:smack: and I missed that the first time I read it.
In Sunday school I was taught that the “fruit” in question only existed in the Garden of Eden, thus Adam and Eve were the only people who’d ever eaten it. (I was brought up Presbyterian.)
God Hates Figs, Fred Phelps misread to tragic conclusion.
I don’t think I was explicitly taught this, but it seems a reasonable conclusion. If it was a special tree (“The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”) why wouldn’t it have had a unique kind of fruit?
(Even if you take the story metaphorically, that doesn’t resolve the question of what kind of fruit serves as the metaphor.)
Apples go hard … apple trees can grow just about anywhere … drinking booze helps us commit sin … thin, I know, but better than the genus name Malus meaning “evil” in Latin …
The Midrash (Jewish oral tradition, written down around the 2nd-3rd centuries CE) offers several opinions: grape, fig and citron (mentioned above), and wheat (which either grew on trees in the Garden of Eden, or the term “tree” in that part of the Bible was not meant to exclusively refer to what we classify, botanically, as a tree).
Persephone ate from a pomegranate.
White Men Can’t Jump says it’s a quince, which is good enough for me.
This is also my take. At least in terms of why the authors didn’t name a more well known fruit. It was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Duh!
Yeah, it’s Tree-of-Knowledge Fruit. I know that it’s not an apple, or a pomegranate, or a fig, because I’ve eaten all of those, and none of them gave me any special knowledge when I did so. Nor has anyone who’s tried one attributed any such effect to eating a durian or a quince or a mango or any other modern named fruit. Clearly whatever fruit it was existed only in Eden, and nobody’s had the opportunity to eat any since.
We refer to the bulge in men’s throats as an Adam’s apple, not an Adam’s pomegranate, for what it’s worth.
I dunno, growing up on Newtons my first taste of a fresh off the tree fig was pretty mind altering.
In fairness, the first reply in this thread mentioned mushrooms.
Some Jehovah’s Witness art seems to favour the “not any existing fruit” interpretation. Practically, this seems to mean some sort ofbumpy pear.
Since the Adam & Eve story is as fictional as can be, this is like arguing what unicorns have for breakfast or dragons have for dinner.
Obviously, the answer to the latter is maidens.
So… bananas are off the table?
Kirk Cameron would say definitely not.
In my growing-up religious years, I often thought that if the fruit still existed in our world, then it would have to be something poisonous to us today. I mean, if it was toxic enough to knock two (then) unmortal beings down to where they were able to die, it would surely be something that would kill the rest of us if we ate it now. Never looked into anything that could fit that description, though.
The point was not that the fruit was poisonous; it was that it was forbidden. The story was about disobedience, not food poisoning.