to peaches,» Appelbaum said.

The so-called Franken-tree, a modern grafted tree bearing 40 types of fruit, didn’t exist in biblical times, but if it did, it just might clear up this mystery.

Originally published on Live Science.

Ashley P. Taylor is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. As a science writer, she focuses on molecular biology and health, though she enjoys learning about experiments of all kinds. Ashley studied biology at Oberlin College, worked in several labs and earned a master’s in journalism from New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. In addition to science, Ashley loves music, dance and language in all its wide possibilities.

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Was the forbidden fruit an apple?

The phrase forbidden fruit has come to mean “something desirable but off limits.” The idea of forbidden fruit originated with the biblical account of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, committing the first sin on earth. Genesis 3 gives the details of mankind’s first temptation. Satan, in the form of a serpent, convinced Eve that she had misunderstood God’s clearly stated command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3:4–5). Satan first challenged her understanding of God’s words, then suggested that she should make her own decision based on her personal assessment that the forbidden fruit was “good,” “pleasing,” and “desirable” (verse 6). So, being deceived and acting contrary to God’s command (Genesis 2:16–17), Eve took the fruit and ate it. She gave the fruit to Adam, who ate some, too. At that moment, sin, death, and destruction entered into God’s perfect world (Romans 5:12).

For centuries, people have wondered about the identity of this enticing fruit that caused so much trouble. Was it an apple as many people assume? The Hebrew word for “fruit” in this passage is peri, which is a generic term used for “produce,” “results,” or “reward.” Nowhere is the identity of the forbidden fruit given in Scripture. Some speculate that the idea of its being an apple may have begun when the Bible was translated into Latin. The Latin word for “apple” is mālum, which is very similar to another Latin word, mălum, which means “evil.” When the Latin Vulgate came into being, the similarity in words could have spawned the idea that apples represent evil.

Legend and art have also added to the common assumption that the forbidden fruit was an apple. We idiomatically refer to the larynx as the Adam’s apple, a term that originated from a folk tale wherein the bulge in a person’s neck was caused by the apple sticking in Adam’s throat. (Helping the legend along is the fact that the cartilaginous protrusion is more pronounced in men than in women.) Renaissance painters helped affix the identification of the forbidden fruit as an apple through their depictions of biblical stories mixed with mythology. Folklore tends to create a life of its own when people repeat as truth what began as suggestion.

What’s likely is that the fruit mentioned in Genesis 3 is no longer available on the earth. Even though the fruit itself was not evil—only the disobedience was—it seems probable that the Lord would have removed that tree and its fruit just as He eventually did with the tree of life (Genesis 2:9; 3:24; Revelation 22:2). The Garden of Eden no longer exists, so it is reasonable to assume that the fruit involved with Eden’s destruction no longer exists, either.

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The History of the “Forbidden” Fruit

No fruit pops up so frequently in Western art, literature, and everyday speech as the apple.

An apple (cunningly labeled “to the fairest”) started the Trojan War. (Odysseus, later struggling to get home from it, yearns for the garden he had as a child, populated by apple trees.) The Norse gods owed their immortality to apples. The Arabian Nights features a magic apple from Samarkand capable of curing all human diseases—predating the belief that an apple a day will keep the doctor away, a proverb that first appeared in print in 1866. Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Dylan Thomas all wrote poems about apples; and everyone from Caravaggio to Magritte painted them.

One place where the ubiquitous apple does not appear is in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis. The original story of Adam, Eve, the snake, and the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil mentions only an unspecified “fruit,” thus opening up centuries of debate over what the hapless First Couple actually ate. Various suggestions include everything from figs, grapes, and citrons to olives, apricots, bananas, pomegranates, and grapefruit. (Similar disagreements rage over probable locations of the Garden of Eden, which range from Turkey to Ohio, Mongolia, and the North Pole.)

The apple as Forbidden Fruit seems to have appeared in western Europe at least by the 12th century. Some researchers suggest that the apple got a bad rap from an unfortunate pun: the Latin malus means both “apple” and “evil,” which may have given early Christians ideas. A 1504 engraving by Albrecht Durer shows Adam and Eve with apples; and 16th-century paintings by Lucas Cranach and Titian show Adam and Eve under particularly tempting apple trees. Though Michelangelo’s Temptation and Fall on the Sistine Ceiling features forbidden figs, apples, increasingly, were held responsible for the Fall. By the 17th century, when Milton wrote Paradise Lost, the forbidden fruit was an Apple with a capital A.

Apples: Sour Enough to ‘Make a Jay Scream’

Apples, taxonomically, are members of Rosaceae, the Rose family, along with such other yummy edibles as pears, plums, peaches, cherries, strawberries, and raspberries. DNA analysis indicates that apples originated in the mountains of Kazakhstan, where the wild Malus sieversii—the many-times great-grandparent of Malus domestica, the modern domesticated apple—still flourishes.

