How France turned the Forbidden Fruit into an Apple with Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel

Gary: If I ask you to imagine Adam and Eve eating the Forbidden Fruit what fruit are they eating? It’s an apple, isn’t it? Most classic paintings depict the Forbidden Fruit as an apple. Likewise the apple is often used to elude to the Forbidden Fruit in popular media, such as when Snow White ate the poisoned apple and fell into a deep sleep. In movies, it’s a trope that villainous characters eat apples, from Draco Malfoy in the third Harry Potter film to Ajax from Deadpool. In Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Barbarossa claims that as soon as the curse is lifted and his undead crew regain their humanity he is going to eat “a whole bushel of apples.” Literature is even more replete with the apple as the Forbidden Fruit, either within the text or as a metaphor on the front cover, as is the case with the first Twilight book.

The apple as the Forbidden Fruit has become ubiquitous, despite the fact that apples did not grow in the Middle East around when the Biblical story was supposed to take place. Why is it that the Forbidden Fruit is depicted as a succulent red apple? Would you believe that it is France’s fault? Before the medieval period artists depicted the Forbidden Fruit as a fruit native to the region. Only by the 11^th century did the French red apple take root. In centuries the French red would become virtually the only Forbidden Fruit left.

To explain how France reinvented the Forbidden Fruit is Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel. Yadin-Israel is a professor of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. He earned his B.A. from the Hebrew University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of two monographs on early rabbinic midrash, a study of the biblical themes in Bruce Springsteen's lyrics, a book series that helps English speakers master the vocabulary of foreign languages, and dozens of articles. What follows is a revelatory conversation about how a subtle change in France led to a reimagining of one of the most well-known stories in all of human history.

Gary: Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel, your book is Temptation Transformed, the story of how the forbidden fruit became an apple. It is a fascinating deep dive into something which makes no sense. Yet people generally take for granted, namely that the forbidden fruit mentioned in Genesis is virtually always depicted as an apple. Despite that fruit not widely appearing in the Middle East thousands of years ago, or at least not in its current form that we would find recognizable. What brought you to this topic?

Azzan: So, appropriately enough, for this podcast. What brought me to this topic is French. And what I mean by that is a mistake that I made because of French. So when I was a young assistant professor, I had a reading group with other people on languages that I wasn't working on. So most of my languages are Semitic, Hebrew and Aramaic and Syriac and the like. But I always wanted to keep fresh and active with other languages. So I had a Latin kind of reading group with one of the graduate students in the classics department at the time. Aaron Pushkin, who has since become a very interesting poet and translator. And we were reading Augustine's Confessions, and in one of the passages, Augustine relates how he and a number of his young friends were just basically taunting and hurting this poor sow that was standing in the field. And he said that they took pomum, and threw them at this sow and I just, you know, reading, sight reading and knowing that in French pomme is Apple. I translated as apples. They were throwing apples at the sow. And Aaron, who's Latin was and still is better than mine. Immediately corrected me and said, well, you know, actually in Latin, pomum just means fruit. Generally a tree fruit, it doesn't mean apple. And because of that French generated mistake of mine. I had this little flash and said, I wonder if that mistake that I'm making has anything to do with the emergence of the forbidden fruit as an apple. Because I already knew that in the text of Genesis, the identity of the fruit is never mentioned. It just says the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So that was just a little like flash and I put that in a box. In other words, I have all these projects that I hope to get to at some point. It wasn't a project I could pursue at the time. As I mentioned, I was a young assistant professor and I got my tenure book out, and then I got a second book out, both on early rabbinic commentaries on the Bible. And I didn't forget it. You know, I kept that as a project that I would like to at some point come back to, and I did, I came to it and I said, look, let me just see if this is even something worth pursuing. So, you know, I started doing a little research and I found that there wasn't really a very clear or very convincing explanation of why the forbidden fruit had become identified with the apple. I started doing some work on art history, and we'll talk about that more fully a little later. But as I did this work, it became increasingly evident to me that there was an interesting project to try to uncover. And ultimately that work resulted in the book. So, one lesson is it's important to know French always. Another lesson is it's good to make mistakes sometimes, you know mean obviously on some level, we would all wish that we got everything right and all our translations were perfect and we knew all these languages so well. But that's not the reality. So when you do make a mistake, sometimes it's worth filing that away and saying, huh, maybe something interesting came from that mistake. And in this case, it did.

