Eating the Fruit (Gen 3:6)
Into and Out of the Garden
6 She took some of its fruit and ate it וַתִּקַּ֥ח מִפִּרְי֖וֹ וַתֹּאכַ֑ל
No sooner seen than done. The woman heard what the snake had to say, evaluated the situation for herself, and decided to eat the apple.
Oops! My bad. Nobody has said anything about an apple, have they?
Well … uh … check that, lots of people have said it was an apple, including Lord Byron, who wrote in his famous poem “Don Juan”:
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
[Canto 13, stanza 99, line 8]
However, to quote the title of an Israeli book presenting “101 Common Mistakes about Judaism,” Eve Did Not Eat an Apple.
That leaves us with two questions:
What did she eat?
What makes people think it was an apple?
As with so many things that the Bible does not explain, the creative writers whose work is preserved in the midrash offered a number of suggestions:
wheat
grapes
citron (etrog)
figs
You can read that midrash in more detail here; rest assured that interpreters have not limited themselves to those choices. For present purposes, the point is that (1) nobody in that midrash, or for centuries afterward, mentions an apple; and (2) no one agrees on what it was they ate. If, as the story implies and perhaps even says explicitly, this tree did not exist outside the garden, it is no wonder we don’t know what it was. It is something you’re not going to find in the produce section — ever. John Day writes in From Creation to Babel:
It is surely a complete error to attempt to identify the fruit of the tree with any known fruit, since the whole point of the tree and what it bestows is that it is unique.
So how did the idea that Eve ate an apple become one of the “101 common mistakes”? The Oxford English Dictionary explains:
apple, n.
3. According to post-biblical Christian tradition: the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in defiance of God's commandment; the forbidden fruit. Also used allusively.
[In the Book of Genesis the type of fruit eaten by Adam and Eve is not specified. In the Talmud it is variously identified as the grape, the fig, or wheat. The identification as an apple appears to arise in the post-classical Latin tradition. Compare post-classical Latin malum (early 5th cent. in a verse translation of Genesis; from late 7th or early 8th cent. in British sources), spec. use of classical Latin mālum apple, and also post-classical Latin pomum (from 12th cent. in British sources), spec. use of classical Latin pōmum fruit, in post-classical Latin also apple, and Old French pomme (13th cent.), spec. use of pomme apple. Apples also appear in Early Christian art in catacombs and on sarcophagi in connection with Adam and Eve. The choice of the apple may have been influenced by the potential pun between classical Latin mālum apple and classical Latin malum evil.]
That is, the words pomme (in Romance languages) and Apfel (in Germanic ones) originally simply meant “fruit.” When those words narrowed in meaning, earlier sources were misunderstood. Azzan Yadin-Israel is the Jewish studies scholar who “owns” this particular topic (as the expression goes), and he will tell you more in this beautifully illustrated essay and even more in his brand-new book on the subject. If you prefer, you can listen to an interview with him about the book.
Note, by the way, that she does not take את et the fruit, using the Hebrew direct object marker, but מן min the fruit, “some of” it. She is already eating like a civilized person.
and she gave some to her man (who was with her) and he ate.
וַתִּתֵּ֧ן גַּם־לְאִישָׁ֛הּ עִמָּ֖הּ וַיֹּאכַֽל׃
As the immigrant says to her grandchildren in the old stereotype, “Have a nice piece fruit. It’s good for you!” It’s tasty, too, as the woman saw earlier in our verse. Notice that unusual עִמָּ֖הּ immah explaining to us that the man — who seemed to have left the cast at the end of Genesis 2 — was indeed back in the picture. I seem to remember a tradition from the ancient Greek theater that no more than two characters could be on stage at a time; our story is certainly following that pattern.
In case you are wondering, by the way, אִישָׁ֛הּ ishah ‘her man’ is the normal way in the Bible to say “her husband,” occurring 38 times, just as אִשְׁתּוֹ ishto ‘his woman’ is the standard way to say “his wife” (about twice as frequent). I realize these two crazy kids are living together without benefit of clergy, but they do have the benefit of God. In fact, though they weren’t “made for each other,” she was definitely made for him. I’m simply being more literal here for my regular purpose of helping us think about the actual words and not the “Bible stories” we all once learned.
Speaking of which …
It’s easy to see from the actual Bible — as opposed to the story most of us have heard at one time or another — a few things we should note explicitly:
The woman was not “tempted.” She was reassured that eating from the tree would be safe, considered it, and did so.
The woman did not trick the man. He was with her when she picked the fruit and ate it, and perhaps even during the conversation with the snake.
The story is told on two different levels. In the plot, the decision to eat from the tree is quite reasonable. Yet the wording hints again and again at an underlying disquiet. The humans are not sinning, but they may be doing something they will live to regret.
The woman and the man (as we know from Genesis 2) are already “like God.” We have seen both of them do things that God too has done.
The woman did not eat the fruit in order to become like God (or like “a god”). Her only motive beyond enjoying a snack was enlightenment.
The snake has no obvious motive. He disappears entirely from the story as soon as he has recited his lines. There is no Snidely Whiplash reaction when the humans eat the fruit.
The only thing that happens immediately after the woman eats some is that she gives some to the man.
We’ll find out what happens after that when we read on.