adam's apple

To Adam, the first man in the biblical creation story.

'Adam's apple', says Van Dale, 'in anatomy is the protruding upper part of the larynx, actually the thyroid cartilage.' The larynx separates the alimentary and airways and is responsible for the voice.

As a result, both men and women have an Adam's apple. In the male it is only larger and more visible.

According to the creation story, God planted a garden in Eden. "There was also the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." 'Of all the trees of the garden you may freely eat,' said God to the first man, 'but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you must die. .' Later in the story, the woman "saw that the tree was desirable to eat of, and that it was pleasing to the eye, yea, that the tree was desirable to make one wise thereby, and she partook of its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

Then both their eyes were opened, and they found themselves naked: they sewed fig leaves together, and made loincloths of them.'

So the Bible nowhere speaks of an apple, nor of a larynx. The ancient Jews

were convinced that it was a fig tree, although a date palm or a vine was not ruled out. The word 'fruit' was translated in Latin by 'pomum'. That used to stand for all fruit trees and their fruits.

The Latin word for 'apple' would have been 'malum' here, which also means 'evil'.

Perhaps this last ambiguity is at the root of the Western choice of the apple.

According to experts, the apple may have ended up in the earthly paradise through Greek and Celtic mythology, in which the fruit belongs to goddesses of love and is thus the symbol of desire, which is always very quickly associated with sin.

In the Song of Solomon, which contains a remarkable number of apples, the sentence is written in Hebrew: 'Under the apple tree I awoke you, there you conceived your mother.' This was translated into Greek by Aquila of Pontus in the second century as, “I brought you up under the apple tree; there you were corrupted.' Jerome (347-419) followed that translation when transposing the Old Testament into Latin.

Most of the godly accounts of the lives of Adam and Eve, like many aprocryphal writings, originated and were recorded between 200 BC and 200 AD. Apparently, the authors thought that Adam must have had something physically visible from his stupid bite.

The core – it couldn't be fig pips – of the forbidden apple stuck in the throat of the first man as a warning to all male posterity.

The first references in our region to the rising and falling virile bulge in the neck date from the Middle Ages, but the image was probably used much earlier.

A citrus variety whose golden yellow skin shows strange indentations was later given the name citrus pomum adami by specialists. The traces indicated that the first man had left his teeth in it forever.

According to a Flemish folktale, Adam was only the victim, he was angry when he heard about the bite, he started ranting and swearing. 'While Adam was delivering his speech, she unexpectedly pushed the apple into his mouth with such force that he bit a piece out of it and swallowed it.

Adam coughed, coughed and spit. Without result: the piece of apple got stuck in his throat; that's why the manfolk has an Adam's apple and a woman's man doesn't!' Clearly a story that sprang from a male brain.

In the hundreds of stories with the apple as a symbol of death and life, the larynx is only mentioned in the fairy tale of Snow White. It is true that the apple causes her death, but at the prince's kiss the piece jumps out of her throat again and the sweet child comes to life again.