The Forbidden Fruit?

For many years, artists and writers have commonly depicted the apple to be the forbidden fruit of Eden's Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Genesis story, in fact, never names it as an apple or even uses the term "Forbidden Fruit." A possible origin of  the apple story could have come from early Latin translations of the word. In Latin, malum means both "apple" and "evil." They were also usually the fruit of choice to hang on the set piece trees used in medieval European mystery plays. Apples were not likely candidates as the fruit of the Middle Eastern writer of Genesis 3, however,  in a land that is generally much too hot for the fruit tree to survive. (Illustration from PowerPoint presentation, "From Eden to Esau.")