Gary: And certainly the most interesting things in life are those you stumble upon is what I found. And who knows, maybe you can even make a book out of it.

Azzan: One hopes. One hopes.

Gary:  Yeah, and one hopes it does well. Before you wrote your book, you mentioned that there is already one theory about why the forbidden fruit is depicted as an apple, and something which you partially touch on. Before you wrote your book, you mentioned that there is already one theory about why the forbidden fruit is depicted as an apple. Can you tell us what the “malum theory” is and why you dismiss it as improbable?

Azzan: Absolutely. So this “malum theory” has to do with the Latin word, the Latin word malum, the Latin word malum Basically it's there are two homonyms in Latin. One is malum which means apple and the other is malum, which is something evil, a bad thing. So the dominant theory, the dominant approach to explaining why the forbidden fruit came to be identified with the apple hinges on that Latin pun, or that Latin play on words. Theologically, the fall of man, the consumption of the forbidden fruit had tremendous ramifications. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. You know, death entered the world.  Humanity entered into a state of fallenness. All of these very significant repercussions. So what is more appropriate? For a fruit that caused such great malum, such a great malum. In other words, such a great harm. Theologically speaking then, that the fruit itself be a malum, in other words an apple. Now this theory is really more than a theory. In other words, it became so ingrained that I have found references to it. First of all, going back to the 17th century. And in contemporary scholarship, it's just cited as something that's well established. So writers, if they're writing about the Bible, if they're writing about anything that has to do with the forbidden fruit, it could be art, it could be theater, it could be a dozen different fields repeatedly. They just say, as is well known. This identification is due to the play on words of Latin malum, meaning both apple and evil. It's a wonderful, it's a wonderful argument. I study rabbinic literature in my day job, and this is a lovely little midrash. It's a lovely little commentary. On the Latin word malum. And I'm very sympathetic to it. Unfortunately, it has one major drawback. And that is that it has absolutely no historical basis. In other words. Well, the first main chapter of the book is devoted to this question, the question of the malum. And. For that chapter I basically spent a year going over as many medieval Latin commentaries on Genesis as I could find, and this includes the major commentators, you know, the commentators whose work is widely cited and widely familiar in medieval writings, but also secondary, tertiary, all these different writers. And the reality is that nobody makes this connection. First of all. Latin authors generally do not refer to the forbidden fruit as malum, as an evil thing in and of itself. And second of all, they consistently use other Latin terminology to refer to the forbidden fruit. Sometimes they use the word fructose, the Latin word for fruit. That's what appears in the Vulgate in the Latin translation, and more often they use the word pomum, which is a generic Latin term for a tree fruit. So. When it actually came time to try and trace this hypothesis, this theory. It led to a complete dead end. It simply wasn't attested in any of the Latin sources, and as a result, it really became necessary to look in other directions to try and find another explanation for why the forbidden fruit came to be identified with the apple.

Gary: Before the forbidden fruit was depicted as an apple, what were the common fruits it was depicted as, and why were these fruits popular?

