Eve Ate the Apple

I recently heard a Yiddish folksong about what Eve ate in the Garden of Eden: “Chava hot dos Epfel gegessen,” the song goes—“Eve ate the apple.” Tempting, delicious and potentially dangerous, the apple is an appropriate fruit for this dramatic biblical scene: Its red color says “danger” (hence red is the color for “stop”), yet it is sweet inside. The problem is that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden isn’t an apple at all. It’s a knowledge-of-good-and-evil fruit, which, according to the end of the story, none of us has ever seen. In Genesis 2:16, God commands […]