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By Root 1293 0

in America than apple pie? So how come apples got such a bad name in Genesis? Truth is, there was no apple in Eden. Genesis doesn’t even mention “forbidden fruit.” The Eden account mentions only the “fruit of knowledge” and the fruit of “everlasting life.” The Garden of Eden version of Creation—the second Creation account in Genesis—traces its literary roots to the Tigris-Euphrates River area. Genesis mentions both these rivers in locating Eden, a word whose derivation is unclear. It might come from the Sumerian word for “plain,” or the Hebrew for “delight.” The identity of the other two rivers mentioned in Genesis, the Pishon and Gihon, is another mystery. Perhaps they were offshoots or tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, ancient rivers that later dried up. Eden is also said to be “in the East,” a phrase commonly used in the Bible to describe the Mesopotamian region. In the ancient city of Mari, located near the Euphrates River in modern Syria, French archaeologists uncovered a library of twenty thousand tablets filled with descriptions of everyday affairs in Mesopotamia dating back to nearly 2000 BCE. Reconstructed murals from a magnificent palace there depict mythical gardens that recall Eden. One even shows a garden with two types of trees in its center.

So what fruits grew on those trees? Some historians have suggested a number of likely suspects as the “forbidden fruit,” including apricots, pomegranates, or figs—a prime candidate since the leaves of the fig tree became the first unisex leisure wear. Fig trees also figure prominently in other spiritual tales, particularly that of the Buddha, who achieved enlightenment while sitting beneath a fig tree known as the Tree of Wisdom! This suggests that the fig may be more than just filling for Fig Newtons.

In other words, the image of Eve polishing up a nice red apple, fodder for great artists and political cartoonists throughout history, has no biblical basis. The apple wasn’t connected to the Eden story until the European Middle Ages, when artists began to depict Eve with an apple, presumably as a way to give common people a familiar fruit.

In stark contrast to Genesis 1 with its simultaneous appearances of male and female, the story in Genesis 2-3 has woman created to be a companion and partner—but not a subordinate—to the man. Because the two of them eat the forbidden fruit, the man is destined to toil as a farmer in the fields of thorns and thistles, and the woman is destined to suffer pain in childbearing and be ruled by her husband. It is only in the aftermath of these divine pronouncements that the man names the woman as he had earlier named the animals, thus indicating his dominion over her.

The linguistic derivation of Eve’s name also remains uncertain. For a long time, “Eve” was interpreted as “the mother of all living,” because the name sounds similar to the Hebrew word for “living being” and Eve is the female ancestor of the entire human race. Another recent suggestion is that there is a connection with the Aramaic word for “serpent,” and that the figure of Eve was originally a fertility goddess associated with snakes. The connection between the serpent and the Devil wouldn’t be made until much later in Christian times. When Genesis was written, serpents had a much better image. Snakes were recognized as fertility objects in several ancient cultures because of their obvious phallic symbolism along with their ability to shed their skins—symbolic of reincarnation. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian heroic epic that predates the Bible, a serpent acquires immortality by eating a magical plant.

More troubling is the question of why Eve takes the fall for the Fall. The fact that Eve takes the rap for humanity’s loss of paradise has obviously had enormous consequences on relations between the sexes. The question is which came first. Did Eve’s action cause woman to be divinely relegated to second-place status? Or was the Eve story, which is so at odds with the first Creation, in which men and women shared equal status, written to give a male-dominated