Azzan: So one of the really wonderful things for me about working on this project was discovering just how rich and varied the forbidden fruit landscape was before the apple emerged. There are many, many fruit that are represented as forbidden fruit. Some appear very briefly, such as, I found one example of a mango, believe it or not, as the forbidden fruit. That's a wild one. Um, not coincidentally, it was created towards the end of the 15th century or the very beginning of the 16th, which was when Portuguese traders began regular trade with India and were bringing mangoes into Europe. So presumably that artist came across a mango and thought that it was sweet and tempting and kind of exotic and introduce that into the forbidden fruit scene. More commonly, you find a fair number of pomegranates. You find sometimes fruit that are very difficult to identify. In other words, many artists didn't necessarily try to create botanically correct representations. But by far the two most common fruit. where the fig and the grape. The fig is the fruit that's really most anchored in the biblical text. Because after Adam and Eve bite off from the forbidden fruit, they realize that they're naked and they immediately cover themselves in fig leaves. So the readers can surmise that if they just ate the forbidden fruit and then covered themselves with fig leaves. Maybe they were standing by a fig tree. And therefore the forbidden fruit was a fig. Obviously, that's not a logical deduction. That's not factual, but it's at least based on the text of the Book of Genesis. The grape is not found in the story of Adam and Eve, but it is associated with the forbidden fruit because of its connection with wine. And the idea that wine is related to sin. So here there's not exactly a textual connection, but there is a conceptual one where the fruit, the wine is associated with alcohol, which is associated with sin and therefore somehow tied to the sin of Adam and Eve. Those fruit appear both in literary sources, in other words, there are very venerable literary traditions that discuss the fig and the grape, and they also appear in art in the iconographic tradition where the fig and the grape and also the pomegranate, and also others are represented as the forbidden fruit.

Gary: You note that the trend for depicting the forbidden fruit as an apple really began in earnest in late 11th century France, and spread from there. What was happening?

