How Do You Like Them Apples?

The cool weather of autumn brings with it, among other things, the ripening and harvest of apples, and this year the bounty has been abundant.

So one fine day last week, as I stood stirring a bubbling pot of apples I was cooking up for apple sauce, I pondered over the many sayings and symbolic meanings ascribed to this humble food over the centuries. From Bible stories to folklore legend, the apple has come to represent many things, from temptation and the fall of man, to innocence and knowledge, immortality and death, love and sexuality, fertility and decay.

Probably its most famed role is that of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis of the Bible. Popular Christian tradition holds that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, though it was never actually named as the apple. The unnamed fruit of Eden only became an apple under the influence of the Greek Mythology story of the golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides. As a result, the apple became a symbol for knowledge, immortality, temptation, the fall of man and sin.  Then it was taken a step further when the larynx in the human throat became known as the Adam's apple because of the folk tale that the bulge was caused by the forbidden fruit sticking in the throat of Adam.

Even the scientific name for apple—Malus—as an adjective, translates to mean bad, or evil.

Yet despite this stain on the Malus’s reputation, at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, Jewish people dip apples into honey to symbolize their hopes for a sweet year ahead, holding the apples as a symbol of beauty, sweetness and prosperity, and the hardiness of the fruit and its durability representing strength and growth.

The old adage that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” supports this more redeeming reputation, and scientifically speaking, the health benefits of eating apples include stabilizing blood sugar, lowering cholesterol, reducing blood pressure, easing inflammation, and boosting the microbiome—all factors that help a person live a longer life. And in Norse mythology, Iðunn, the goddess of eternal youth, is the keeper of a wooden box full of apples, eaten by the gods when they begin to grow old, rendering them young again.

Another fruit idiom from the Bible came about when the Psalms were first translated into English. In Psalms 17:8, David asks God to “Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.” In Hebrew, the word is not apple, but ishon, or, “little man,” because when you look into someone else’s eye, you see a tiny image of yourself reflected back.  Ishon means “pupil.” When the psalm was translated into Old English in the 10th century, however, it became apple. Scholars speculate that Anglo-Saxons used the word “apple” for “pupil” because they conceived of this part of the eye as a solid ball that could actually fall out if a person wasn’t careful, but you can see a little version of yourself reflected in a particularly shiny apple, too. Since then, being "the apple of someone’s eye” means a person or thing that someone loves very much.

But then, versions of the proverb of the “bad apple” as someone who creates problems or trouble for others, can be found as far back as the early 16th century.

Then there’s the tradition of bobbing for apples, which dates back to the Roman invasion of Britain, when the conquering army merged their own celebrations with the traditional Celtic beliefs which held apples as a sign of fertility and abundance. During the annual Celtic celebration of Samhain, young unmarried people would try to bite into an apple floating in water. The first person to bite into an apple would be the next one to marry. And a maiden who placed the apple she bobbed under her pillow was said to dream of her future sweetheart.

Another apple with magical properties is the famed poisoned apple that the evil queen offers Snow White. It represents a comparable story to that of Adam and Eve, where Snow White is tempted by the poisoned (evil) apple and ultimately suffers for it.

These, and more, are the fruits of the sweet but lowly apple’s eminence.

As I stand stirring, smelling that sweet smell of soft, ripe flesh and juiciness—of life-giving nutrients breaking down into the sweetest, tender mash, I think of the tree from which these apples came—it’s long life and thick, twisting trunk, branches bowing low to the ground, laden with fruit. And it is not Eve, nor a serpent or a supposed sin, on which I ruminate, but the tale of the Handless Maiden.

It’s a story about an apple tree which represents the talent, sexuality, fertility and life-giving force of a young maiden, a mother and an old woman, all in one. She who is fertile, she who brings forth, she who—even when having gathered many years—still brings forth the sweetest fruits imaginable, in ample abundance, for the nourishment and sustenance of others.