Dr. Dylan Johnson

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's extremely interesting in terms of the content, what it describes.

It's also interesting in terms of its placement within Genesis, coming immediately after another creation.

So lots of questions there.

No, forbidden fruit was not an apple.

That's purely an accident.

Well, we think it's a bit apocryphal, but we think it's an accident of Latin translators.

So in the Hebrew, the word is just pre, which just means fruit.

And if we know much about horticulture, historical horticulture in Southern Levant, in the Middle East, not many apple trees.

But in Latin, there's a funny coincidence that the word for evil, that's pretty important, malum, is also the word for apple, malum.

So by Eve eating the malum, she invites evil into this world.

So we think that maybe that's kind of a folk tradition, why we think of the fruit as an apple, but we don't actually know for sure.

Where is it?

So if we think of biblical writing as centered in and around this place in the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, what would become Israel and Judah, then it's east.

It's east of there.

How far east?

It doesn't really give us a very clear indication because, again, this is a fairly mythological place.

Mesopotamia, perhaps, perhaps further east, perhaps nowhere, perhaps as part of that mythical geography that in some ways is connected to real places, but always a little bit further, kind of a Shangri-La, not quite sure where it is exactly, but it is fairly clear that from the biblical mindset, it's somewhere in the east, which means it's old in certain respects because of the antiquity of those cultures that are further east.

Yeah, exactly.