Well now way back in the Bible
\nTemptations always come along
\nThere\u2019s always somebody tempting
\nSomebody into doing something they know is wrong
\nWell they tempt you, man, with silver
\nAnd they tempt you, sir, with gold
\nAnd they tempt you with the pleasure
\nThat the flesh does surely hold
\nThey say Eve tempted Adam with an apple
\nBut man I ain\u2019t going for that
\nI know it was her pink Cadillac \u2026<\/p>\n\u2014 Bruce Springsteen, \u201cPink Cadillac\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019m reading Rachel Held Evans\u2019 Evolving in Monkey Town.<\/em> It\u2019s a lovely, candid and generous book and one of my favorites in the burgeoning genre of younger memoirs about recovering from evangelical childhood.*<\/p>\n
Describing the intense, unyieldingly correct<\/em> faith of her childhood, Held Evans writes:<\/p>\n
I was the nutcase kid who removed wise men figurines from manger scenes at Christmas to more accurately depict the historical time line of Advent. I gently corrected my Sunday school teacher when she referred to Jonah getting swallowed up by the whale<\/em> (everyone knows that the word is literally translated \u201cbig fish\u201d) or referenced the forbidden apple<\/em> in the garden of Eden (which was more likely some sort of Middle Eastern fruit, like a fig).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Held Evans is able to look back and laugh at her insistence on such \u201ccorrections\u201d because she realizes now that they were based on a misplaced certainty. I remember such certainty, too, and how it led to odd speculations about things like the \u201chistoric\u201d location of the garden of Eden or the precise identity of the forbidden fruit.<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s correct one of those corrections. The fruit in the story of the Garden of Eden was neither an apple nor a fig. Nor was it a pomegranate or a grape. The story just says \u201cfruit,\u201d and to ask what kind of fruit the story actually<\/em> refers to is to misread the story, transforming it through that word \u201cactually\u201d into the historical account it never claims itself to be. That\u2019s not how the story presents itself and it\u2019s not something the story allows itself to be. That\u2019s not what this story is for<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Imagine someone leaving a performance of Hamlet<\/em> and dismissing the play as worthless because the final scene just wasn\u2019t funny<\/em>. On the one hand, that criticism is valid. Hamlet<\/em> has some very funny bits, but the ending is a real downer and once the final duel starts, you almost never hear anyone in the audience laughing. But on the other hand this complaint is simply confused. It\u2019s based on misreading what kind of story<\/em> the play is telling and judging it as though it were some other kind of story than what it is.<\/p>\n
Trying to validate the story of the garden of Eden by deducing its historical \u201cdetails\u201d \u2014 what kind of fruit? where was the location of the garden? \u2014 is the same sort of error. It\u2019s as foolishly beside-the-point as complaining that no one laughs at the end of Hamlet.<\/em><\/p>\n
So, then, where did the popular notion of an apple come from? How did this come to be the prevalent idea when we picture this story? I suppose that painters or sculptors portraying scenes from this story had<\/em> to settle on some identity for this fruit \u2014 but what led them to choose the apple?<\/p>\n
Cecil Adams has an excellent discussion of the history of this idea on The Straight Dope<\/a>: \u201cWas the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n
Genesis doesn\u2019t mention apples, but Proverbs 25:11 says a timely word is like apples of gold in a setting of silver. More significantly, in the Song of Solomon the apple is an erotic symbol indicating sweetness, desire, and the female breast, which gives you an idea how things are starting to go, metaphorwise.<\/p>\n
Early Christian scholars often took the forbidden fruit to be an apple, possibly because of the irresistible pun suggested by the Latin malum, which means both \u201capple\u201d and \u201cevil.\u201d At least one early Latin translation of the bible uses \u201capple\u201d instead of \u201cfruit.\u201d A contributing factor no doubt was that apples were a lot more popular in Europe than in the Middle East, where it\u2019s generally too hot for them to thrive.<\/p>\n
\u2026 Still, the apple wasn\u2019t the unanimous choice for forbidden fruit. Carved depictions of Adam and Eve with apples are found in early Christian catacombs and on sarcophagi. The apple was the favored representation of the forbidden fruit in Christian art in France and Germany beginning around the 12th century. But Byzantine and Italian artists tended to go with the fig.<\/p>\n
In fact, you can read Christian iconography as a long, twilight struggle between figs and apples over which is the alpha temptation symbol. The apple has a lot to recommend it: red (blood) or golden (greed), round (fertility) and sweet-tasting (desire). The fig, on the other hand, has a certain phallic look, noted as far back as the ancient Greeks, who, admittedly, thought everything looked phallic. By the Renaissance, almost simultaneously we have Albrecht D\u00fcrer depicting Adam and Eve and the serpent with an apple (1504, 1507), and Michelangelo equipping the same cast with figs on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (circa 1510).<\/p>\n