Azzan: Right. So I said earlier that the chapter on the malum basically led to a dead end. In other words, I found that there was no justification for the very widespread idea that the forbidden fruit became the apple because of this play on words in Latin, and that that dead end meant that I needed to go in a new direction. Now, I had basically exhausted my textual avenues. In other words, the text just simply had not yielded the results that I hoped they would yield. So I switched gears and I began to examine the way in which the forbidden fruit was depicted in art. Now, I have to confess that when I started this project, I thought that this section would consist of me summarizing the findings of the 2 or 5 or 10 or 20 books that had been written on the art of the fall of man. As it turned out, the number of books written on this topic, the number of art history books or iconographic books written on this topic was zero. There simply were not adequate resources. No, no art historian had written on the forbidden fruit as such. I mean, there are articles here and there. And of course, the topic comes up when art historians discuss various Fall of Man scenes and things like that. But this wasn't the sole focus of any monograph. So that was a challenge, and I basically had to start gathering together images from databases and from books and from all kinds of sources. And I put together a database of about 600 images, a little under 600 images of the forbidden fruit starting in the fourth century and ending in the Renaissance. And what that material showed was that for a very long time the artistic depictions were essentially in line with what I was seeing in the texts. In other words, artists were representing the forbidden fruit in this variety of ways. Pomegranates. Citroens. Grapes. Figs. et cetera. But then something remarkable happens. And exactly as you said in late 11th century France we find an apple. We find an apple. And that in and of itself, you know, you find one apple. You can't make too much of that. But at that same time, it's not just a single apple, it's the beginning of a trend. And then there's another apple and another apple and another. And within 50 or 70 years, the apple has become the dominant forbidden fruit. Which is a completely surprising development. In other words, you have hundreds and hundreds of years of various fruit being represented as the forbidden fruit. And all of a sudden, not only does the apple appear and it's not clear why. It takes over the landscape, it becomes the dominant forbidden fruit and completely marginalizes these other fruit, even though they had hundreds of years of history working in their favor. So. This leads us to a new question, which is now we know historically where the apple appears. Why does it appear in France at this moment? And why does it become so dominant? Now, at this point, I just want to add one more finding from the artistic images, which is that similar processes appear in some other countries, but not all. So. You have very shortly after the apple appears in France. A similar dynamic is visible in German art and in English art and in Dutch art. In other words, the apple appears a little bit after France and it begins to take over the landscape not as dramatically and as quickly as it did in France, but over time it becomes the dominant forbidden fruit in Germany, in England and in the Low Countries. But that does not happen, for example, in Italy. In Italy, the fig is the dominant image and they remain a fig centered country for hundreds of years. The apple doesn't really appear in force in Italy until the 17th century. I'll qualify that maybe if I have a chance a little later. But generally speaking, the Apple tradition does not appear in Italy until the 17th century. Hundreds of years after France. So now the question is what is going on? Why does this change happen? Why does it become so dominant? What is the apple become so dominant, and why is it propagated in this unusual way? Shortly after France, it becomes dominant in Germany, in England, in the lower, in the Low Countries. And yet it does not penetrate into Italy for hundreds of years. So this is really the point where I am trying to provide a historic event, a historic development. That can explain this shift. Now, if you remember the question that started me on this path, in other words, the mistake that I made translating the Latin because I used modern French as a guide. In other words, my mistranslation of Latin pomum as though it were apple, when in fact it is, and when in fact it's just fruit. That is also where the answer to this question lies. That is to say, it is during this time that old French undergoes a very interesting semantic change. In other words, a change in the meaning of the words. Now, Old French, as you undoubtedly know, is basically a type of spoken Latin. In other words, it's a type of develops from Latin and over time takes on its own like regional characteristics that distinguish it from other romance languages. Generally speaking when Latin words over time became kind of, generally speaking, the transition from Latin to Old French was smooth in the sense that words maintained their basic meaning. But there's one important case where that did not happen, and that is the case of the word malum. As I mentioned earlier, malum in Latin is both something evil and apple. In Old French, probably because of the negative connotations of the word malum evil. The meaning apple did not enter into Old French. In other words, the Old French kind of a descendant of Latin malum, which we know from today, from, you know, mal and the like and even in English, if you say, you know, malevolent and the like, it's only in the sense of bad or evil. And the Latin word malum apple did not enter into Old French. As a result, you have a language that is missing the word for apple. Now, of course, over time, that's not  possible. You know, you're going to you're going to develop a word for apple. And that's exactly what happens. I said again earlier that the Latin word that was used most commonly to speak of the forbidden fruit was the word pomum, a generic Latin term for tree fruit. And that word begins to change its meaning in Old French. The Latin word is just a generic term for fruit, but in Old French it begins to narrow its meaning rather than be fruit, generally speaking. It starts to be used in a more specific and narrow way to refer to the apple. So there is a period of time in Old French when the word let's just say pomme. When the word pomme meant fruit as it does in in Latin. And then a transition from fruit to more narrowly, apple. This is called semantic narrowing. In historical linguistics, it's a very common phenomenon. Words are constantly changing their meaning. And so there's nothing unusual about this. In this particular case, there's actually a very plausible explanation for why it happens. As I said, the word malum apple has all these negative connotations. So this is just something that happens. And pomum enters French's pomme and then begins to narrow its meaning to apple rather than fruit. Why is this relevant to us? Because in the early stages of this shift when the word pomme meant fruit as well, and certainly that's what it meant for Literate French speakers, Old French speakers who were trained in Latin. And they knew the word pomum meant fruit more generally. Those educated and literate scholars used the word pomme to mean fruit, which is what it meant at the time, at a certain moment. And they used it regularly in translating stories from the Bible. In this case, the Old Testament. And a they employed the word pomme exactly in the way that the Latin translations and the Latin text used pomum, namely, to indicate the forbidden fruit. So in Old French translations and not only translations, also there are revisions of biblical history and there are poems. There's even a play called Le Jeu d’Adam, the Adam Play, which theater, It was like a traveling theater troupe that would go around the French countryside and perform the story of the forbidden fruit, the story of the fall of man. And in Le Jeu d’Adam, the word that is used is pomme. So in all of these different translations and histories and theater and poetry, there was a time when the forbidden fruit was called a pomme simply because it was a fruit, and that's what pomme meant. However, as this semantic narrowing proceeded, as the word pomme became more and more associated with apples rather than with fruit more broadly. The earlier texts, translations, histories, poetry, theater, all of that were understood by speakers of Old French not as referring to pomme fruit, but as referring to pomme apple. And it is precisely at the time when this shift takes place, this linguistic shift, the semantic shift, that we find art that begins to represent the forbidden fruit as an apple. In other words, you can actually map out you can juxtapose the linguistic change from pomme fruit to pomme apple. With the iconographic change. Fruit, forbidden fruit that's being depicted as pomegranates and grapes and figs to the appearance, and then shortly thereafter dominance of the apple. So it's really a very kind of wonderful way to bring together literary evidence with artistic or iconographic evidence and show that this shift that there's this wonderful correlation between the two.

