The Bible Never Says Adam and Eve Ate an Apple

One of the most iconic images in Western culture is Eve holding a shiny red apple, offering it to Adam in the Garden of Eden. There's just one problem: the Bible never mentions an apple. Not once. The entire apple association is a 1,600-year-old misunderstanding that somehow became gospel truth.

The Book of Genesis describes the forbidden fruit with the Hebrew word "peri," which simply means "fruit"—any fruit. It's as generic as saying "food" or "beverage." The text gives zero clues about what kind of tree it was or what the fruit looked like.

A Latin Pun Gone Viral

So how did the apple invade the story? Blame a Latin wordplay. In 382 A.D., Pope Damasus I commissioned scholar Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin. Jerome translated the Hebrew "peri" as the Latin word "malum."

Here's the kicker: in Latin, "malum" means both "apple" and "evil." It's unclear whether Jerome intended a clever pun or if it was just linguistic coincidence, but the double meaning stuck. The forbidden fruit became linguistically tied to both the apple and sin itself.

Renaissance Artists Sealed the Deal

The apple myth went mainstream thanks to Renaissance painters. Artists like Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, and Hugo van der Goes painted Eden scenes featuring apples because they were familiar, symbolic, and easy to paint. Europeans knew apples—they didn't know what pomegranates or figs looked like in many cases.

Then John Milton's 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost explicitly named the fruit as an apple across its 10,000+ lines. With that kind of cultural weight behind it, the apple became canon in Western imagination, even though it was never canon in scripture.

What Fruit Was It Actually?

Nobody knows. Rabbis and scholars have speculated for centuries:

• Fig: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after eating, suggesting the tree was nearby
• Grape: Wine symbolizes both celebration and sin in Jewish tradition
• Pomegranate: Some Jewish texts suggest this, as it's loaded with seeds (symbolizing fertility and knowledge)
• Wheat: The Hebrew word for wheat ("chitah") resembles the word for sin ("cheit")
• Carob, citron, quince, even mushrooms: Yes, really

The point of the Genesis story wasn't about botany—it was about disobedience and moral knowledge. The fruit was never meant to be identified, which is probably why the Bible doesn't bother naming it.

The apple is just good marketing. It's round, red, shiny, and universally recognized. But scripturally speaking, Eve could have been holding a banana for all we know.