Was the Forbidden Fruit an Apple? The Bible Never Says, and Eve Ate Before Adam

The Bible does not say what kind of fruit it was. Genesis calls it “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden”, and the apple is a later Western tradition. The rabbis proposed a fig, grapes, wheat or a citron. Eve ate first and “gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

One of those rabbis thought the silence was deliberate. God, he taught, has never revealed the tree and never will, to spare the first man’s honour. Whether or not he was right about the reason, Genesis keeps our eyes on something other than the fruit: on a command, a choice and two people hiding among the trees. What followed the eating, the opened eyes, the hiding and God’s sentence, is told in what happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit.

What does Genesis say about the forbidden fruit?

Genesis names the tree, never the fruit. Among the trees God made grow in Eden was “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9). The command was about the second: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (2:16–17).

When the serpent questioned her, the woman repeated the command with an addition of her own: “God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (3:3). And all through the story, the Hebrew word for the fruit is the ordinary word for fruit of any kind. “Peri could be absolutely any fruit,” says Robert Appelbaum, a professor of English literature at Uppsala University.

The only plant Genesis names in the scene is the fig, and only for its leaves: “they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (3:7). That verse is where the idea that the fruit was a fig began.

An early Christian writer, Theophilus of Antioch, saw that the fruit was never the point. “The tree of knowledge itself was good, and its fruit was good,” he wrote in To Autolycus. “For it was not the tree, as some think, but the disobedience, which had death in it.” Death was in the choosing.

Why do people say the forbidden fruit was an apple?

There are two explanations, one from Latin and one from medieval French, and the scholars who hold them disagree.

The Latin pun

The best-known explanation is a pun. In Latin, mālum with a long vowel is “an apple, i. e. any tree-fruit fleshy on the outside, and having a kernel within,” as Lewis and Short’s dictionary defines it, a word “applied also to quinces, pomegranates, peaches, oranges, lemons, etc.” With a short vowel, mălum means “an evil, mischief, misfortune, calamity.” The Roman playwright Plautus was already joking with the pair; the dictionary cites his pun on the two words.

Appelbaum, quoted by NPR, says that Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin, “hit upon the idea of translating peri as malus,” which he calls “a very good pun.” But open the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, at Genesis 3 and you will not quite find it. Its word for the fruit there is fructus, plain “fruit.” The play on words sits in the name of the tree instead: the tree “of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:17) is the tree “scientiae boni et mali,” and mali, “of evil,” is spelled like the Latin for “of the apple.”

The French apple

Azzan Yadin-Israel calls the Latin explanation “a dead end.” He is professor of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University and the author of Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple, and he gathered a little under 600 images of the forbidden fruit from the fourth century to the Renaissance. He found pomegranates, citrons, grapes and figs until, in his words, “in late 11th century France we find an apple.” Within “50 or 70 years,” he says, “the apple has become the dominant forbidden fruit.” He traces the change to language. The Old French word pomme “at one point meant fruit and then came to mean apple,” so a French reader told that Eve gave Adam a pomme pictured an apple. German, English and Dutch art followed, he says, but Italian art did not until the seventeenth century.

Milton and the artists

John Milton’s Paradise Lost begins with the fruit of the forbidden tree “whose mortal taste” brought “death into the World, and all our woe,” and later gives it a name. The serpent tells Eve of “those fair apples,” and Satan boasts in hell that he seduced Man “with an apple.” Even so, Appelbaum points out, in Milton’s time the English word “apple” could still mean “any fleshy seed-bearing fruit.”

Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of Adam and Eve, made in 1504, is often said to show an apple tree. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds an impression of it, reads it otherwise: “The branch Adam holds is of the mountain ash, the Tree of Life, while the fig, of which Eve has broken off a branch, is from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.”

If it was not an apple, what was the forbidden fruit?

The rabbis of the Talmud and the Midrash argued over the tree, and each answer comes with a reason drawn from Scripture or from life. The Talmud gives three answers and the Midrash four. Two of the rabbis even swap answers between the books: in the Talmud Rabbi Meir says vine and Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai wheat, and in the Midrash Meir says wheat and Yehuda grapes.

The fig has the most support, and the reasons given for it are tender ones. In the Talmud, Rabbi Neḥemya reasons that “with the object with which they were corrupted and sinned they were rehabilitated,” since Adam and Eve “must have taken the leaves from the tree closest at hand.” Genesis Rabbah tells a parable: after the sin, no tree in the garden would give Adam its leaves, “But the fig tree, whose fruit he had eaten, opened its door and received him.” The Apocalypse of Moses, an ancient retelling of Adam and Eve’s life printed among the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, has Eve say that the leaves fell from every tree but the fig, and “it was from the very same plant of which I had eaten.” In these tellings, the tree of their fall became the tree that covered their shame.

Appelbaum’s own list of rabbinic proposals also includes the pomegranate and the apricot, though he names no text for either. The pomegranate’s place in Scripture is traced in the pomegranate in the Bible.

And one rabbi in Genesis Rabbah would not name the tree at all. “Far be it that God should have revealed” the tree “to any man,” taught Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, “nor will He reveal it in the future.” His reason was Adam’s dignity. The Law has even an animal put to death so that no one can point it out in the marketplace and recall a person’s sin. How much more, he reasoned, would God guard the honour of the first man.

Who ate the forbidden fruit first, Adam or Eve?

Eve ate first. Genesis 3:6 gives the order: “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” When God questioned them, each blamed another. “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat,” said Adam (3:12), and the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (3:13).

The New Testament keeps the order and draws a distinction. “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression,” Paul wrote (1 Timothy 2:14), and he warned the Corinthians against being led astray “as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty” (2 Corinthians 11:3). Yet when Paul traces sin and death to their source, he names the man: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Romans 5:12).

Christian teaching keeps the same order. “Eve was deceived by this promise, and by the fairness of the fruit, and ate of it,” says the Orthodox Longer Catechism of Philaret. “Adam ate after her example.” Augustine read Paul’s words to mean that Adam knew what he was doing. He was “not on this account less culpable, but sinned with his eyes open,” because “the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin.” Even love can lead us into sin when it is set above the word of God.

Why did Eve eat the fruit?

The serpent gave her two reasons, and Genesis gives three more of her own. The serpent contradicted God, “Ye shall not surely die,” and promised, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (3:4–5). Then she looked at the tree and saw “that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (3:6).

The commentator Matthew Henry called her “ringleader in the transgression,” the one who led the way, and traced the steps in that verse: she saw, she took, she ate, she gave, and he ate. He noticed that God had made every tree in the garden “pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (2:9), so that, in her eyes, “She saw no harm in this tree, more than in any of the rest.” The fruit looked like every other good gift. Only the word of God set it apart.

Why God allowed the serpent into the garden at all, and did not stop them, is taken up in how Satan entered Eden.

Was Adam with Eve when she ate?

Genesis says she gave the fruit “unto her husband with her.” Read on its own, “with her” puts him at her side. Henry thought otherwise. “It is probable that he was not with her when she was tempted,” he wrote, because “surely, if he had, he would have interposed to prevent the sin.” The Apocalypse of Moses tells it the same way: Eve eats alone, then calls, “Adam, Adam, where art thou,” and “speedily I persuaded him, and he ate.”

Eve’s “where art thou” is the question God himself asks a few verses later (Genesis 3:9), when the two of them are hiding among the trees. We still do not know the name of the fruit. Genesis tells us instead what was lost, and who came looking.

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