Banana Read Free Page B

Latin word malum , which, according to biblical archaeologist Schneir Levin, was intended to mean something similar to “malicious.” Malum also can be translated as “apple,” however, derived from a Greek word for the fruit, melon . When Renaissance artists referred to their Gutenberg bibles, they took the term to be a reference to the fruit—and began painting apples into their Gardens of Eden.

    NOT EVERYONE INTERPRETED the term that way, though. Over the centuries, scholars outside of Renaissance Europe asserted that the identification should have been the banana.

    Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, 1526.
It should have been a banana.
    Among these scholars was Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy. Early in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus made two entries for the fruit in his Systema Naturae, a seminal catalogue of over four thousand species of fauna and seven thousand kinds of plant life. A deeply religious man, Linnaeus saw his work as no less than creating a complete inventory of God’s creation. He both believed in Eden and that the banana belonged there. The scientific name he gave to the sweet, yellow banana was Musa sapentium , from a Latin term meaning “wise” (as in the tree of knowledge). The green banana—our plantain—was called Musa paradisiaca , “the banana of paradise.”
    Linnaeus’s family designation for banana, Musa , derives from mauz , the Arabic word for the fruit. This makes sense, since the Koran also situates the banana in the sacred garden. There, Eden’s forbidden tree is called the talh , an archaic Arabic word that scholars usually translate as “tree of paradise” (or sometimes even more directly as “banana tree”). The Islamic sacred text describes the tree as one whose “fruits piled one above another, in long extended shade…whose season is not limited, and [whose] supply will not be cut off.” Sure enough, that description matches the concentric rings of banana bunches and the plant’s multigenerational life span.
    But let’s swing back to the Judeo-Christian Bible, for a moment. In the Western story of Eden, Adam and Eve are said to react to their nakedness by covering themselves with “fig leaves.” Fig greenery might cover the essentials, barely. Banana leaves are actually used to make clothing (as well as rope, bedding, and umbrellas) in many parts of the world, even today. In this case, the word for the Edenic fruit isn’t mistranslated, just misunderstood: Bananas have been called figs throughout history. Alexander the Great, after sampling the fruit in India, described it as such, as did Spanish explorers in the New World. The clincher comes from ancient Hebrew. In that language, the language of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, including Genesis), notes Levin, a word for the forbidden fruit translates directly: It is called the “fig of Eve.”

    AS THEY IMAGINED EDEN , the authors of the Bible would have, most likely, drawn from the landscape around them. And what was around them? Over the centuries, there have been dozens of attempts to scientifically locate the “genuine” Eden. Some have been exercises in theological speculation (like the Mormon notion that Eden sat somewhere near St. Louis). Others try to match landmarks in the text with real geological features. In Genesis, for example, four rivers—the Tigris, Euphrates, Pison, and Gihon—are said to have bounded the paradise. The first two still exist today, flowing through Iraq and Iran. The other pair are mysteries. In the early 1980s, however, archaeologist Juris Zarins used satellite imagery to locate vestiges of two long-vanished waterways. By calculating variations in climate and terrain, Zarins concluded that the four rivers did intersect in what was once lush valley, now submerged offshore in the Persian Gulf.
    A Middle Eastern Eden