Programmer Humor

32179 readers

58 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
No NSFW content.
Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

852

Names (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

211 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

TL;DR The fruit of the tree of knowledge being a literal apple is non-canon, being entirely based on a pun.

The word "apple" is not used in the Bible, that is, unless the Bible in question is a translation that specifically uses that word. Even then, see below.

The whole apple thing comes from:

the fact that the word for "apple" can be used as a synonym for "(any) fruit" in some languages and context, and so could mean any fruit.

Think about French pomme de terre for "potato" which is literally "apple (meaning 'fruit') of the earth". Dutch has aardappel (earth apple) which is the same thing. Fun fact: Old English eorþæppel (earth apple) allegedly meant "cucumber". Go figure. But I digress.

Latin is the main ecclesiastical language for one particularly influential branch of Christianity and one word for apple in Latin is "malus". That sounds like a lot of unrelated Latin words that start "mal-" that mean bad or evil, thus an apparent connection to the fruit of the tree of knowledge also leading to evil.

(I mean, it might actually be a proto-apple of some sort (modern apples did not exist 7000 years ago or whenever it was supposed to be) but the Bible doesn't specify.

Some scholars think that the whole thing developed out of metaphor for abandoning a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for farming. Others think that it might be a reference to beer / alcohol, which is one of the first things humans got interested in after farming.)

[–] Pipoca 4 points 10 months ago

Additionally, the idea that the serpent in the garden of eden is the devil is post-biblical.

First of all, the old testament doesn't really present the devil as a character, at all. Satan is a Hebrew word meaning "accuser", not a name of a specific entity.

For example, in the book of Job, a bunch of angels come before God, and "hasatan/the accuser" is among them; it seems more like it's a job title of one of the angels than as being the Christian idea of the devil.

Second of all, the new testament doesn't unambiguously call the serpent in the garden of eden the devil, literally anywhere.

Christians will often point to Revelation 20:2

He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

Although this is probably a reference to Leviathan instead, who is called both a dragon and a serpent elsewhere, and features in canaanite creation myths that are referenced elsewhere (e.g. Isaiah 27 closely mirrors some Ugaritic tablets we've found, just replacing Baal defeating Leviathan with God defeating Leviathan)

They'll also cite some verses calling the devil the father of lies, although this is fairly ambiguous. Particularly since the serpent doesn't actually say anything untrue in Genesis - it's at best a lie of omission, and saying it's a lie of omission presupposes that the serpent knew how God would punish everyone involved.