Genesis chapter 3 of the Bible recounts the story of Adam, the first man God created, and the woman God formed from one of Adam’s ribs. Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.Arrow-games arrow-left-red arrow-left-white arrow-left arrow-right-red arrow-right-white arrow-right arrow-select-orange arrow-select-white arrow-select arrow-top check-icon chef chevron-bottom-small chevron-bottom comment-white comment courses-bg-icon events-img-1 events-img-2 ico-contact ico-facebook ico-linkedin ico-print ico-twitter icon-360 icon-accordion-chevron icon-addr icon-archives icon-book icon-bookmark icon-calendar (copy) icon-calendar icon-chat icon-clock icon-close-red icon-close-white icon-close icon-collection icon-comments icon-delete-grey icon-email icon-event icon-eye eye icon-facebook-l icon-facebook icon-favorite-active-red icon-favorite-active icon-favorite-red icon-favorite-white icon-favorite icon-file icon-fill-pencil icon-fork icon-google-l icon-info icon-instagram icon-lang icon-menu icon-mic-full icon-mic icon-notification-red icon-notification icon-pages icon-panorama icon-pencil icon-people-2 icon-people-3 icon-people icon-people2 icon-phone icon-pin icon-play-orange icon-play-white icon-play icon-plus icon-publication icon-pulse icon-quizzes icon-random icon-reading icon-recipes icon-resize icon-scroll-to-top icon-search icon-share spinner11 icon-star icon-ticket icon-title-activity icon-title-default icon-title-game icon-title-h5p icon-title-video icon-tripadvisor icon-twitter-l icon-twitter icon-user warning icon-youtube learn-hat learn-icon like logo ok-icon reply round-arrow-gray round-arrow share An ancient Roman punned – and the apple myth was born. Satan heads eagerly toward a gathering of fellow devils, where he boasts that the Fall of Man has been wrought by something as ridiculous as "an apple."Įxcept that it was a fig or a peach or a pear. Meanwhile, the serpent, its mission accomplished, slinks into the gloom. Their shared meal, foreshadowed as it is by expulsion and doom, is a moving and poignant tableau of marital bliss. Sated and intoxicated as if with wine, she bows low before "O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees," and hurries forth with "a bough of fairest fruit" to her beloved Adam, that he too might eat and aspire to godhead. Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,īut Eve is insensible to the cosmic disappointment her lunch has caused.
It takes place not at any old time of the day but at lunchtime:įorth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:Įarth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Take, for instance, the serpent's impeccably timed gustatory seduction.
What makes the temptation scene so absorbing and enjoyable is that, although written in archaic English, it is speckled with mundane details that make the reader stop in surprise. With its superfood dietary advice, celebration of the 'self-help is the best help' ideal, and presence of a snake-oil salesman, Paradise Lost is a quintessentially American story, although composed more than a century before the United States was founded. As a widely read canonical work, Paradise Lost was influential in cementing the role of apple in the Fall story.īut whether the forbidden fruit was an apple, fig, peach, pomegranate or something completely different, it is worth revisiting the temptation scene in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, both as an homage to Milton (who composed his masterpiece when he was blind, impoverished and in the doghouse for his regicidal politics) and simply to savor the sublime beauty of the language. For them, the forbidden fruit became synonymous with the malus pumila. It was only later readers of Milton, says Appelbaum, who thought of "apple" as "apple" and not any seed-bearing fruit. It became a template for future artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose luminous Adam and Eve painting is hung with apples that glow like rubies. But the apple began to dominate Fall artworks in Europe after the German artist Albrecht Dürer's famous 1504 engraving depicted the First Couple counterpoised beside an apple tree. Which explains why Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco features a serpent coiled around a fig tree. So was the fig, the peach, and so forth." "To complicate things even more," says Appelbaum, "the word malus in Jerome's time, and for a long time after, could refer to any fleshy seed-bearing fruit. As a noun it seems to mean an apple, in our own sense of the word, coming from the very common tree now known officially as the Malus pumila. As an adjective, malus means bad or evil. "But he hit upon the idea of translating peri as malus, which in Latin has two very different meanings. "Jerome had several options," says Appelbaum, a professor of English literature at Sweden's Uppsala University.
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