[Avodah] FRUITFUL QUESTION

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 05:29:58PM +0100, Alan Rubin wrote:
: The idea that the fruit of the tree in Gan Eden was an apple is not
: confined to the English speaking world.. The fruit is often shown as
: an apple in European art. My understanding is that the idea comes from
: the similarity of the Latin word for  apple malum to the word for
: evil.

Brilliant!

But the sounds don't exactly match. "Malum" from "malus" means evil,
but both vowels are short. "Malum" with a long /A/ from the Ancient Greek
"melon" means apple and sometimes fruit in general.

It is likely that the people who produced the Vulgate chose "malus" over
the synonym "fructus" because they were consciously or unconsciously 
motivated by the pun.

(I am not sure, had someone else written this post, if I would have told
them to redirect it to Areivim. If I made the wrong decision, I apologize.)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             With the "Echad" of the Shema, the Jew crowns
micha at aishdas.org        G-d as King of the entire cosmos and all four
http://www.aishdas.org   corners of the world, but sometimes he forgets
Fax: (270) 514-1507      to include himself.     - Rav Yisrael Salanter