There’s a lot to be said for domestication. Though Henry David Thoreau insisted that he much preferred the wild apple (“of spirited flavor”) to the civilized versions found in Massachusetts orchards, even he admitted that the occasional spirited bite was “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” The truth is that wild apples – grown from seeds—are generally pretty awful.

Apples are a victim of their own genetic creativity, a characteristic known to botanists as extreme heterozygosity. This ensures that an apple grown from seed won’t be anything like its parents. This is great for evolution, producing thousands of diverse apple varieties, adapted to every environment from North Dakota to New Zealand. For apple growers, though, intent on preserving selected favorites, the apple’s slippery genome is frustrating. In apples, the only guarantee of reproducibility is grafting, which is how our modern eating apples are propagated.

Johnny Appleseed, Spreading Booze Throughout America

But not by Johnny Appleseed. John Chapman of Leominster, Massachusetts—a.k.a. the apple-toting, tin-pot-hatted folk hero—condemned grafting as wicked, insisting that the only road to a good apple was seeds. Chapman collected seeds by the bushel from Pennsylvania cider mills and ferried them west, where he established apple nurseries in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and distributed wildly random seedlings to settlers far and wide. The mouth-puckering results almost certainly went primarily into cider and applejack. These weren’t great eating apples. What Johnny Appleseed was disseminating was booze. Eventually this backfired, as temperance activists fingered the apple as a source of alcoholic sin and demanded that the morally upright burn their apple trees.

Recently the apple as forbidden fruit has been back in the news. Joe Davis, bio-artist attached to geneticist George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, is preparing to create an apple tree that is—literally—a Tree of Knowledge. Davis’s project aims to incorporate Wikipedia into the apple genome. For this purpose, he plans to use the world’s oldest known apple, a 4000-year-old variety of M. sieversii.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Church and a number of other researchers have proposed that DNA may be the data storage venue of the future. A single droplet of DNA is capable of storing 700 terabytes of data – that’s the equivalent of 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-Ray discs—and it’s impressively stable. Unlike magnetic tape that needs to be replaced every five years or so, DNA can survive for thousands. The trick is to convert data into binary code based on A, G, C, and T – the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA – and use the result as a blueprint to synthesize a DNA sequence. Davis plans to insert his Wikipedia-coded DNA into a bacterium capable of transferring its genome into an apple cell. This won’t change the taste, smell, or appearance of the apple, but each treated fruit will carry, hidden among its genes, a chunk of extra info—say, the Wikipedia entry on apple trees, snakes, Genesis, or applesauce.

Apples: The Fruit of Knowledge

All of Wikipedia can’t fit into one handy apple. Each tiny bacterial carrier can only cope with a few thousand words—which means the whole of Wikipedia, some two and a half billion words long, may require an entire forest of apple trees. (One critic guesses 666,000 trees.) And eating such an apple, sadly, won’t make any of us more knowledgeable. Retrieving the info from apple DNA will require a DNA sequencer and some decoding software. On the other hand, this may be just as well. Most M. sieversii varieties are what apple growers refer to as “spitters”—because the common response to the first mouthful is to spit it out, fast.

The 50-acre orchard at USDA’s Plant Genetics Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, has what may be the world’s largest collection of apple trees—some 2500 different varieties from all over the world. Among the latest additions are varieties of M. sieversii, the apple’s ancient ancestor from Asia, laden with beneficial genes not found in our modern and monotonous apple crop. Whereas a century ago, Americans grew thousands of varieties of apples, nowadays we’re down to just a handful, among them McIntosh, Jonathan, and Red Delicious—which last, a lot of people argue, may be red, but it isn’t exactly delicious. Genetic uniformity in crops seldom pays off, and the American apple—attacked by pests on all sides—now needs a battery of chemicals in order to survive. Ancestral genes may give our apples the resistance and versatility they need—to say nothing of a new battery of flavors, colors, and shapes that we’ve forgotten apples ever had.

When it comes to information, M. sieversii doesn’t need Wikipedia.

Luckily for us, it already has plenty.

This story is part of National Geographic’s special eight-month Future of Food series.

• Church, George M., Yuan Gao, Sriram Kosuri. Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA. Science 28, September 2012.
• House, Patrick. Object of Interest: The Twice-Forbidden Fruit. New Yorker, May 2014.
• Pollan, Michael. Breaking Ground: The Call of the Wild Apple. New York Times, 5 November, 1998.
• Wilensky-Lanford, Brook. Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden. Grove Press, 2011.

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