An apple can symbolize knowledge and temptation, love and desire, discord, youth and health, and plain affection. Most of those meanings come from a few old sources: the fruit of Eden, which Genesis never actually calls an apple, the golden apples of Greek myth, love poetry and the orchard. Painters then carried them from altarpieces to still lifes, and Cézanne made the apple a subject in its own right.
Here is where each meaning comes from, how artists used it, and why an apple has always made a good gift.
Myth and scripture
The fruit of Eden
Genesis never names the fruit. In the King James Version, Eve sees that the tree is good for food and "took of the fruit thereof, and did eat". The Hebrew word, peri, is a general one for fruit, the literary scholar Robert Appelbaum told NPR, and rabbinic commentators proposed many candidates. The Talmud records three opinions, a vine, a fig and wheat. The Quran likewise speaks only of "this tree".
How it became an apple is usually explained with a Latin near-pun. Jerome's Latin Bible, the Vulgate, still calls the fruit simply fructus, but it names the tree lignum scientiae boni et mali, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Latin, mălum means "evil" and mālum, with a long first vowel, means "apple." Written Latin doesn't mark the difference. Even mālum was loose: Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary applies it to almost any fleshy tree fruit, from quinces and pomegranates to peaches and lemons.
Not every scholar accepts the pun. In his book Temptation Transformed, the Rutgers classicist Azzan Yadin-Israel reports finding no support for it in Latin sources, and notes that apples first appear in images of the Fall in 12th-century France. He traces the change to language instead: Latin writers usually called the fruit pomum, fruit in general, and the Old French pom used in early translations of Genesis narrowed over time to mean "apple" (Rutgers Today).
Art and poetry did the rest, though slowly. The Met reads the forbidden tree in Dürer's 1504 Adam and Eve as a fig. Milton, a fine Latinist, called the fruit an apple twice in Paradise Lost (1667), and later readers took him literally, Appelbaum says. However it happened, the apple came to stand for knowledge, temptation and the Fall.
The golden apple of discord
Greek myth has its own fateful apple. According to Britannica, Eris, the goddess of strife, was the only deity not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She threw a golden apple inscribed "For the most beautiful" among the guests. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it, Paris was asked to judge, and he chose Aphrodite, who helped him win Helen. The Trojan War followed. French still calls a bone of contention la pomme de discorde, as we note in what "pommette" means.
Apples of the gods
Other mythical apples belonged to the gods. The Hesperides guarded a tree of golden apples that Gaea gave Hera when she married Zeus, and fetching them was one of Heracles' labors (Britannica). In Norse myth, the goddess Idun kept the apples the gods had to eat to stay young, and when a giant carried her off, they began to age (Britannica). Here the apple stands for youth and immortality.
Love and courtship
In ancient Greece, an apple could be a proposal. Diogenes Laertius quotes two epigrams attributed to Plato in which the poet throws an apple to someone he loves. If she refuses, he asks her to keep it anyway, and see how short-lived beauty is.
Apples could also win a bride. The huntress Atalanta would marry only a man who could outrun her. Hippomenes beat her by dropping three golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, a gift from Aphrodite, and Atalanta stopped to pick them up. Plutarch records that Solon directed Athenian brides to nibble a quince, the apple's close cousin, before the wedding night.
The Bible's love poetry uses the same fruit. In the Song of Songs, the beloved is "as the apple tree among the trees of the wood," and the speaker asks to be comforted with apples, "for I am sick of love."
Then there's the apple of your eye. The phrase originally meant the pupil. Old English æppel was used to translate the Latin for "pupil of the eye," and it was later extended to anyone precious, as Dictionary.com explains. In Deuteronomy, as the King James Version renders it, God keeps his people "as the apple of his eye." Paul Gauguin used it of a painting: he called the Cézanne still life he owned "an exceptional pearl, the apple of my eye," according to MoMA.
Health and the orchard
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is younger than it sounds. It began as a Welsh rhyme printed in 1866, promising that an apple at bedtime would keep the doctor from earning his bread. The current wording appeared in 1913. Researchers at Dartmouth put it to the test in 2015 and found that, once other factors were accounted for, daily apple eaters were no more likely to avoid the doctor, though they did use slightly fewer prescription drugs (JAMA Internal Medicine).
