Mystical systems
Forbidden Fruit
Direct answer
Forbidden Fruit: The forbidden fruit is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which Adam and Eve eat against God's command in Genesis; the text does not say what kind it was.
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At a glance
- Also called
- fruit of the tree of knowledge
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Tree of Knowledge, Serpent, Lilith, Pandora
The forbidden fruit is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which Adam and Eve eat against God's command in Genesis; the text does not say what kind it was.
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Was the forbidden fruit an apple?
In Genesis 2 God allows the first man every tree of the garden but one, and warns that eating from it brings death. In chapter 3 the serpent tells the woman that the fruit opens the eyes and makes one like God, knowing good and evil. She eats, gives some to her husband, and they see that they are naked. The Hebrew uses the plain word for fruit and names no species.
The apple is a later Western habit. Jewish teachers of late antiquity proposed the fig, the grape, wheat and the citron. Latin readers had a ready pun, since malum can mean both an evil and an apple, and by the later Middle Ages painters in northern Europe showed an apple as a matter of course. As an everyday phrase forbidden fruit now means anything made more tempting by being off limits, a sense the story itself supports: the fruit is described as a delight to the eyes before it is eaten.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Forbidden knowledge.
What sets Forbidden Fruit apart
What defines the fruit is the ban and not the botany. Genesis is exact about the prohibition, its wording and its penalty, and vague about everything a gardener would ask. That silence became a mirror: each tradition named the fruit it found most fitting. The fig was argued from the fig leaves sewn straight afterward, the grape from wine and its sorrows, wheat from the saying that a child knows nothing until it tastes grain, and the apple from a pun that works only in Latin.
- Text: Genesis 2:16 to 17 and 3:1 to 7
- Hebrew word: peri, fruit, with no species named
- Rabbinic candidates: fig, grape, wheat and citron (Berakhot 40a; Genesis Rabbah)
- Latin pun: malum, which can mean an evil or an apple
- Fixed for English: Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667
Often mistaken for something else: The tree of knowledge is the tree in the garden and the idea it stands for; the forbidden fruit is the thing actually taken and eaten, and the phrase that passed into daily speech.
The story behind Forbidden Fruit
The story stands in Genesis 2:16 to 17 and 3:1 to 7. The rabbinic suggestions are gathered in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Berakhot 40a, and in Genesis Rabbah. Jerome's Latin Bible, completed about 405, made the wordplay on malum available to the West. John Milton called the fruit an apple in Paradise Lost in 1667, which fixed the image for English readers. The Quran tells the story without naming the tree's fruit, and Muslim commentators often suggested wheat.
Why Forbidden Fruit matters
Forbidden Fruit is the most familiar image of forbidden knowledge in the West, and the gap between the text and the apple shows how tradition fills silence.
How to read Forbidden Fruit
The phrase names the fruit of the Eden story and, in ordinary speech, any pleasure whose appeal grows with the ban on it.
Forbidden Fruit in practice: an example
A parent who bans one harmless video game and finds it becomes the only one the children want has met the forbidden fruit effect.
Where readings of Forbidden Fruit go wrong
The apple is tradition, not scripture, and the story's meaning is read differently by Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpreters.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- forbidden fruit meaning, what was the forbidden fruit, forbidden fruit apple, fruit of the tree of knowledge, forbidden fruit bible
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Was the forbidden fruit an apple?
Genesis does not say. The apple became usual in Western Europe, helped by a Latin pun between the words for evil and apple and later by Milton. Jewish tradition suggests the fig, grape, wheat or citron instead.
What does forbidden fruit mean as a phrase?
It means something desired all the more because it is not allowed. The saying that forbidden fruit is sweetest has long been proverbial in English.
What tree did the forbidden fruit come from?
From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which stands in the middle of the garden beside the tree of life. Only the first is forbidden. After the couple eat, they are sent out so that they cannot also eat from the tree of life.
