APPLES OF SODOM

Back in February, I noticed an article in the Boston Globe in which Stephen Prothero, Chair of Theology at BU, called for a required high school course in Bible. To quote the Globe article, “His goal is to address a great irony: The most religious industrial nation on earth is drowning in religious ignorance.” (Boston Globe, Feb 24, 2007). Teaching Bible as religion is the job of synagogues and churches but I am inclined to think exposure to Bible as a cultural text is good idea if only to give us more of a connection to our forbearers (Jewish and others). Let me offer an example that has been amusing me this term.

Together with a professor of literature, I teach a Psychology and Literature course at MIT.  My colleague is a Melville expert so we assigned Melville's Typee, his novelized memoir of his sojourn with South Sea ‘cannibals’. In Chapter 8, the thirsty and feverish narrator is bitterly disappointed by a drink from a stream. “Had the apples of Sodom turned to ashes in my mouth, I could not have felt a more startling revulsion.” While Melville, writing for his mid19th century audience, apparently expected that his readers would know something about these apples of Sodom, I had never heard of them before.  I was sure that this was not a direct biblical reference but the metaphor seemed to make sense. Genesis 13:10 says that the area around Sodom was originally “well watered … like the garden of the Lord”; that is, like the Garden of Eden --- and we know about apples in that garden. Sodom does not stay well-watered.  “The men of Sodom were wicked” (Gen 13:13) and, eventually, “the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen 19:24) so that the “whole land ..was .. a burning waste of salt and sulfur” (Deut 29:23). You may recall that this was the disaster that turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. And so it is to this day; the presumed sites of the cities lie in a desolate landscape at the shores of the Dead Sea.

As early as the time of the Maccabees,(2nd  century BCE), the site seems to have become a tourist destination of a sort.  The apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” tells us that “even to this day the waste land that smokes is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness: and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul.”
 (10:7) So 2000+ years ago, you could go to the Dead Sea and someone would show you the pillar of salt and, of more relevance to those apples of Sodom, some curious plants. The great Jewish historian, Josephus, writing in the first century CE, produces the description that is usually cited as the source text for the apples of Sodom:  “The country of Sodom … was of old a most happy land, both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it is now all burnt up. It is related how, for the impiety of its inhabitants, it was burnt by lightning; in consequence of which there are still the remainders of that Divine fire, … as well as the ashes growing in their fruits. The fruits have a color as if they were fit to be eaten, but if you pluck them with your hands, they dissolve into smoke and ashes.” (Wars of the Jews, Bk4, Ch8, para4)

This is pretty clearly the same fruit that Melville is talking about but we need apples and Josephus would not have called these “apples of Sodom” because apples didn't grow in that part of the world, certainly not as we know them. To get to apples, we need The Great Fruit Switch – the time when, at least in the Christian West, the apple became the iconic fruit of the Garden of Eden. (I suspect that the apples of Sodom followed those of Eden.) In Rabbinic sources, the identity of the forbidden fruit is widely disputed (from wheat to apricots and beyond) and never settled.

However it happened, western tradition came to believe in Eve's apple and the apples of Sodom as well. Back at the Dead Sea, the locals were happy to adapt and by the 17th century, travelers of the era report being shown Sodom apples.  Back at home, a playwright like John Webster was reader to use that material:

You see, my lords, what goodly fruit she seems;
Yet like those apples travelers report
To grow where Sodom and Gomorrah stood,
I will but touch her, and you straight shall see
She'll fall to soot and ashes. (The White Devil” Act 3, sc 2)

Literary usage is widespread in that era from Milton’s Paradise Lost to a Bach Cantata (BWV54, if you are checking). By 1846, when Typee was published, Melville could have expected his readers to recognize apples of Sodom as a metaphor for something that looked deceptively appealing and, more concretely, something that turned to ashes in the mouth.

Today, you can see apples of Sodom without leaving home by asking Google Images to show them to you. It turns out that there are quite a few candidate plants including, at one time, the eggplant. There are some papers in the scientific literature and one song by Marilyn Manson but a potent metaphor and a connection with thousands of years of history seems to have faded away.