Was the 'forbidden fruit' in the Garden of Eden really an apple?
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.
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 — become the predominant interpretation? 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.
"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.
https://www.livescience.com/what-was-forbidden-fruit-in-eden.html
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