![]() Which explains why Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco features a serpent coiled around a fig tree. So was the fig, the peach, and so forth." "To complicate things even more," says Appelbaum, "the word malus in Jerome's time, and for a long time after, could refer to any fleshy seed-bearing fruit. As a noun it seems to mean an apple, in our own sense of the word, coming from the very common tree now known officially as the Malus pumila. As an adjective, malus means bad or evil. "But he hit upon the idea of translating peri as malus, which in Latin has two very different meanings. "Jerome had several options," says Appelbaum, a professor of English literature at Sweden's Uppsala University. Some commentators even thought of the forbidden fruit as a kind of wine, intoxicating to drink." "Rabbinic commentators variously characterized it as a fig, a pomegranate, a grape, an apricot, a citron, or even wheat. "Peri could be absolutely any fruit," he says. In the Hebrew Bible, a generic term, peri, is used for the fruit hanging from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, explains Robert Appelbaum, who discusses the biblical provenance of the apple in his book Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections. As it turned out, the Latin words for evil and apple are the same: malus. Jerome's path-breaking, 15-year project, which resulted in the canonical Vulgate, used the Latin spoken by the common man. In order to explain, we have to go all the way back to the fourth century A.D., when Pope Damasus ordered his leading scholar of scripture, Jerome, to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin. The short and unexpected answer is: a Latin pun. So how did the apple become the guilty fruit that brought death into this world and all our woe? Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tasteīrought Death into the World, and all our woeīut in the course of his over-10,000-line poem, Milton names the fruit twice, explicitly calling it an apple. Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |