Eve Ate the Apple

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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 Adam: “You may eat from every tree of the Garden, but you may not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” In the course of the story, Adam and Eve eat the fruit of this tree, whereupon “the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed together fig leaves, which served them as loincloths” (Genesis 3:7). This fruit gives some kind of special knowledge, which includes a consciousness of sex, so that the two are embarrassed to be naked in front of each other and try to cover up. Somehow this type of knowledge makes them “like gods, knowing good and evil” (compare Genesis 3:5 and 3:22). This is an amazing and mysterious kind of fruit.

It is a standard rule of biblical interpretation that where the Bible is reticent or obscure, later interpreters will expand the story with explanatory details. The earliest interpretive description of this tree is in the extrabiblical Book of Enoch. In 1 Enoch 32:4, a passage probably from the third century B.C.E., Enoch is taking a tour of heaven, where he sees the “paradise of righteousness,” in which grows the “tree of wisdom.” He reports: “That tree is in height like the fir, and its leaves, like (those of) the carob, and its fruit like the clusters of the vine—very cheerful; and its fragrance penetrates far beyond the tree.”¹ The tree and its fruit are still mysterious, but they are now imaginable in comparison with other known species.

Later interpreters were more explicit. In the Midrash Rabbah (c. fourth century C.E.) and other rabbinic writings, the major proposals are the fig, grape, wheat, carob, etrog and nut.² The fig is a candidate because Adam and Eve used the leaves of a fig tree to cover themselves. The reason for grapes is that wine was regarded as a drink of the gods (see Judges 9:13) and because of a thematic link with Deuteronomy 32:32: “Their grapes are poisonous grapes, their grape-clusters are bitter for them.” Wheat, carob and etrog are proposed because their names are similar to Hebrew or Aramaic words for “sin,” “destruction” and “he desired,” respectively. The nut tree is advanced because nuts were believed to produce sexual desire. In each of these opinions, something obscure in Scripture is aligned with something known elsewhere, either from Scripture, popular lore or language. The principle is straightforward: One explains the unknown by connecting it with the known. A different rabbinic opinion is that God chose not to reveal the name of the tree. It is a mystery that cannot be solved, perhaps because God does not wish the tree’s name to be known, lest people be cruel to it.

In early Christian interpretation, the tree and its fruit are most commonly identified as the fig, grape or nut, as in the early Jewish interpretations. The earliest known identification of the fruit as an apple is by the Christian Latin poet Commodianus, who lived sometime between the third and fifth century C.E. He wasn’t much of a poet—according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “his verse has no poetic value”—but he may have preserved for us a bit of popular lore. Why is the forbidden fruit an apple? Probably for the same reason that in Hebrew it was identified as wheat, carob or etrog: the power of words, the nexus between sound and meaning. In Latin, the word for “apple” is the same as the word for “evil”—both are malus. The forbidden fruit, from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (lignumque scientiae boni et mali, in the Latin translation of Genesis) was naturally identified, by the inner magic of words, as the apple (malus). This identification became the dominant interpretation in Christian tradition, whence it entered into Jewish tradition too. Although almost no one speaks Latin today, this wordplay in Latin still has its hold over us. 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 […]