13 Things - Big Apple Facts, And Small Ones Too

That forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden? It could have been a pomegranate.

- Jen McCaffery

1 THAT FORBIDDEN apple in the Garden of Eden? It could have been a pomegranate. The book of Genesis does not explicitly say what fruit Eve persuaded Adam to share with her. The Hebrew Bible uses the generic term peri, which rabbinic scholars have said could be used to describe a fig, a grape, a pomegranate, an apricot, or even wheat.

2 ANOTHER apple centric Biblical note: the phrase apple of your eye. In Psalm 17, David uses it when he’s talking to God: “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.” Is David rather full of himself in assuming that he is God’s favorite? Not necessarily. The Bible’s use of apple here is thought to be a poetic way to refer to the eye’s pupil, which is also round.

3 APPLES HAVE long been associated with fertility— Paris had hoped his golden apple would win him Helen of Troy. And according to npr.org, in colonial New England “an eligible young lady would try to peel an apple in a single unbroken strip, toss the peel over her shoulder, and peer nervously to see what letter the peel formed on the floor: This was the initial of her future husband.”