Forbidden Fruit Wheat Wheat represents knowledge in Torah

Forbidden Fruit

Wheat • Wheat represents knowledge in Torah thought, because a child is considered to have attained a certain level of intellectual maturity only after he or she has tasted wheat. 2 • According to this opinion, wheat was originally meant to grow on a tree, not as a grain, but as bread already baked. After the sin, this tree which would grow ready-made baked goods was reduced to a lowly plant which had to be harvested and processed to produce flour. In the future, when the sin of the forbidden fruit will be rectified, the Tree of Knowledge will be restored to its former glory. 3

Grapes or Wine • There is no fruit that can cause as much misery as the grape and its wine. 4 According to the Zohar, Noah planted grapes upon leaving the Ark in an attempt to rectify the sin of the forbidden fruit. 5 • Some women have the custom of not partaking in the wine of havdalah 6 based on the opinion that the forbidden fruit may have been grapes. 7

Fig • The fig tree plays a well-known role in Adam and Eve’s story, providing clothing rather than nourishment, and some commentators suggest there may be a connection: “By that with which they were made low were they rectified. ” 8 • The Midrash gives the parable of a king’s son who disgraced himself with one of the maidservants. When the king heard of it, he deprived his son of high rank and expelled him from the palace. The son then went about to the doors of the other maidservants, and none would take him in. But she who disgraced herself with him opened the door of her house and received him. “So, too, when Adam ate of that tree, the Holy One deprived him of his lofty status and expelled him from the Garden of Eden. Adam then went about among all the trees, but none would let him take even one leaf. . . But the fig tree whose fruit Adam had eaten opened its doors [so to speak] and received him, as is said, 9 ‘They sewed fig leaves together. ’” 10

Nut (Et. Al) • Rabbi Amram Gaon identifies the forbidden fruit as a nut, and mentions it in one of the blessings recited during the marriage ceremony in his siddur. 16 • Some commentators explain that in truth, the prohibition of eating the forbidden fruit either included in it all of the different opinions mentioned in the Talmud (i. e. , grape, wheat, fig), or was a unique fruit which was a blend of all of them. 17

Maybe a melon? • Before the 4 th century, the word malum, Greek for “melon”, was also used to mean “apple. ” For this reason, Italian still uses a derivation of malum to mean “apple. ” • The Spanish manzana also has Roman roots, but of a different nature. The term comes from an Iberian pronunciation of the Latin matianum, a word referring to a sweet-smelling golden apple that Matius, a friend of Caesar’s, raised.

In the Hebrew Bible, a generic term, peri, is used for the fruit hanging from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it was an apple, right? In order to explain, we have to go all the way back to the fourth century A. D. , when Pope Damasus ordered his leading scholar of scripture, Jerome, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome's path-breaking, 15 -year project, which resulted in the canonical Vulgate, used the Latin spoken by the common man. As it turned out, the Latin words for evil and apple are the same: malus. When Jerome was translating the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, " the word malus snaked in. A brilliant but controversial theologian, Jerome was known for his hot temper, but he obviously also had a rather cool sense of humor. As an adjective, malus means bad or evil. 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. So Jerome came up with a very good pun.

The story doesn't end there… To complicate things even more the word malus in Jerome's time, and for a long time after, could refer to any fleshy seedbearing fruit. A pear was a kind of malus. So was the fig, the peach, and so forth. Which explains why Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco features a serpent coiled around a fig tree. • But the apple began to dominate Fall artworks in Europe after the German artist Albrecht D? rer's famous 1504 engraving depicted the First Couple counterpoised beside an apple tree. 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.

The spread of malus… • 350 years ago, John Milton sold his publisher the copyright of Paradise Lost for the sum of five pounds. His great work dramatizes the oldest story in the Bible; whose principal characters most folk have committed to memory and heart: Father-God, Adam, Eve, Snake-Satan…and (drumroll) an …APPLE! • Milton uses "Fruit" is in the poem's sonorous opening lines: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe • But in the course of his over-10, 000 -line poem, Milton names the fruit twice, explicitly calling it an apple. People liked to read it… …and the rest is literary (and Mind. Mapped history…)

Footnotes: • • • • • 1. Bereishit Rabbah 15: 7. 2. Talmud, Berachot 40 a and Sanhedrin 70 b; Bereishit Rabbah ibid. 3. See sources in previous note. 4. Ibid. 5. Zohar 1: 73 a. 6. There is in fact no obligation for anyone but the person who recites havdalah to drink the wine. The issue is about women specifically not drinking from it, as opposed to men, who may drink from it if they wish, as some have the custom to do. Additionally, some are of the opinion that based on this, if a woman were in a situation where she needed to make havdalah herself, it is preferable she use one of the other permitted beverages. The majority opinion, however, is that in such a case should indeed recite havdalah on wine, and drink the wine herself. 7. R. Yeshayah Halevi Horowitz, Shaloh, end of Masechet Shabbat, Torah Ohr (cited by Magen Avraham, Orach Chaim 296: 4): “The Tree of Knowledge was a grapevine, from which Eve squeezed wine in order to separate from man, which corresponds with niddah, menstrual blood. She does not partake of the havdalah (separation) wine. ” Alternatively, Rabbi Yeshayah Viner, Bigdei Yesha 296: 4, explains that the 39 prohibited forms of work on Shabbat are parallel to the 39 curses that came because of the snake, and havdalah comes to permit work that was caused by Eve and what she did to the world. Hence women should avoid drinking the wine that is a reminder of her sin. Still others explain that the reason behind the custom of women not drinking the havdalah wine are halachic considerations that are unique to havdalah, but which are beyond the scope of this article. 8. Talmud, Berachot and Sanhedrin ibid. 9. Genesis 3: 7 10. Bereishit Rabbah ibid. 11. Genesis 3: 6 12. Bereishit Rabbah ibid. 13. Genesis 2: 9 14. Nachmanides on Leviticus 23: 40 15. Taamei Haminhagim, Inyanim Shonim 68; Rabbi Yisroel Chaim Friedman, Likkutei Maharich 3: 106 a. 16. Siddur Rabbi Amram Gaon, Seder Birchat Erusin Venissu’in, Blessing 147. 17. Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, (Ben Ish Chai), Ben Yehoyada on Talmud, Berachot 40 a.