Genesis forbidden fruit: How the Apple Took Root
Genesis leaves the forbidden fruit unnamed. When the woman sees that the tree is good for eating, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom, she takes its fruit, eats, and gives some to her husband. An apple is absent from that scene, although it later became a familiar symbol of temptation. The route from an unnamed fruit to a recognizable apple runs through competing interpretations, medieval art, changing vocabulary, and printed pictures. Along the way, grapes, figs, citrons, and other candidates occupied places that apples would eventually claim across much of European art.
Early interpreters offered a surprisingly varied menu. Genesis Rabbah lists wheat, grapes, citrons, and figs as possibilities. Wheat left little trace in the later tradition, while the citron received a distinctive association: crusaders called it Adam's Apple because the narrowing near the top of some fruits could resemble a human bite. A citron also appears in Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece, completed in 1432. Grapes had a much broader following. The Book of Enoch presents a tree with fruit resembling vine clusters, and the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch and Apocalypse of Abraham take similar approaches to the fruit's identity.
Christian interpreters also favored grapes and figs as the forbidden fruit. Origen of Alexandria connected the fruit of Noah's vineyard with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Much later, Andrew of St. Victor treated the grape as a familiar association with the Fall of Man. The fig had a particularly close narrative connection: after eating, Adam and Eve make garments from fig leaves. Augustine, Alcuin of York, and Thomas Aquinas were among the Christian authors who supported or suggested the fig identification.
Church art displayed this variety rather than a single settled answer. At Airvault, a tree was represented as a fig; at Amiens, the fruit was a grape. At the Abbey of St. Denis, the serpent carried a grape cluster in its mouth. Scenes at the Abbey of Sainte-Madeleine in Vezelay included grapes and a pomegranate offered by Eve. A fresco at Saint Jean des Vignes showed the serpent passing a small black fruit, apparently an olive. The early twelfth century brought an apple into French depictions of the forbidden fruit, with its shape becoming identifiable through features such as a stem or distinctive cleft.
The apple spread through stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, and church reliefs. English images began incorporating apples by the middle of the thirteenth century, and they largely displaced figs by the early fourteenth century. German scenes had previously included figs, pomegranates, and other varieties; apples began taking their place in the thirteenth century. Northern artists associated with the apple tradition included Hugo van der Goes, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Albrecht Durer. Italy followed a different course. The fig remained prominent there well into the sixteenth century, including in Michelangelo's Fall of Man in the Sistine Chapel.
Language offers a way to explain that uneven geography. Latin commentators commonly used pomum, meaning fruit or orchard fruit, for the forbidden fruit. In Old French, pomum became pom, and translations used it for fruit generally. Over time, pom narrowed to mean apple. Readers encountering older wording could therefore understand a specific fruit where earlier writers had used a general term. Forbidden pom appeared in a translation of Genesis, biblical retellings, poetry by Marie de France, and the play Jeu d'Adam. It also reached works outside biblical storytelling, including Le roman de Renart and the first French adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
A competing explanation focused on malum, the Latin word that could mean apple or evil. Sir Thomas Browne promoted that connection in Vulgar Errors. Yet Latin commentary on Genesis seldom used this wordplay, favoring fructus or pomum even when discussing the evil of Eve's transgression. The linguistic changes in northern Europe followed a different pattern: Middle English appel and Middle High German apfel narrowed from fruit to apple, partly under French cultural influence. Italian mela never meant fruit, so it had not served as a general label for the forbidden fruit. That difference helps explain the apple's slower arrival in Italian images.
Printing gave the apple another route beyond its early linguistic setting. Major publishing houses in the early sixteenth century were located in northern Europe, where artists including Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Cranach worked within the apple tradition. The 1550 edition of Martin Luther's Bible translation included its first Fall of Man illustration, a woodcut by Hans Brosamer showing an apple. The medium carried that image across Europe and beyond. Italian artists also adopted the apple more firmly by the middle of the sixteenth century, with examples in Giulio Clovio's Farnese Hours and paintings by Tintoretto and Titian.