Ancient World Seminar: Prof. Azzan Yadin-Israel (Rutgers University)  "How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple: Interpretation, Iconography, and Linguistics." 

Abstract
How did the apple, unmentioned by the Bible, become the dominant symbol of temptation, sin, and the Fall? This talk pursues this mystery across art and religious history, uncovering where, when, and why the forbidden fruit became an apple. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. As the talk will demonstrate, Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art, due to shifts in vernacular accounts of the Fall of Man. A wide-ranging discussion of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, that transforms our historical understanding of a central religious icon.

About the speaker
Azzan Yadin-Israel is Professor of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. His research interests are concerned with Plato, the Presocratics, classical rabbinic literature and he is the author of several works, including:The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.