Gary: You've explained how the apple came to dominate in France due to this linguistic shift in French. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is where you explain where the apple iconography spread, and where it does not. Can you explain why the apple image spread to England, Germany, the Netherlands and northern Italy, but not southern Italy and Spain?

Azzan: Absolutely, absolutely. So we've now been able to answer two of the three main questions. In other words, why did the apple appear, right? And because of this linguistic change and the way that the linguistic change caused readers and speakers of Old French to understand the Old French texts about the fall of man. We've also been, we're now also able to explain why it spread so quickly. Because if you are reading the book of Genesis in Old French, okay, the earliest translation is called the Lefèvre translation. If you're reading the old The Book of Genesis, an Old French and it says, Eve gave Adam a pomme, and you understand that to mean apple, why in the world would you represent the forbidden fruit as anything but an apple? Why in the world would you represent it as a fig or a grape or anything else, when the actual book of Genesis, as you understand it, is telling you that it's an apple. Now we are at a position to address the question that you just raised, Gary, which is why did the apple spread the way it did? Why did it develop the way it did in Germany, England and the Netherlands, but not in southern Italy and Spain? And the answer is that a very similar dynamic occurs in those countries, similar to the one that we just saw in in France. What do I mean by that? I mean that in Old High German for example you have a shift from a general term, general word. The word apfel. Once meant fruit. It once was a generic term for fruit. And over time, this is probably a shift that happens because of the influence of French. French at the time was a very dominant language. It was the language of the royalty in Germany. So under the influence of French, the word apfel undergoes a similar semantic narrowing. Rather than meaning fruit, it narrows and comes to mean apple. The same thing happens with the English word apple, and I have to say that as a native speaker of English, I did not know this, but apple at one point meant fruit. It was a generic term for fruit and it to again under the influence of French. Obviously French was incredibly influential after 1066 in England, and under the influence of French it to, the word apple too undergoes a semantic narrowing and no longer means fruit in a generic sense, but rather, as we know it today, refers to the fruit that we call the apple. And then the same shift in interpreting the earlier writings in the earlier sources occurs in all these countries. The same thing happens in the Netherlands and the earlier translations, the earlier pommes, anything that has to do with the fall of man. And had the word apple in it originally meaning fruit is now reinterpreted, misinterpreted to mean what we call the apple. And when that happens, the fruit changes. In other words, as soon as that happens, the fruit as it's represented in art changes. It becomes the apple. This linguistic shift does not happen in Spain, because the Spanish word for apple is manzana, and it was that word for from the beginning. In other words, it was not a generic term for fruit that then narrowed and so forth. It just they had a dedicated word for apple and it does not happen in in Italy, the Italian word is mela and it is apple from the get go. It's related to malum and so forth. One of the challenges that I faced in kind of mapping this out was the challenge of northern Italy. Because in northern Italy there actually is quite a strong representation of apples early on. And for a very long time, you know, I was stuck, I didn't really know how to explain this. And this wasn't going to undermine the whole project. You know, it's legitimate to say, here's how things are. And I don't really know why. In Italy it does occur in the north, but not the south. But in fact, this is a wonderful example of the importance of the linguistic shift because what we today call Northern Italy was in the Middle Ages, a separate linguistic area, or in fact a number of separate linguistic areas. There are actually significantly different from what we today call Italian. In other words, what we today call Italian is basically Tuscan. It's the Italian of Tuscany. While northern Italy had different languages Piedmontese and others, or Venetian. And they are linguistically very different. From Tuscan, from what we today call Italian, and in fact are much closer to French. In many ways they're closer to French. And one of the ways they're closer to French is that they don't use the word mela for apple the way they do in Italian today, in Tuscan, and therefore in Italian today. But rather, of course, they use a word like pomme, and it was the generic term for fruit. And then it narrowed to mean apple. So the same dynamic that we saw in France, and that later is played out in Germany and in England and the Netherlands also occurs in northern Italy. And that's exactly why northern Italy has the forbidden fruit as an apple much earlier than Rome or Florence do by hundreds of years. So northern Italy started out as a challenge, started out as a bit of a stumbling block, but ultimately it became a wonderful piece of evidence for the significance of the linguistic aspect to the appearance of the apple as a forbidden fruit.