The orchard has its own rite of good health. In England, wassailing takes place on Twelfth Night, when revelers tie toast soaked in cider to the branches of apple trees to please the trees' spirits, ward off bad ones and encourage a good harvest. The word comes from the Old English was hál, "be hale," according to the National Trust.
Apple symbolism in art and literature
For centuries, painters used the apple to tell the story of the Fall. In Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve of 1526, at the Courtauld, Eve stands under the Tree of Knowledge handing Adam an apple. In Carlo Crivelli's small Madonna and Child of about 1480, the Met reads the apples and a fly as signs of sin, set against a cucumber and a goldfinch that point to redemption.
Literature kept the apple's double nature. In the Grimms' "Little Snow-White," the queen's apple is "white with a red cheek," so lovely that anyone who sees it wants it, and only the red half is poisoned.
Still life painters made the apple stand for plenty, the senses and time passing, which we trace in famous fruit still life paintings, and how to read them. Then Paul Cézanne took the apple seriously for its own sake. The critic Gustave Geffroy remembered him proclaiming "With an apple, I want to astonish Paris!" Read why Cézanne painted apples to see how he did it.
In the 20th century, René Magritte painted The Listening Room (1952), now at the Menil Collection in Houston, in which a gigantic green apple is barely contained by the room around it.
The apple as a gift
An apple has often been a small gift that carries a message. Schoolchildren brought a shiny one for the teacher, which is how college students of the 1920s came to call a flatterer an apple-polisher, according to Merriam-Webster.
Cézanne traced his friendship with Zola to one. At school he took a beating for talking to the boy everyone else shunned, and the next day Zola brought him a big basket of apples, as Cézanne told the poet Joachim Gasquet. The Musée de l'Orangerie connects his apple paintings to that friendship.
At Rosh Hashanah, Jews dip apples in honey to wish for a sweet new year. My Jewish Learning traces the custom to medieval German Jewish communities; by the 14th century it was the main symbolic food of the holiday there. In China, young people exchange "peace apples" on Christmas Eve, a play on words: the first syllable of píngguǒ, apple, matches the first of píng'ān yè, Christmas Eve, as the Christian Science Monitor explains.
The apple has carried scent as a gift, too. A pomander, a round container of fragrant things for scenting rooms or clothes, takes its name from the Old French pome d'embre, "apple of ambergris".
Le Bonne Pomme belongs to that last line. It is a hand-painted apple of hand-poured soy and beeswax, presented under a handblown glass cloche and designed in France. Displayed under its cloche, it scents a room without being lit, with crisp apple skin, melon and peach over rose, red berries, caramel, musk and wood. It can be lit, but isn't meant to be: the painted finish will melt and the wax may drip, which is not a defect.
For more fruit in wax, see our guide to fruit-shaped candles, a short history of wax fruit and Trompe-l'Œil Fruit: The Art of Fooling the Eye. For the scent of the fruit itself, read what an apple candle smells like and apple candles without the cinnamon.
An apple has meant a proposal, a thank-you and a wish for a sweet year. Le Bonne Pomme is one to give and keep.
Frequently asked questions
What does an apple symbolize?
Most often knowledge and temptation, from the story of Eden, and love and desire, from Greek myth and poetry. It can also stand for discord (the golden apple Paris awarded), youth and health, abundance in still life painting, and affection, as in "the apple of my eye."
What does the apple mean in the Bible?
Genesis calls the forbidden fruit only "the fruit," and Jewish tradition proposed a vine, a fig or wheat. The apple came from later Latin and artistic tradition. Elsewhere in the King James Version, apples appear in love poetry, in the phrase "apple of his eye," and in Proverbs: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."
What does "apple of my eye" mean?
Someone you cherish above all others. The phrase first meant the pupil of the eye, which Old English called an apple, and the King James Version used it in Deuteronomy and the Psalms.
What does apple mean in slang?
An apple-polisher is a flatterer, after the shiny apple for the teacher. "The Big Apple" for New York was popularized by the racing writer John J. Fitz Gerald in the 1920s, after a New Orleans stablehand's remark about New York's racetracks reached him, according to the linguists Gerald Cohen and Barry Popik.
