What Adam and Eve ate was NOT apple but Banana -- The banana was the tree of Knowledge (CNN- In an ad replaced apple with banana). In the Garden of Eden- Adam and Eve, The First Man and Woman were loitering aimlessly. ... …And the Lord God commanded the man, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.  Genesis 2:16–17 In Genesis 3, A serpent tempts the woman: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.— Genesis 3:4–5 Desiring this wisdom, the woman eats the forbidden fruit and gives some to the man who also eats it. They become aware of their "nakedness" and make “fig-leaf clothes”, and hide when God approaches. God curses the serpent, the woman than the man, and expels the man and woman from the Garden and thereby from eternal life. There is an argument that the tree of knowledge – the tree of good and evil – – is the banana tree and not an apple as held generally. The apple became the forbidden fruit by a “mistake;” made by Saint Jerome, who in AD 400 first compiled the Bible as we know it today. With the discovery of printing, and with the Renaissance, the Bible became very popular with the writers and artists. They depicted Adam and Eve and the apple in many writings, paintings and sculptures. There are many compelling reasons for such a belief. In the Middle East, among the ancient Sumerians and Hebrews, many legends and beliefs existed on the banana. I would like to quote from Conklin's book, ‘Getting Back into the Garden of Eden.’ ‘…Earlier, the banana was associated with sages and meditative wisdom, and with fertility rites…The flower stem with the bud of male leaves at the tip is very much serpent-like and also phallic in shape. Its reddish-purple colour could symbolize passion as well as danger. Further, the banana fruits hang upside down on the stem and in, circa 2500 1600BCE, could in a sense, have been thought to be sent down from above, from the gods. The banana itself is, of course, is a phallic-shaped fruit. In ancient times eating of this phallic-shaped fruit may well have been thought to induce sexual desire in both men and women…Such beliefs spreading to the Sumerians, and then to the neighbouring Hebrews ‘might have helped in evolving a symbolism that led to the belief that banana was the Tree of Knowledge… ‘ ‘.. Incorporating these notions of the banana plant into the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and having Eve choose to have the fruit would have been a very appropriate and symbolic way of expressing the emotional ambivalence surrounding the knowledge of sexual intercourse and the resulting birth, growth, ageing and death cycle of human existence. …..’ ‘…The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is primarily a cosmic symbol for all that has come from the originating source. Yet, its Garden of Eden also functions as a secondary symbolic substitute for the male penis. By having Eve choose to have the fruit first, the Hebrew male sought to reduce and so disown his own part in the Garden drama. In genital terms, the fruit Eve chooses to imbibe, not in the oral cavity but rather in her vaginal cavity, its semen, which result in progeny and childbirth…’ ‘…The tree can be seen as a phallic symbol which at least in the Garden of Eden story, is disowned by the Hebrew male psyche …. There is one explicit reference that the Hebrew male has in the past, thought of the tree as a phallus, which gives fruits: “And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised. Three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you; it shall not be eaten of. But the fourth year shall ye eat of the fruits thereof, that it may yield unto you, the increase thereof….” (LV19:23-25). What is suggested in this metaphor is that the fruit of the immature tree is its “foreskin” while the tree is an uncircumcised penis? In the Hebrew society, the tree was (and even now) considered as a male penis. In the Qur’an also, banana considered the Tree of Paradise. It was with the banana leaves that Eve covered her body and not with that of fig leaf. The specific name of banana Musa paradisiaca, given by Linnaeus, was derived from the above belief of its heavenly origin. Dan Koeppel has written the book titled ‘Banana – the fate of the fruit that changed the world.’ His researches on the ancient publications in Latin and Hebrew led him to conclude that the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve ate was nothing but the banana. Apple was never a common fruit in the biblical geographical locations, while banana was one of the most common. In ancient Hebrew, banana was called the Eve’s Fig and Koeppel opines that the banana leaves were used by Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness. Location of the Garden of Eden was in an area now submerged in the Persian Gulf. In the words of Koeppel: ‘In Genesis, for example, four rivers—the Tigris, Euphrates, Pison, and Gihon—are said to have bounded the paradise. The first two still exist today, flowing through Iraq and Iran. The other pair are mysteries. In the early 1980s, however, archaeologist Juris Zarins used satellite imagery to locate vestiges of two long-vanished waterways. By calculating variations in climate and terrain, Zarins concluded that the four rivers did intersect in what was once a lush valley, now submerged offshore in the Persian Gulf.’ According to the Quran, Surah Al-A'ra 7:19 describes Adam and his wife in Paradise where they may eat what is provided, except for one Tree they must not eat from, lest they are considered Zalimun (wrongdoers). Surah Al-A'raf 7:20–22 describes Shaitan who whispers to Adam and his wife and deceives them. When they taste of the tree, their shame becomes manifest to them and they begin to cover themselves with leaves. And their Lord called out to them: Did I not forbid you both from that tree and say to you that the Shaitan is your open enemy? In the Middle Ages, the notion that the Forbidden Fruit is the banana appeared in several places. In 1277 Nathan HaMe’ati translated the Rambam’s medical work Pirkei Moshe (Aphorisms of Moses) from Arabic into Hebrew. In the section detailing the medicinal effects of the banana (20:88), Nathan HaMe’ati calls it the “apple of Eden.” The sixteenth-century Rabbi Menachem de Lonzano, in his Ma’arich, a work explaining foreign words in rabbinic literature, says the banana is a well-known fruit in Syria and Egypt that the Arabs call “the apple of Gan Eden.” Today, some bananas are known by the Latin names Musa paradisiaca (fruit of paradise) and Musa sapientum (fruit of knowledge). Identifying the Tree of Knowledge with the banana appears to be a Christian tradition from at least the twelfth century that enjoyed popularity but was never adopted by rabbinic sources. (Ari Z. Zivotofsky, 2017). An Eastern legend (Calexico Chronicle, Volume IX, Number 12, 2 November 1912; The forbidden fruit, Achieves of The UCal, Riverside). says that the Serpent tempted Eve with a Banana. This legend is prevalent among the Christian inhabitants of the east that they believed the banana to be the tree of the source of good and evil, the serpent tempted Eve with a bunch of this fruit. They ate the fruit and became aware of their nakedness and it was with the leaves of the banana plant that they covered their nakedness. This legend influenced the early botanists that they named the two most common banana types as Musa paradisiaca (tree of paradise) and Musa sapientum (tree of knowledge). Sources: 1. PN Ravindran. Sacred and Ritual Plants of India (In press) 2. Koeppel, D. Banana: The fate of the fruit that changed the world. 2008 Conklin, E. Getting Back Into The Garden of Eden, 1998. Anon. (1912) Calexico Chronicle, Volume IX, Number 12, 2 November 1912; The forbidden fruit, Achieves of The UC, Riverside). ooOoo