Gary: What importance do you think the depiction of the forbidden fruit as an apple has had in religious thinking, art and popular culture?

Azzan: So one of the most fascinating conclusions I think of this particular project is that, arguably the most recognizable symbol of the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament, and maybe the second most recognizable figure of the Bible I would say maybe after the cross. Actually has nothing to do with religion or the Bible or anything like that, in other words. So the apple has had a tremendous, tremendous impact culturally and artistically because, look, we all live in in a world where the Bible is self-evidently referring to an apple. At least that's how we understand it. And you see, apple's everywhere, and apples have become a symbol of forbidden knowledge. They've become a symbol of temptation. They've become a symbol of sexuality. You find it in in art, you find it in book covers, you find it in caricatures, you know, everywhere. You know, if you want to, like a funny image of temptation in the New Yorker cartoon, there'll be an apple there. So the impact has been tremendous. What is so interesting about this is that the apple appears as the result of linguistic processes that are completely indifferent to the story of Adam and Eve. In other words, the shift from Old French pomme meaning fruit to Old French pomme meaning apple has nothing to do with the Bible. It has nothing to do with Adam and Eve. It has nothing to do with, you know, any kind of religious questions or theological questions or anything like that. And yet it has had an amazing impact on our understanding of Adam and Eve and temptation and the forbidden fruit and so forth. So there's a bit of a cautionary tale. Because I think one of the reasons scholars had not realized why the forbidden fruit came to be identified with the apple was that they assumed that that there must be a religious reason for it. In other words, the malum hypothesis that you associate the forbidden fruit, the apple, because of this play on words in Latin, is very appealing in that regard, because it has to do with theological questions. Malum is an apple. The forbidden fruit brought about this terrible theological malum, the fall of man. So those two can be linked. Great. That's wonderful. Except that it's wrong. And it's wrong largely because scholars, we're stuck thinking that the reason for such a prominent biblical symbol must be biblical, must be somehow related to the Bible. But in fact, that's not the case. That is simply not the case. It has to do with a independent linguistic shift that happens in the transition from Late Latin to Old French, and is completely unrelated to the Book of Genesis or the Fall of Man.

Gary: Your work is incredibly interdisciplinary. You look at the evolution of language, art, and theology. Talk a bit about working in such disparate fields, geographic areas, and in multiple languages. I bet that wasn't easy.

