I was leaning against the counter in my kitchen the other day, chomping away at an apple [1], and I got to thinking about apples in folklore and belief.

It may not look like it on the surface, but at its core [2] this is a very big topic. If you think about it, apples have featured in one way or another in a vast body of religion, mythology, superstition, fables and folk wisdom.

I won’t try to tackle all of this in one post, that would be madness. However, over the next little while I hope to put a few articles up on ulblog exploring the interesting world of the apple.

But for now, let’s start with one of the stories that takes place at the beginning of everything.

In the beginning…

Most people reading this blog will be familiar with the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from The Garden Of Eden for eating the fruit of The Tree Of Knowledge.

In popular tradition, the fruit that was at the centre of humanity’s fall from grace is usually represented as our friend the apple, but did you know that the early writers of the Old Testament probably had another fruit in mind?

The Book Of Genesis never mentions the name of the fruit from which Adam and Eve ate, and while apples feature later in the Old Testament [3], Biblical scholars think that the fruit originally used to symbolise forbidden knowledge might more readily have been the fig, or grapes or one of several other more likely suspects [4].

It’s a bum wrap, see…

So why did the apple go on to become the fruit we all associate with the story of Adam and Eve?

Unfortunately, we don’t really know.

Some scholars suggest that it was simply the product of a rather obvious pun in Latin — the Latin word for apple is malum, while the Latin word for evil is malus [5]. So, it’s possible that the coincidental similarity between these two words made it easy for early Latin theologians to associate the fruit with the original sin [6] [7].

Other scholars have suggested that since the apple was a prized and often expensive fruit in the Mediterranean during the time in which Christianity was gaining ground and in which the Bible was being translated into European languages, it became natural to associate the irresistible temptation that led to humanity’s downfall with the rather delicious fruit.

The biggest eviction since last year’s Big Brother Finale!

We’ll probably never know exactly why the apple became intrinsically associated with the story of Adam and Eve and The Garden Of Eden.

Still, it’s kind of fun, when you’re biting into a juicy apple, to think about how this fruit went from being a law-abiding, upstanding member of the orchard, to being implicated in the greatest scandal the Old Testament ever knew, and all on hearsay evidence and faulty testimony!

The next post in this series will explore the ugly side of apples, in “The Bad Apple.”

Footnotes:

1.	It was a Pink Lady, in case you’re interested. Pink Ladies have a very tart flavour and are one of my favourite apple varieties.
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2.	Aha ahahahah, bad apple pun intended! …Sorry.
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3.	See Proverbs 25:12.
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4.	See The Straight Dope: Was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?
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5.	See Wikipedia.org: Apple.
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6.	See Wikipedia.org: Original sin.
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7.	You know, I can just see some Monk giggling away at dinner about this pun while all the other Monks sit around and think, “It’s even worse than all his, ‘Knock knock, who goeth there?’ jokes”.
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