THE APPLE TREE IN THE BIBLE

The Apple Tree in the Bible



The Apple and the Bible

Introduction

The Bible states, “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight…  And the Lord God commanded the man saying, 'of every tree of the garden you may freely eat:  But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat you shall surely die. And when the woman saw that the tree was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit and ate it and gave some to her husband.  And the eyes of both of them were opened.” Genesis 3:1-7.

While it never states that the fruit of this forbidden tree was an apple, the apple has been associated with the forbidden fruit.  It symbolizes the loss of innocence and temptation. From that one passage in the Bible regarding the forbidden fruit, literature, poems, mythology, and even fairy tales, have used and described the apple and the tree as pertaining to the loss of virtue and/or the desire for something considered wrong.

Discussion

Almost everyone is familiar with the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve lived in an idyllic garden planted in Eden. They were naked and unashamed. Everything was perfect. But then one day, everything went wrong. A cunning serpent seduced Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit. At first she said no because God had told Adam they were not to eat of it, lest they die. But the serpent was one heck of a salesman. He persuaded Eve to eat, and Eve persuaded Adam to do likewise. They were cast out of paradise, never to return. They eventually did die, just as God had said. And mankind has been dying ever since. Here that forbidden fruit refers to the apple.

The tree itself symbolizes life, and the fruit it bears symbolizes knowledge, thus the tree symbolizes the knowledge to create life, which supposedly gave Adam and Eve the wisdom to copulate and conceive. This is noted when they discover their nakedness, as they both felt ashamed of the natural beauty of their genitalia. The Apple, has always been a symbol of knowledge since ancient times, I think the Greeks were the first to utilize this fruit as a symbol of knowledge. Many young and eager students give the gift of an Apple to their teacher, as a symbol of knowledge, thus many children's bibles reference the tree of knowledge as being an Apple tree.

In the poem, The Paper Nautilus, my interpretation is that the teacher is giving out advice and teaching the student things, the student does not know and cannot conceive of. When you gain knowledge you lose some of your innocence to that knowledge.

The shell could represent an apple.  The mother does nothing but protect her eggs until they hatch.  Once they hatch, she goes on with her ...