Azzan: Right. That's a great question. And I think here we also can pick up the theme that I was just touching on about why scholars have not recognized the historic developments that led to the forbidden fruit becoming an apple. And now we're at another factor here, which is the interdisciplinary nature of the analysis. So if you are interested in this question and you just look at the Latin commentaries, you will see that they do not provide you with the connection between malum malum that is widely assumed, but that's really all you can get from those sources. If you are an art historian you will find that the apple appears in France in the late 11th century.  You'll see that it spreads, but you won't have any sense of why that might happen. If you are working on the vernaculars, if you're working on Old French and other vernacular languages. You will recognize that the word pomme at one point meant fruit and then came to mean apple. But you won't connect that with the appearance of the apple in the art. You won't connect that with the absence of the malum malum in the Latin. In other words, each of these fields on its own simply will not yield an answer. It simply will not yield an explanation for why the forbidden fruit became the apple. It is only if you can bring them all together. And that's exactly as you said, the interdisciplinary aspect of this project. Only if you bring them all together can you see that first, it's a dead end in Latin. Second, it appears in the French iconographic tradition. And third, that the reason for the appearance is this shift in Old French. In the semantics of Old French. Only if you bring them all together can you find that, and then you also have to do additional work to explain the spread of the apple to other areas, to, as we said, Germany, England and so forth. I think that this is maybe mythologically the great contribution of this, of this study, because it just makes it undeniable that you have to work across disciplines. Now, that doesn't have to mean that a single person works across disciplines. This could be done collaboratively, you know, it could be done with scholars of these different fields working together. I ended up doing it all myself, which was, as you say, not easy was not it's not a simple project, especially as I said earlier when I realized that there was not really a lot of work done on the iconographic side of this, and I had to collect all of the images. But I will say it's a great plug for learning languages and for just following your curiosity. Look, when I was in undergrad, I saved up money every year, and at the end of the academic year, I would spend time in a different country learning the language as best I could. So, you know, I spent a summer in Berlin and I spent a summer in Paris, and I spent time in Mexico City and, you know, at each point I just went there in order to learn the language. Now, I didn't come out of those summers, you know, expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I did spend six weeks immersed in German, French, Spanish and so forth. And that really gave me a great foundation. If you continue and work as a scholar to try and keep in touch with different languages, to try and incorporate them into your work, at least to read scholarship in those languages, all very good and positive things, so that when it came time. To work on this. You know, I had the tools to at least on a, on a scholarly level, to look at old French texts or to look at Middle High German. Uh, it took extra work. I had to spend the summer, you know, working on old French, a different summer working on a middle High German. But at least the basis was there. At least there was something to build on. And you're absolutely right that it's a very challenging thing. I would also say it's a very exhilarating thing. In other words, if you can draw on all these different sources. Put them together in a way that has not been done, and reach conclusions that up until now had not been recognized. Then really, that's a wonderful thing for someone who, like myself, has devoted their professional life to scholarship. So it is challenging and it is difficult, but it's also really wonderful.

Gary: Finally, what are the odds that the fig, grape and other fruits might make a comeback as the forbidden fruit?

Azzan: Well, I think that a lot hinges on the reception of my book.

Gary: Well, let's get it out.

Azzan: Well, really, I think the onus now is on you. It's on the podcast and can right speak now to the listeners. Hey everyone, if you're listening to this, get the word out that it doesn't have to be the apple, in other words. Look, you can even see this in a certain sense as, just recovering the earlier richness of having figs and pomegranates and citrons and grapes and even a mango, right, as the forbidden fruit. That was all lost. I mean, you can see this as a diversity issue in some sense. I'm in a certain sense, the dominance of the apple has marginalized a number of very rich and very well-established traditions up until that point. And there's no reason not to recover them. There's no reason not to revisit this question of the apple. It would certainly enrich our visual life if we saw representations of Adam and Eve holding a fig or holding a cluster of grapes, or holding a pomegranate. So I don't know what the odds are, but I'm trying to do my part.

Gary: Well, I'm just waiting for the depiction as a pineapple so I can put it on my pizza. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Yadin-Israel. The book is Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple. Thank you so much.

Azzan: Thank you. Gary, this was a pleasure.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.