Ultimately the apple prevailed. In Areopagitica<\/em> (1644), Milton explicitly described the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil as an apple, and that was pretty much the ball game. Islamic tradition, however, commonly represents the forbidden fruit as the fig or olive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If we\u2019re going to insist on identifying the forbidden fruit from the story in Genesis, then forget about apples and figs. I prefer to go with another suggestion by some early rabbis \u2014 the citron. Adams notes that this idea was based on a pun \u2014 the Hebrew word for citron is etrog<\/em>, which sounds like ragag<\/em>, or \u201cdesire.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I like the idea of the citron because it\u2019s a citrus fruit, which raises some interesting possibilities for this story. This occurred to me while reding another of those recovering-evangelical memoirs, Jonathan Dudley\u2019s Broken Words.<\/em> In his chapter on evolution, Dudley notes:<\/p>\n
The reason that humans, gorillas and chimps need to consume vitamin C in their diets \u2014 while lower mammals, including primates further down the evolutionary tree, don\u2019t \u2014 is that humans, gorillas and chimps all have the same, inactivating mutation in a gene needed to make vitamin C. From an evolutionary perspective, the gene was mutated and rendered nonfunctional in an ape ancestor, then passed on to its evolutionary descendants, including humans. From a creationist perspective, God gave all higher primates the same broken gene for no apparent reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So genetically, we humans have no choice but either to add some vitamin C to our diets or to suffer from scurvy. That changes the story quite a bit. A story about choice becomes a fatalistic tale of hard-wired genetic inevitability. That\u2019s a rather substantial and dramatic change \u2014 almost a complete reversal of the meaning of the story as originally told.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s what happens when we take one kind of story and treat it as another kind of story. Any attempt to read this story from Genesis as history \u2014 as the tale of a historical man named \u201cMankind\u201d \u2014 inevitably changes the story and inevitably entangles it in some such notion of fate or fatalism. If we insist on twisting this origin story into a pseudoscientific or pseudohistorical tale of our actual genetic ancestors, then we\u2019re forced to regard Adam and Eve as having the same genes \u2014 the same fallen,<\/em> imperfect genes \u2014 as we possess as their children. That\u2019s not what the story seems originally to have intended, but once we turn from reading it in the way it was originally written we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that its meaning changes. To treat any story as another kind of story<\/em> is always to change its meaning.<\/p>\n
Was the forbidden fruit a citron? Or an apple or a fig? The story doesn\u2019t say. It\u2019s not that kind of story.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n
* See also Alisa Harris\u2019 Raised Right,<\/em> Jonathan Dudley\u2019s Broken Words,<\/em> Christine Rosen\u2019s My Fundamentalist Education,<\/em> Jason Boyett\u2019s O Me of Little Faith,<\/em> Donald Miller\u2019s Blue Like Jazz, etc.<\/em> The pattern I\u2019ve noticed thus far in those I have read is that most of the authors had to question or abandon the \u201cpackage deal\u201d politics that came with their faith in order to reclaim and rediscover that faith. The one exception is the author who retained the conservative politics of fundamentalism, but lost the faith. Interesting, that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well now way back in the Bible Temptations always come along There\u2019s always somebody tempting Somebody into doing something they know is wrong Well they tempt you, man, with silver And they tempt you, sir, with gold And they tempt you with the pleasure That the flesh does surely hold They say Eve tempted Adam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-4953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible"],"yoast_head":"\n
Apples and oranges<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Well now way back in the Bible Temptations always come along There's always somebody tempting Somebody into doing something they know is wrong Well they\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Apples and oranges\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Well now way back in the Bible Temptations always come along There's always somebody tempting Somebody into doing something they know is wrong Well they\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-11-25T16:43:33+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/\",\"name\":\"Apples and oranges\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2011-11-25T16:43:33+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2011-11-25T16:43:33+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"Well now way back in the Bible Temptations always come along There's always somebody tempting Somebody into doing something they know is wrong Well they\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/25\/apples-and-oranges\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Apples and oranges\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\",\"name\":\"slacktivist\",\"description\":\""Test everything; hold fast to what is good."\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\",\"name\":\"Fred Clark\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7083ccd514d4fb8d5043041756d766a0?s=96&d=identicon&r=pg\",\"caption\":\"Fred Clark\"},\"description\":\"Fred Clark is a graduate of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now called Palmer Seminary), of Eastern College (now called Eastern University) and of the fundamentalist Timothy Christian High School (still fundamentalist and still called Timothy Christian High School, but not really thrilled to have a snarky, liberal, tree-hugging, pro-choice, pro-GLBT, peacenik, commie, evolutionist as such a vocal alumnus). A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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